One year on

In answer to all of my questions from my last post (last year):

Fear.

Beginning the process of professional writing would force me to do something that I've been wholly unwilling to do for many years: draw my future into the present.

You see, I'm satisfied with my future. It's sealed away in a tidy little package, perpetually idyllic, eternally complete. It's a beacon of hope that shines a distant light into a messy, murky present smeared with self-doubt and cluttered with failures and weakness. I can borrow from this future to finance my present, and the line of credit is never exhausted. I can be content with the "is" by virtue of the "is to come".

Except, of course, "is to come" relies on one simple point: I must move from now to then. Somehow. It won't suddenly manifest itself on my 45th birthday. And this is where my emotions have fought my mind to a stalemate. In the unconscious parts of me, I don't want to have my idyllic future, because I know that to have it is to understand and live in its flaws.

To borrow from the beacon-of-light metaphor further: If a man is out at sea in rough surf and sees the lighthouse safety, warmth, and success fill his heart...he doesn't take the time to think consciously about what it would be like to actually stand at the base of the lighthouse. To stand there is to be on the solid foundation, but it is still at the sea's edge, vulnerable to the spray of the surf and the wind and the rain. At the helm, seeing the beacon, the man at sea thinks only of the security of bedrock under his feet, and it's comforting.

To stretch a little further, suppose the man at sea is me. I grip the helm and sailor on, riding each successive swell, content in the knowledge that the lighthouse exists...but I hesitate to navigate into the harbor. I sense the rocks, I sense the darkness of the distance between here and the light...and most importantly, I don't want to find out that to be on the land is to still stand in the rain.

And I'll die at sea for it.

Or I would, if I never came about landward.

Dispensing with word painting for a moment: I've realized finally that in order to have any fulfilling future at all, I have to reach for it, mess and all, and let my imaginary success rot on the vine so that I can enjoy whatsoever real success there is to be harvested.

Apparently I can't explain this thing without symbolism and metaphor. Oh well.

A sub-point of this discovery relates directly to why I'm posting here after such a long hiatus.

I have to stop blogging. Totally. Not necessarily forever, but in order to get down to business of taking a hack at living on my ideas, I'm going to have to spend a lot of energy figuring out what those ideas are. To blog (for me) is to write to an imaginary audience whose predilections and politics I'm catering to, even as I purport to disagree. I have to learn first what I'm really trying to say, say it, and then (and only then) grapple with the response of readers. I don't doubt that if I am ever published, the things that please and displease people will surprise the pants off me.

I've got enough real struggle to do now, I don't need to make more trouble for myself by leading myself to believe that there are people waiting on me to put up something new.

So.

Thanks to all that encouraged me. You're very welcome to any that have been encouraged. I'll see you on the flip side.

Things to say and no way to say them

True writers, it seems to me, are the kind of people that observe the world, contemplate the reasons and motives behind the way it works, and then comment on all of it in direct, thought provoking ways.

My problem of late has been that I've realized that, while I may observe and contemplate the world at large, I'm a little at a loss when it comes to reportage. I don't really have a clue how to turn my thoughts into any productive output.

Oh sure, I have ideas. Concepts for works of varying natures flit around my mind, but nothing seems to land. Even when I get a really good idea that seems to have a lot of mileage to it, I can't seem to bend the thing into any real product. Even on those rare occasions where I sit down and pound away at the keyboard for a few hours, I almost invariably stop because I realize how daunting the task is that I've taken on, or how little I actually know about the subject at hand.

So what is this? Laziness? Lack of focus? Lack of purpose? or just plain technical inability? I kind of ride a carousel around these points. Sometimes I feel like I don't get anything written because I'm a slacker. Sometimes I feel woefully ignorant. Sometimes I feel like I just don't know how to write...like a weekend warrior determined to change the spark plugs who pops the hood only to discover that he can't even make sense of the difference between the radiator and the engine block.

The sad, frustrating reality is that it's likely to be a blend of all of these problems. When I work up the courage to try, I find my knowledge lacking, then lose focus because I'm off researching, and when I come back to the germ of the idea, I realize I don't have the first clue how to make it work as a piece of literature.

I wish there was an uplifting end to this post, but there isn't. It's just a big *le sigh*, and another tweak on the "I'm good but I'm stymied" tail.

If I can't do it, I must not be that good.

Way to go, New Jersey

...He says as he rolls his eyes.

New Jersey is allowing an exception to their anti-idle law to expire May 1.

That exception allowed drivers to idle their engines when in the sleeper berth.

So now, in New Jersey, you won't be able to idle your truck for more than 3 minutes while parked. Period. No exceptions.

Good for the environment! some cheer.

Ignorant of reality and kind to the atmosphere at the expense of human safety.

If you can't afford an APU to run your air conditioning, or if yours breaks (I'd venture to guess that a majority of trucks don't have APUs yet) you'll no longer be able to legally idle your truck in order to keep the cab cool.

WE HAVE TO SLEEP, NEW JERSEY.

If we can't sleep, we don't drive safely. If we don't drive safely, you non-trucking types will start screaming about tightening the Hours of Service rules.

If this post seems incoherent, it's only because this anti-idle crap makes me so livid I can't find adequate words to express myself.

How are drivers supposed to stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer without an APU or the ability to idle their engines?

Are you going to subsidize the purchase and installation of APUs, New Jersey?

No, you're not. You're just going to pass laws that effectively treat truck drivers worse than livestock.

Laws like this are born in ignorance. It's ignorance that's hard to dispel, because we who drive are out doing our jobs, and that means we can't be at home, pestering our representatives about keeping the law remotely fair for truck drivers.

If it keeps going this way, you might as well just teach me how to yoke up a team of oxen....

But then I suppose they wouldn't be allowed to defecate.

:angryfistshake:

On January 1st, 2010, the state of Illinois repealed the split speed limit for cars and trucks of 65mph/55mph respectively, and moved everybody to 65 mph. This change excepts the six county Chicago area, which is wise.

The result is that you now have hundreds of truckers (myself included) quite gleefully doing 65 throughout the state. To say gleefully is not to say unsafely, for those of you wringing your hands about the evils of fast moving trucks. I will continue to quote to anyone interested in hearing that two thirds of car/truck accidents are the fault of the car.

Anyway. This change in speed laws has produced an interesting effect...or, rather, a lack of such effect. I had been curious to see how traffic would pace itself and how things would space out and bunch up as the local population adjusted to parity with we of the freighter persuasion. As it turns out, it appears that many (if not most) cars are still champing at the bit to get around me.

This leads me to wonder if the incidence of passenger cars cited for speeding will increase this year. In order to pass me so swiftly as you are, Oh Illinoian, you need to violate your speed limit pretty flagrantly.

The law, up until now, has granted you the de facto right to pass me at 10mph of difference...but now that the law is changed, do you continue to believe it's your right?

Is your sense of progress based not on your speedometer, but on your tally of passed trucks?

I wonder.

Having driven in states with and without split speeds, I'm beginning to form a theory, and Illinois will be a fantastic testing bed for the theory.

The theory is: Passenger car drivers in states where the speed limits are split tend to see themselves as more important than trucks. Restated: When the law discriminates between truck and car speed limits, car drivers look on the trucks as "less than".

I know that it's disappointing and sometimes nerve wracking to have a semi-truck blocking your view of the road; I drive a car, too. But there is a certain aggression to the movements of cars in splitter states that belies their contempt of the truck's existence. I exaggerate slightly to make my point, but the bumper crowding and lane diving and accelerator stomping I've witnessed in California, Illinois, Michigan, and a few other notables is pretty pronounced.

So Illinois is the control. It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues. Cars very well may speed where they hadn't sped before, just to maintain their "rightful" edge on trucks.

Maybe not.

Curious.

I've just woken up from a sleep cycle after a full 26 hours of work/waiting for work with no sleep.

I don't feel sick, crappy, nauseated, or any of the other things that usually go with fatigue in me.

How is it that some days I can be up for 16 hours and feel like I'm going to die, and then turn around and hammer a ridiculous 26 hour marathon and not feel it?

Weird.

Going back to sleep now.

Seen recently, scrawled on a toilet paper dispenser in a Texas bathroom:

First, in black sharpie:

STOP BIG GOVERNMENT

Immediately beneath, in another's writing:

help each other then

I normally pass over toilet graffiti unmoved, but this one hit me so square on the nose I had to write it down. This seven word argument that smashingly undercuts a traditional conservative battle cry pretty perfectly sums up much of what I feel.

I'd love it if government institutions could be lean and un-invasive, and let us go about our lives unencumbered. But as the respondent on that toilet paper wheel so succinctly points out, we are not doing a good enough job of helping each other through difficulties and trials, sickness and disasters.

Some churches do good things, but as often as not, it seems, help comes with a hook. Those helped have to endure a proselytizing in the process. Free food on the condition of open ears is not charity, it's a sales pitch.

Individuals conversely seem to be accidentally or consciously swallowing Ayn Rand whole, looking out for number 1 and to hell everybody else. I can't tell you how many "stop big government" truckers I meet who, in the same breath, decry government intervention and panhandlers on the side of the road. The government's not supposed to step in, and damned if they'll spare a dime. Who's supposed to help keep these people from starving to death? I assume that the disease and death of these unfortunates while no help is offered them is not acceptable to you. If it is, I really don't care to discuss the social contract with you until you can pull your head out of your ass.

How can we have a society that protects its citizens from byzantine privation without either a government or a populace willing to make the investment?

A bleak scene from the Katrina aftermath is emblazoned on my mind. A string of people very vocally protested the fate of a poor elderly woman whose corpse was sitting in a wheelchair outside the superdome. The corpse was covered in a dirty bedsheet. "Look at the indignity of this" was the refrain. "How can people be treated this way?"

How indeed, when so many of those voices belonged to able bodied young people just as capable as the government of stepping in and taking a old woman's corpse somewhere decent to be laid to wait for its final rest. In that moment, I first understood the impossibility.

The government can't do it right, and the people won't.

This world is not a nice place to live.

Another, briefer gripe about misplaced American Christian zeal.

I have a little FM transmitter that I can plug into my iPod. It transmits a disappointingly wimpy signal on any of the four frequencies between 88.1 and 88.7, so that I can listen to the iPod over the radio in the truck.

An interesting pattern I've noticed in recent months is that often I'll run into radio stations whose signals will overpower the weak transmission coming from inside the cab. This is to be expected from Wimpy McTransmitter...however, what is not expected is the number of times I run across stations that absolutely blow out 88.5 or 88.3 (usually) and subsequently bleed signal onto the surrounding frequencies. These are strong towers, folks. A station booming on 88.5 will produce shadow signals on both 88.3 and 88.7, knocking down three of four of my choices to hear my own stuff. I'll hear the station on 88.5 as if my transmitter was not even on, and on .3 and .7, the buzz and rumble of the voices and music on .5 will overpower the clarity of what my iPod is quietly trying to play.

The common thread? All Christian stations, of one stripe or another. Since I started actively noticing this, it's been unfailingly consistent that if I lose three freqs, it's a Christian tower booming me out.

It's irritating, frankly.

And here's why. To me, this over-powered broadcast strength is a direct result of the misconception that people don't believe in Christ because they can't hear the message. Solution? Buy a tower that, like a blast cannon, launches the message a hundred miles in every direction. Then more people will hear it. Then end result is an extension of the functional stalemate between Evangelical Christianity and the Rest of Everybody.

Let me try to sum it up from the "Rest of Everybody" perspective: We've heard all of this. If we were interested, we'd listen. It just so happens we're not interested, and saying the same things you've already said, but saying them louder, and more invasively, does not increase the attractiveness of your message.

Let me also take a minute to point out that, in my opinion, Christian radio is dangerous. It goes out and honest, well meaning spiritual people listen to it, and because it got on the air, they take it for doctrinal truth. I've heard more things on Christian stations that are shaky, misleading, or just flat wrong than I can count.

So, if you happen to be thinking about buying a titanic broadcast tower in order to improve your evangelism, Mr. Christian Station Manager (and you happen to be reading this) let me make a couple of points.

1) The message of Christ is a message intended to be communicated from individual to individual, based on the way God uses the disciple to show the un-disciple how transformative redemption can be. Mass media will never replace this. Indeed it might be that mass media has made the individual completely oblivious to the need for personal relationship.

2) You overestimate your own role in God's purposes for redemption if you think that people are saved because they can't hear your programming. Very poignantly, I just heard today Magaret Atwood give one of the most concise (and deadly accurate) descriptions of Christ as the propitiation for sin I've ever hear anybody give, churchman or not, and she doesn't believe it personally for a minute. She understands the principle, but does not believe. It's not an issue of not having heard for her.

3) And I reiterate here, bits and blurbs of your programming, heard far and wide, taking out of context or in, can do damage the health of those on your own "team".

4) Always and always, a message delivered when the receiver does not desire to listen falls on deaf ears.