Down Time

 

It really is quiet out here on Robinson Road. The wind has died down and all that I can hear now is the fire burning in the stove and the computer spinning. The refrigerator is in its down cycle and the clock ran out of batteries long ago. No, wait, there’s the wind in the branches again, and now a car passes. In the early morning, and I’ve recently discovered, early afternoon you can hear the lonesome whistle of the Indiana Railroad on its daily rounds, miles away. The refrigerator just kicked on and of course there is the sound of my fingers clattering on the keyboard. I don’t count the workings of my own brain. Are those even properly sounds?

Yeah, I’m really enjoying being unemployed. I’m ever so slowly unraveling the detrimental involvement with the soul sapping, resource depleting unsustainable world. Not that I hope to ever actually escape, this is but an interlude, a little down time. The cat rustles in her nesting place near the stove.

So how’s the job search, you ask? I’ve found work, we’re just waiting for the bank to come through. If I can hold out until then I’ll be building a house for a few months, and more jobs will likely flow from that. If not and after if then I can always do like Pete said and follow one of those semis down I-65 and take 800 numbers off of their trailers. I have applications in other places and I’m terrified lest I get offered a job in a factory, or delivering produce or something.

The photograph is by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, as seen in my recent trip to the the Chicago Art Institute.

 

Toy Trains

I'm sitting here drinking coffee, waiting for the kids to get up. From Shoshana's apartment you can see the rail yard at the terminus of the Red Line. I like watching the trains snake around the tight turns, their segmented bodies complying in turn to the form of the track like a silver snake. Sometimes two trains follow each other, amplifying the effect, sometimes there are trains going in opposite directions. I haven't quite figured out the layout of the yard, how the flow works. I particularly like it when a train comes down the long sloping s-curve ramp that is, I believe, the southbound arm of the Purple Line heading toward the city from points north. They come in fast then slow to a crawl.

I always learn so much when I come up here. This time I learned about transporting fishes and coral, and in more detail how you ship a Beluga Whale. They go Fed Ex. Of course it's more complicated than that! I hear about these things over the phone but get so much more out of a face to face conversation.

Go Fish

And now I don't know what to say. The past week I've been considering angles, thinking of things I'd like to share either about the job itself or the fact that I'm quitting. Just now, on the drive up here to Chicago I had a spiel mapped out, but it's all evaporated.

I'd been traveling in silence since hitting the hinterlands, the radio desert between Lafayette and Gary. Oh, it's not like West Texas were there literally are no stations. There are plenty of radio stations, but none of them come in clearly, for very long, unless they're proclaiming the power of Jesus. He's got one hell of a transmitter out there!

I hadn't noticed the silence. I'm used to the sound of my own head, an engine and wheels over pavement. I realized that I was long out of the acoustic doldrums as I exited the Dan Ryan onto Lake Shore Drive. I tuned in WXRT playing some funky old blues just in time to ROCK OUT through the big city. It was awesome.

I sound like a Driver don't I? Well, I was one, for twelve and a half years. Today was my last day. Not that I won't drive for a living again. I mean, what else am I going to do at 54 years of age in a technologized un-humanistic era, be an artist? I'm used to a "median income," as humble as that turned out to be. I have bills! But I'm going to hold out as long as I can.

So is this a seminal moment, or merely an interlude? Probably the latter, but it sure as hell will be nice not to live life on the damn highway, for awhile anyway. Let's see if I can make it to March before I disappear again into a cloud of diesel exhaust.

 

Underemployment

 

I was standing outside shooting the breeze with Jimmy, the yard switcher. We were laughing about...that is I was bitching about the changes that have come down recently in my job. Al pulled up and climbed out of his truck. As he approached I said to Jimmy, “Al might be feeling the same way right about now.” Right on cue Al shakes his head and says, “Fuck this shit.” Jimmy laughed.

Jimmy can laugh at his leisure, the changes don’t effect him, only us “professional drivers.” I’d been complaining about the drop in pay; asking us to work our asses off dropping trailers hither and yon, and risk our lives in a big truck for around ten bucks an hour. Al, though cocked his head toward the building and said, “This guy,” clearly meaning Sam, the corporate honcho running things lately. “He drank a whole bunch of that JB Hunt Koolaid!” Al has a point.

There, I’ve said it, I’ve named the Company. Early on in my blogging career I disguised who I drove for. I described life from a drivers perspective, with practices and exploits that while responsible didn’t exactly fit with corporate policy. JB is so anal retentive I wouldn’t put it past them to pay people to scour the internet looking for their name. Oh, but they wouldn’t want to pay someone when they could simply have a spider do the leg work, now would they? Do I sound bitter?

I’d been stressing over the situation since the word about the changes came down over New Years, but haven’t done much to find another job. I mean, after a grueling 10 to 14 hour day, with an hour commute each way who has the energy? And on the weekend it’s recovery mode. The truth is I’m not optimistic about finding anything close to home that will pay a living wage, and home is where I want to be. So, I’ve been depressed.

“Promise me you won’t quit your job until you have another one,” my friend fairly pleaded with me. “I can’t do that,” I said, although it was my every intention to secure something else before I did quit. “I was already questioning if this job was worth the toll it’s taking on me before. If the money isn’t enough to make it worth my while, I mean, if I can’t afford the petrol to get to work then what’s the point?” KC fears for me, I know.

Living in denial I’d failed to calculate exactly what my pay would be. I simply accepted the phrase “hundreds of dollars a week” that my coworkers were bandying about and shuffled on in my haze. Then the changes took effect and I was forced to look at the reality of it. “I can’t do this anymore!” I’d scream into the night, then take a deep breath and soldier on. Then it hit me... ”I have a class A commercial driver’s license. I can quit this account without quitting my job!” So I did, I turned in my two weeks notice. What a relief! I felt so much better, instantly. It had to be the right decision.

I'm probably going to have to go back out on the road. Hopefully I'll find something that get's me home weekends, at least. The blog will change once again from Recurring Nightmare back to The (Ultra)Reluctant Trucker. I could keep working for JB Hunt; then again...

 

New Year's Dissolution

 

Happy New Year everybody!

Resolutions? Sort of yes and no. I don't do New Year's resolutions. I know how they generally turn out so I just reorient myself to the points of the compass and walk on.

I did kind of have a resolution made for me. It came the week between Xmas and New Years, at work. The best Fleet Manager in the world had recently quit. The guy he trained to take over, Jeremy, actually looked like he might be OK, but he was only there for a week before corporate sent him somewhere else and we were being managed by Sam, long distance from Cleveland. Sam was being trained by the manager of the same account up in the Northeast Ohio region. My fellow drivers who have been around know the trainer. They say he's an asshole.

Forgive me, I've already given far more detail than I meant to. I was just painting the backdrop.

So I get a message over the satellite saying that a couple of corporate guys would be in the office one afternoon and they wanted to meet with us individually. Cutting to the point: they're cutting our pay, fairly drastically, by thousands of dollars a year. A re-negotiated contract. There are guys who've been working this account for fifteen years. I found out today they haven't gotten a raise in five years, yet the workload has increased. As for me, I've been questioning whether the degree of commitment necessary to commute to this job is worth it. I know that I won't find anything local that will pay as much, but now I won't be making as much anyway, so I resolve to look for another job. Happy New Year!

It's almost a theme. Up at the Dollar General Distribution Center in Marion we've never had to stop at the gate. We just put on our four ways and eased through. If both of the inbound lanes were occupied then we could use the "express lane" on the outside. We stopped on the way out and that was enough. The other evening I noticed that the folks in the guard shack were paying a lot more attention than usual as I went by. On the way out one of the guys said, "You didn't stop at the gate!" like he was mad. "I, I didn't think I had to," I rejoined. The guy winked and the woman running the shift said, "Just slow down enough so we can get the numbers off your truck. New policy. They keep thinking of ways to make us do more work."

I thought I was joking when I said, "Well you're obviously overpaid."

"Ha!" she retorted, "They've taken care of that, they've cut our wages."

Wait a minute. I thought the Dollar Stores were the big beneficiaries of the Great Recession. I thought they were doing bang up business with everyone looking for a bargain. Lord knows we can't get up there often enough to collect all the pallets left over after they've stocked the merchandise that came in on them.

I'm reminded of what Catherine Crier said in that book I read, Patriot Acts. To paraphrase; "The 'job creators' won't make jobs out of the goodness of thier hearts if there's no demand, no matter how much money they have. They're beholden to the bottom line. Capitalism isn't immoral, it's amoral." Too bad they think short term.

Look at the job market. Cut the wages. Maximize the profits.

But I can't leave you with that, it's my first post of the new year. During the "W" years I used to say, "The world is in worse shape than I've ever seen it." [then I'd say, "Good job Bush!"] It's hard to say whether it's actually worse now or not. It ain't good, that's for sure, although the technology is fantastic.

Speaking of technology here's something to cheer you up: I recently learned that the new GM (genetically modified) "RoundUp® ready" crops have spurred such an over use of herbicide that we not only have run off, but herbicide resistant weeds, leading to the new wave of GM crops that are tolerant to defoliants; read Agent Orange. They are already in widespread panic! Where's Rachael Carson when you need her?

"...Leonard Brezhnev...It's the End of the World as we Know it..."

Yes folks, it's the end of Western Civilization, long predicted and even, dare I say, long anticipated. But we come out of it as one tribe, regardless of your skin color, your sexual preference or your spiritual beliefs. It really couldn't happen any other way. I once mused, wondering if this was the plan for every planet capable of producing and empowering intelligence: fossil fuels for them to use, then abuse. Still, there's no guarantee that there will be "a remnant," a surviving community here on Earth, what with all of the undoubtedly trillions of experiments spread throughout this sublime Universe, and in the end maybe none of them survive (those sound like fighting words). I hope we do. I want to be a part of it, but it doesn't ultimately matter, It's All Good.

Happy New Year!

 

Partitioned Sky

 

Damn, who would have expected a jogger out on a windy wooded road hours after the sun had set? I felt bad, I mean, I had my brights on till I was almost on him, coming the other way. I don't know what I thought he was in his reflective vest with a flashlight strapped to his head; a construction barricade or reflective tape on someone's mailbox or something, certainly not a jogger.

The early dawn light was soft as ever, but seemed chill this morning, reflected as it was off of the layer of white that still covered the lawn. I turned on a light to counteract that impression. My compact florescents aren't bad, being second generation. I mean they're not cold per se, but in in the vent hood above the range I still have an ancient incandescent that hasn't expired yet. I have to admit they give off a cozy glow, and that's all the light I needed anyway. I'll have to experiment with the new high efficiency bulbs they're coming out with now, when it goes.

It was nice too that there was a fire still smoldering in the wood stove. I only had to throw a couple of pieces of wood in there and I was done. In a few minutes it was warm enough for me to take a shower. A fairly warm day was forecast so I didn't bother to stoke the stove when I left for work. As I was cleaning out the ashes after work I was pleasantly surprised when I dug into some live coals. The newspaper was beginning to smoke before I'd even placed the kindling. And I'm still only using poplar, a fairly soft hard wood. My neighbor has some real hardwood cut and split he's going to sell me cheap, as soon as it dries up or freezes so that he can get into his property over in Brown County. The way it's been going it may not do either for the duration of the winter!

I was going to kvetch about my car problems, and work, which are interrelated, but we were going along so nicely and I really don't want to think about all that right now. There is one more thing that I want to tell you though. Something that happened at work this morning:

I was on a small two lane highway in the glacier flattened north of Indiana, flat as a pancake. The sun was shining full on me but the western horizon was dominated by a massive purple cloud trailing the shadows of isolated rainstorms; trailing like the tentacles of a jellyfish swimming against a swift current. That rain, or snow or whatever it was didn't reach the ground until it had traveled miles and miles from where it started in the sky.

I noticed more cloud bursts to the north, but these fell at a gentle, normal angle. The interesting thing was that they fell at an angle opposite to the others. Then I noticed that the southernmost of these rain showers, a fairly heavy downpour, bent at a sharp angle two thirds of the way to ground, forced backward to the same angle as those thrashed trailing tentacles. The division was half way to the cloud by the time that I got to Logansport and lost sight of the phenomenon. It would have been cool to see the one storm completely overtaken by the other.

 

Occupy Nightmare

I don't really have anything to say except maybe: "Forgive them truck driver, they know not what they do." Or should that be, "Forgive them truck driver, they're stupid and can't do any better?" No, some are downright stupid, I'm sure, but most are simply ignorant. I wish they'd say, "Forgive him, for he is trying to pilot that behemoth safely through these streets and it ain't easy."

But why is it always about the job? I know it started out that way because being an over the road truck driver was novel and exciting and at that time the job and sleep eclipsed 90% of my life. It's no longer novel or exciting, but still consumes, along with the necessary sleep, at least 75% of me. I pay a heavy price to earn a living. And what a great living it is. I make a median income and still live paycheck to paycheck.

The days are short. Darkness fall early and the Xmas lights are up. They range from the trashy to the extravagant, and occasionally the truly elegant. I shouldn't put them down though, I do like them; I mean at least they're something to look at.

I started doing some research. I'm tired of this damned rhetoric from both sides of the aisle, but especially from the serfs staunchly defending their cruel overlords. It's tragically comical; stranger than fiction.

I don't remember my elementary school history well enough to retort but I'm sure what's being bandied about isn't right. After hearing an interview with Catherine Crier I decided to get her new book, *Patriot Acts.* I mean, she worked for Fox News, she's main stream enough that I can't get accused of reading subversive literature, which I'm also open to.

She thinks we're in deep do do, but we already knew that, right? I was after Adam Smith and the "Invisible Hand," but lack the time to read primary sources (or even Wikipedia entries with my schedule). Just as I thought: the Right's wrong; got it ass backward, or rather, "selectively edited" (quoting Catherine there). Given my new found penchant for speaking out I'm sure you'll hear more about this. If not, look it up.