"Railroad Semanitics #1" by Aaron Dactyl

After devouring #2-#4, I e-mailed Aaron a while ago and asked him why #1 wasn't available and he said it was "a hold back", which I took to mean that it revealed sensitive info. I guess this edition has been sanitized. And they published 5,000! The kids in America must be starving for freedom and adventure.

The stories are good as usual. His rhapsodic/poetic descriptions of the scenery are kind of painful, though. You look at the pictures and everything looks pretty sterile and barren most of the time.

He's kind of off-base in the intro saying that freight-hopping is an "off-the-grid" activity. Having to cover huge expanses in a fairly short amount of time using the country's railroad infrastructure seems pretty on-grid to me. Doing it dangerously and illegally is pretty cool, but saying it's "off-the-grid" is silly. He does get to travel through some totally empty and desolate terrain, which is getting away from the "madding crowd", for sure. It's also kind of creepy and sci-fi, too.

One of the stories about being caught in the bathroom of a DPU and the railroad worker telling Dactyl that "he didn't see him", is exactly like one of the stories in one of the other zines in this series. I no longer own the other ones so I can't check.

There's a few editing glitches, as well, where two words are run together. And a small photo of a crew change is inexplicably repeated on two successive pages.

The kinds of info included are:
1) Freight-hopping anecdote
2) Scenic, people, or graffiti photos
3) tabular info
4) Newspaper stories
5) Handwritten letters from "Coaltrain" to "Joe"

The first two items are good but the rest are boring and useless filler. The newspaper stories would be OK if he just included the photos and headlines and maybe a brief caption of his own. But he includes the whole text and they tend to be a real headache to read and not worth the effort.

This one cost 8 fuckin' smackers. Another bougie little item for safe little suburban armchair adventure nerds.

And if you know how to get food stamps and shoplift CLIF bars you'll never have to work a steady job.

This stuff is seriously tantalizing. But I think I'd like to read about people navigating around on foot (or canoe) through wilderness or thinly-settled areas. At the end of the day, freights are just pieces of huge dangerous machinery. I guess it helps to have a sort of fetish for them, which Aaron and his friends clearly do.

I went on-line recently to watch some freight-hopping videos on YouTube and I didn't realize how fuckin' noisy it is. I guess it helps to be partly deaf or wear earplugs.

This zine is listed on Amazon.com and has an ISBN. Doesn't seem right, somehow, for a zine to have an ISBN.