Hello eveyone. Just a few typed words today, feeling a bit lazy to do a photograph.

Just did a couple days of ridealong by way of learning how to do my glorious new job delivering boxes of stuff to the Family Dollars in the Northeast hereabouts. I was worried about not being able to lift the rollers. Turns out I can manage them. The guy who trained me on the account uses steel rollers and he prefers them to the aluminum ones, as the steel ones don't bend.

Joe my trainer is a pretty interesting character. He's two years older than me but a lot older in certain ways, he's got kids and a wife and an ex-wife and 18 years of experience driving the big rigs. Sometimes he sounds a lot like Jason Leigh's Earl. He's pretty unhappy with certain vexing things that have happened to him recently doing this job and is looking elsewhere for other jobs. I learned a new expression from him. If the directions to a store on its load manifest are accurate, they are said by him to be "Dead Nuts."

I have no idea how that expression came to be.

Myself I've been working on staying loose inside my head. Something Brad Warner's new book reminded me is that the negative impact various events in your life sometimes have on you are because of the fiction you create in your mind of how things are sposta be as opposed to how they actually are. When things don't go according to your vision, you get upset. Rather than blathering on about it I shall recomment Warner's new book Sit Down and Shut up instead. I'm trying to stay loose and to keep in mind that it is only own self that I can experience, and my own self I can fear to experience. And my own self is a construct.

Anyway, that's all I seem to have in my head at the moment worth writing about. Take care, my friends.

JBL

I had a little hometime the past three days so I swung by the rents' house In northampton mass in the hopes of getting a free dinner by the mechanism of showing up. But my father said "we don't have enough pork chops" shortly after I arrived in the kitchen so that plan fell through. First time actually. Mother advised me to call ahead of time in the future. The above baloon passed overhead with few companions, very low and my mom thought they were going to land in the back yard.

Right now I'm at the Ambest in fultonville NY on my way out to Rome to get started on the Family Dollar run. the people I've spoken to who operate this operation have very unmusical voices, as if they were the voices of cinder blocks or rusty machines. It vexes me to be right about people when I judge them by the sound of their voices but too often I'm exactly right about who they are. Heading west on 90 seems to be the road I'm on when making trucking transitions. Heading to Swift, bringing truck back to Swift, Changing departments at Werner.

I guess having been over the road focuses my mind on the conflict of wanting to see new places versus wanting to be in the places I'm used to. A mirror loves to reflect the new as well as the old, and the mind and self you might say are a mirror, a collection of images calling itself "I". Kind of a liability that I love the world, the pressures of work distract me from it and I resent them bitterly and deeply. Joy and pain always have the same origin in a being.

Up here in the northeast it's nice to put on the NPR radio stations to get some intelligent news, even if it gets repetitive. It gives me a feeling of home. The northeast in general feels like my back yard now, after the distances I've covered.

I guess if you travel far you miss home and if you're home you miss the faraway places. Nothing for it I guess but to try and find something reasonably workable. whatever.

Take care everyone. The summer leaves us and autumn's cool sweetness will fill our lungs, so let's breathe.

JBL

Hello everyone. I've been getting frustrated with the way Werner manages its over the road drivers so I've asked to be transferred into a dedicated account, doing family dollar stores up in the northeast, based out of Rome, NY. Most dedicated accounts are only open to drivers with some seniority but you can get a dedicated Family Dollar right out of school because you have to touch the freight. When I was at swift I talked to a guy who did Family Dollar and he said the heaviest boxes he was dealing with were bleach, about 30 pounds. Swift pays better on that account if memory serves but at the time I left I was seeking a 48 state job that didn't suck, which I didn't find unfortunately.

I have been really vexed with the way Werner manages my time. They profess to care about their drivers but they have only a single consideration in anything, and that is to get freight moved. The past couple of days I've had just a few hours our of my 70 available, and they push those to the firewall, at really inconvenient times. Yesterday I was out of hours in the early afternoon so they had me starting up at 1am the next morning. But the 5.25 hours I had available weren't enough to get the load done, so I phoned in about it and they took it off, and today I got a load I could actually do. Miracle of miracles.

One thing that is really disagreeable about Werner compared with Swift is that Werner doesn't tell you how much of a window you have for a pickup or delivery time, they just want you to do everything as fast as possible so you'll be available for the next load which might possibly exist when you're done with the one you're on. So you're always feeling pressured and rushed, even when there's no good reason for it; you might have a 24 hour window to drop the trailer and take out an empty, but they won't tell you that, generally. Sunday they were pressuring me about my getting a load to procter & gamble in Pineville Louisiana later than had been originally scheduled, and there was another load right out of there after I dropped off the one I brought to them, but P&G wasn't in nearly as big a hurry as Werner was, and the load wasn't ready until three hours after I got there. If I had been as early delivering the original load as they had wanted, I wouldn't have any hours left on my 14 per day to have moved that load at all.

Since then I've just been back and forth to and from P&G in Pineville. I feel like a local driver who just doesn't get to go home.

Anyway, I called about the family dollar account and they had an opening in the northeast so I asked to get headed back there, and asked for a little home time. At this point I can't really say whether this maneuver will save me any aggravation at all, but from what I gather the money you can realistically make is markedly better than what's at all likely over the road, about a thousand bucks a week. Home every weekend. I hope the way that it works is that I will have a set schedule from week to week that will allow me to know where and when I have to be at places, so I can know when I have to sleep or if I can otherwise chill. I don't KNOW that it's like that but it might be, and if it isn't it's still better money and home time. The dedicated drivers average 1900 miles a week so it's not like I won't ever be seening any place.

Anyway, I've been mostly in Louisiana since the weekend but these two photos happen to be from last evening in mississippi. Second time in a few days that my wanderings about have taken me past equine species who have been friendly enough to appoach and have their noses petted. The fellow in the photo below was the stallion of his herd and rather an attention whore who wouldn't let his mares come up to see me, which all of them did. I had a similar encounter with some horses up in Illinois a few days ago, but most of the horses were too shy to come up to me.

I could be out riding around Louisiana right now and I gues I might yet do a little bit of it, but it's bloody hot and muggy with thunderstormy clouds wandering about and that weather doesn't entirely agree with me. I'm also in a funk about dealing with werner. Hopefully the dedicated account will better agree with me.

Weird thing is that this is the second time I've decided to take on more work in the hopes of escaping from certain types of BS. I hope I can still remain a butterfly if I have made a decision that would more characterize an ox.




Couple of days ago I spontaneously coined the word "shituation" thinking it would be a singularly useful word, widely applicable in the trucking industry. Unfortunately later that evening I had a good use for it. These 120,000 dollar trucks use ridiculous tiny delicate keys. The first day I got my truck I bent the key in the door, so I immediately had the shop make me a duplicate. So two nights ago I broke the original key trying to unlock the truck but unfortunately the duplicate was inside the truck. So after 30 minutes on hold with Werner Breakdown the told me "try calling a locksmith." I guess regular truck mechanics don't do locks. So I borrowed the phone book and none of the locksmiths would answer and the one who answered wouldn't drive forty miles to help me but suggested calling their other branch 50 miles away maybe someone there would help me. So the truck stop staff gave me a number of a guy who had a tire service and he came out, tried unsuccessfully to open the door with a wire, and when he couldn't do it, he suggested calling the sherriff's office. The sherriffs wouldn't help but they gave me some phone numbers of other local locksmiths, and I was able to get one of them to come out, and he was able to get my door open.

So never coin a word that could be dangerous if applicable.

Love and kisses

JBL

About the soundest advice you're ever likely to get.



Right now I'm at the Werner Terminal in Indianapolis, while bits and pieces of my truck are lying on the shop floor with a guy an a roller backboard and a bunch of his tools. The hoped for result of this is that the truck will start when you put the key in the ignition and turn it. This is very important to your productivity as a trucker.

I've been super stressed this past couple of days since my truck's starter, or some other part of importance to starting has been defunct, necessitating never turning the truck off, and getting a tow truck to give me a pull so I could pop the clutch and start her up that way. Werner is super anal about having drivers moving only when they'er hauling paying loads and for that reason they wouldn't just send me to a shop to get it fixed. It was also labor day weekend, but whatever.

Last night I had a phone conversation with Jormagund about the possibility of working for his company. For the time being I'm thinking I either want to go over to Coca Cola when my brother spots and opening for me, or get another local job when I have my year of exp come January. If none of that works out Pohl would likely be a good alternative if it proves to be one that is open to me.

Yesterday I was in Champaign Illinois wandering around the campus of the University of Ill. Too bad all the buildings were closed. Huge campus, about two by three miles. Very flat and bikeable though. It reminded me of Temple down in Philadelphia where the city and college are very much morphed together.

I tend to hate to leave places that I like when I'm in them, whether it's Columbus Ohio or Cranbury New Jersey or now U ill at Champaign. I find myself beautiful inviting places where I meet nice people, and afterwards I make these long lonely bike rides along noisy roads through areas of strip malls and car dealerships and chain restaurants. There's always an appreciable boundary to cross, where the feeling of the place you love disappears and you're back in the cold, (or hot) smelly loud bright world of industry and commerce.

I daresay that while Werner is keeping me moving better than swift did, at least when I don't have a busted truck over a holiday weekend, they don't spend any of their money, as far as I can see on their terminals, which are absolute shitholes. Swift is a crappy company with very nice terminals with showers and laundy, and plenty of hangout space, picnic tables and barbecue grills outside. I do in fact miss some things about swift now that I think about them, but I was making so little money there the sutuation was untenable.

Well, I've done a little bit of my habitual wandering around on a bike. A couple of days ago I took a day off a little south of detroit, and I was debating with myself whether to head up north to detroit and see the city or head south to see lake erie. The latter was a lot closer and I was feeling like seeking out some mellowness so I headed south.

Sometimes it strikes me that there are a lot fewer city names in use than there are cities, and I suspect that a lot of times you can tell where the settlers of a western city came from by the names of the eastern cities they choose for where they moved out to. The area south of Detroit Michigan is strangely similar to New Jersey. Due east of the truck stop at exit 32 is the town of Trenton which has an Elizabeth Park. And like NJ that part of michigan is very marshy and heavily industrialized, and if you're at the shoreline you watch giant cargo ships passing by all day long.

I rode down the riverside towards lake erie and I found a mashlands park with a museum on it. There were boardwalks and trails through the marshes, and I when I went on one of tghe boardwalks I was kind of overwhelmed with the sounds of nature, the breeze through the trees and all the song of birds and insects. I've never seen so many wading birds and insect eating birds in my life. It was such a powerful impact in me that I just thought "the land is singing". I've been thinking about how one might think that before man arrived on the continent or on the planet that there was silence, but life is something which sings. My hometown of northampton mass has its own signature song of crickets, with the addition of various frogs depending on how near water you are. Long island has its own voice, a different sort of cricket sound. Down south they have cicadas loud as airplanes. Birds, amphibians, and insects sing a lot more than reptiles or mammals it seems, just from my impression, and man and his machines roar.

Today I had a little downtime at a rest stop on I-94 just inside Minnesota, leaving wisconsin. I noticed a fellow had a bike and he pointed out bike trail I could get to, so I went for a ride and came into Afton, Mn where the people are friendly, as in other random bicyclists just saying hello to me, people leaving expensive bicycles unlocked and unattended in front of stores. Some people here have that accent you hear in the movie Fargo. The roads in Michigan are terrible but the people are friendly, and so are the people in minnesota. I walked up into a country store type place and ended up talking for a while with some folks on rocking chairs on the porch. They said I don't look much like a truck driver, more like a college professor and I told then about my classics education, and we got to talking about history and word origins. I told them how on my bike ride there it had dawned on me that the word "coprolite" comes from the greek kopros "shit" and litos "stone". I was asked about how the word gay had come to mean homosexual. I guess one thing I dislike about a lot of average folks that I meet is their homophobia. My hometown of Northampton mass has a large gay community and one of my best friends is gay, and it vexes me to find so many otherwise perfectly nice people have this totally stupid mean-spirited dislike of homosexuals.

Whatever. I guess nobody's perfect.

Do not read the following blog. Just enjoy this fine photograph of a happy duck and then go look at some lovely naked girls. As if you would ever do otherwise.



Things aren't going all that well for me in the trucking business. I had another accident today a week into my new position at Werner, and I ran two hours over my legal hours.

To be successful as a truck driver, or in many other professions for that matter, you have to be very non-volatile emotionally. At the center of me there isn't stillness, there's a storm and pressure breaks it loose and it fucks me up in a lot of ways that aren't at all cool where jobs are concerned.

Anyway, today I was thinking about Brad Warner's last article, in which he mentions a noted buddhist teacher making the statement that there is no "way to peace", peace is the way. I get that; if peace is contingent on loss or gain there can be no peace, as it is always contingent on some changeable circumstance. Peace has to be make by peace, not by contingencies of circumstance. The buddha said someting similar, " I gained not the least thing when I attained supreme perfect enlightenment, and for that exact reason it is called supreme perfect enlightenment." If enlightenment could be were as gain, that would be a manifestation of attachment, with its concomitant of aversion to loss, which is the opposite of the freedom from attachment and averson which is what enlightenment is.

So anyway I was thinking about this sort of thing as I was heading toward my delivery location today. I was thinking on the way there "it's a good thing that this consignee is on a main thoroughfare because that means they will have an offstreet loading area out of traffic, unlike some place on a side street which often have docks you have to back into right from the street. But when I got there OH MY FUCKING GOD not only are the loading docks accessed from the fucking busy four lane thouroughfare but you have to FUCKING BLINDSIDE IN. So I parked the fucking truck on the street and went to find someone to tell me which door to back into, and after not getting any help from anyone a forklift driver finally tells me I can pull in off the street and head out back to the two loading docks out in back where they take off paper rolls. Which for you non-truckers are gigantic immensely heavy ( eight of them weighed 42,000 pounds ) rolls that are part of the unseen understructure of society that most people never see. So I went back out and got my truck over to the loading docks I'd been sent to. After waiting for nearly an hour for them to start I got out of the truck to head over to the recieving office to ask if they knew I was there, and this guy walks over to me from the front parking lot. . . and it turns out I hit his ford ranger with the tail end of my trailer as it swung around when I was trying to get the fucking truck around a fucking tight corner. I had no Idea it had happened, as the truck is very loud and heavy and clipping off a plastic tail light does not make much of an impact for you to notice when you're up in the cab. So that's my third accident.

I keep telling myself that it's only five months until I have a year of experience and can start looking for local jobs, but whenever I try to make myself feel better by telling myself that I have a really terrible high stress day that makes is look like no way in fucking hell I'm going to make it through those five months. Who's going to hire me with all these accidents I keep having? I have this five thousand dollar student loan to pay off that I haven't even been able to make any payments on yet and I totally suck as a truck driver and may not last on the profession long enough to be able to pay it off. A while ago when I as in connecticut I was at a rest stop and I saw a coca cola tractor trailer. About like what I expect my brother will be driving. It was a day cab, which has a shorter wheel base and better visibility, and the trailer was maybe 40-45 feet long with the wheels all the way at the back so no swingout. I could drive something like that pretty damn well I think, but I'm going to fucking blow my chance to ever drive a truck like that because of the accidents I'm having trying to maneuver over the road monster trucks into places that were not designed for them to fit into.

Couple of days ago I had another super fun time. I got into a really tight dock by pulling into a driveway opposite that was prominently signed NO TRUCKS but I went in anyway. So far so good.
Then I get over to the office and there's another Werner driver there and she's got mechanical trouble with her truck and she asks me if she could talk me into backing her trailer in for her. Now this is another oh-my-fucking-god nightmare loading dock to get into featuring a narrow street large rocks, a fire hydrant, telephone pole, and shiny expensive tractor trailer trucks serving as fun obstacles to get around. I so did not want to do that, but I my coward heart refused to just be an asshole and say HELL NO so I agreed to back her trailer in for her. I asked her to signal me to help me get it in, which proved to be a mistake as I generally had no fucking idea what she was telling me to do. in retrospect I might have been able to get the fucking thing in for her if I'd just done it myself and gotten out and looked maybe forty times as I inched the fucking thing in, but anyway after maybe seven or eight tries I gave up and decided to drop her trailer. I pulled the fifth wheel unlock and was going to drop it, but I realized I was blocking a driveway, so I backed it up, and managed to hit the curb with the landing gear, and when pulled forward to get the landing gear off the curb the trailer fell off the fifth wheel as the unlock lever hadn't locke back into place. So then me and her and other people where trying to crank up the landing gear on a trailer with 30,000 pounds of shit on it with a lever that wouldn't go into low gear and was old and rusty. And the throughbolt on the crank handle broke off and I thought I was completely fucked at that point. But the woman whose trailer I'd just had this assed off performance with was able to get a new throughbolt for the crank handle from the mechanics who'd come to fix her truck. Oh and by the way I'd burnt some rubber trying to force the truck back under the trailer with engine power and that didn't work. Finally it occurred to me tho reinflate my suspension, which I'd deflated to try and get my fifth wheel back under the trailer. With the suspension inflated back up the trailer was raised and we could lower the landing gear enough so that I could get under it when I deflated my suspension again and the day was saved. I just got a bruise on my butt for my trouble when I was getting physical with that damn crank arm.

So anyway, some days I wonder if I can ever do anything right. I'm a butterfly in a world of oxen, I don't belong, I don't do too many things well and it's not fucking okay.

I don't know, maybe I'll be as smiley my next blog. Today I ran two hours over my legal seventy, and I think . . and fuckit. enough for today.

Lately I've been working myself up to have a go at art again. I should be very sorry about it if I got to the end of my life without at least having tried to be an artist.

Been thinking about what sort of project would be fun enough to do for years, interesting enough to keep me motivated to keep trying. I thought of a book I once found in a little used bookstore, of victorian studio portraits, and I went up there in search ot that book, thinking to set about drawing from those old photographs. I didn't find that particular book again, but I found a couple of others, one on Modigliani and another on Mucha. I think it would be fun to do portraits of people I know in the style of Modigliani, or Mucha or Aubrey Beardsley. So this afternoon I set about copying (sort of) a modigliani painting with the above result. It is what it is, nothing earthshaking but I don't hate it. I'm not really attempting to duplicate a given painting, I'm trying to study how an artist has built his image, to give myself a toolbox of techiques, of expressive visual language. I've never had much success drawing from life so I'm having a go at learning to make pictures by studying pictures. I also spent five dollars on a big sampler package of colored pencils. I don't know what makes another sort of colored pencils cost six times as much, but I spose I'll learn my way through the medium. I don't see colors as well as other people do, but there's nothing for it but to try and work with such colors as I can see.

I've been feeling depressed about having to leave home again. I know it doesn't make sense but it afflicts me anyway. Tomorrow I'm headed down to Harrisburg Pa to start up with Werner. I'm too long out of school for them to offer tuition reimbursement on my student loans, but whatever. Hopefully they have loads and miles. Hopefully their trucks are as nice as they claim. Now that I have cellular internet I can waste even more time here. Or maybe feel less pressured to do so, when I can get it any time.

Cherrio, pip pip.

Today I took a drive out to Boston.



I had been thinking to go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum but when I was headed there I went by the MFA and it seemed like a much bigger place so I opted for that instead. I paid way too much to park there but next time I'll have a better idea of where to park. But I got to see a couple of Van Goghs and Turner's Slave Ship, so I guess it was worth it.



It never occurred to me that the Slave Ship might be right in my own backyard. I guess I've never done an art survey to see what noted masterpieces were real close by. On the other hand it means that I've let my less than perfect mental health keep me from getting out and seeing things that were readily seeable. Hafta not let that continue.

Yesterday I wandered through an old house museum in Hadley mass. I kind of caught a tour guide off guard, apparently you're sposta pay four bucks for a tour and not take pictures, but I gave myself a tour; the door was open and I took a number of pictures.

Not sure exactly what to do tomorrow, maybe head down to the Mystic Aquarium in mystic conn. Or maybe mess around with a new old camera I picked up at the Newfane flea market up in vermont last weekend. it's an old kodak folding camera that shoots a 3.5 by 5.5 inch negative. No film for it anymore but you can cut paper to size and use that for a negative like you'd do with a pinhole camera, and make contact prints. I'll have to pick up a pack of low contrast paper though, multigrade is way too high in contrast.

Well whatever. I hope my web friends have all had a nice weekend.

Evening ladies and germs

Well, yesterday I got on the truck after my weekend and waited from 9-5 for a load, then came back home. Today I got back on and sent in my hours, and at 1130am they were nice enough to send me a message setting my availability for tomorrow morning, so my whole afternoon is not wasted, unless I just surf web or something like that. So came home and got on the phone with Werner trucking and I'm starting there in allentown PA next friday. So I'm officially done with swift.

From the sound of it I'll be busier at Werner and have less down time to fuck around taking pictures, but I should hopefully get to see more of the country and make some more bucks.

Yesterday I finally broke down and got myself a wireless card for my laptop. Actually a little keyless cell phone that sticks into a usb port. I guess I'll cancel my hardwired home phone which sees very little use of late, and that along with not getting the Siricomm wifi service and dialup internet costs, I shall be paying the same for all wireless service as I had been paying for the various shit I was using before. But my wireless bill is going to be about 120 a month so I'll have to be good about paying on time and not rack up three or four months unpaid bills as I tend to do in my procrastinatory condition of mind.

So should I work for Swift another week, or just bring the truck back tomorrow? A moral crisis.