Life – 70 West

Time to Hit the Road

It’s time to cut my losses and admit it’s time to hit the road on what I believe will be my last career .. on the road, trucking. (How’s that for a sentence?) Working 911 was an interesting year. Fascinating, appalling. Ultimately, the callers didn’t drive me away. The calls didn’t drive me away. The center, which is actually one of the better ones in the country, drove me away. Three problems: Training is a debacle; communications is non-existent; and I hated police dispatch. So, I’ve called time. I gave it a solid year. But by the end of April, I could tell the writing was on the wall.

Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@juanezl?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Esteban Zapata</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/red-and-white-truck-on-black-asphalt-road-f8Nb18iHdPo?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a> — Photo by Esteban Zapata on Unsplash

Why trucking? Well, age discrimination is a thing. Trucking is one of the few careers where I can still enter. I’m in very good health now, best since my thirties. I’m up to the job. And as I said, I want to get away from people in a cocoon. It might not be exactly a safe situation all the time, but good god, anything after 45+ years of working in too-close proximity to people.

I’ve enjoyed (mostly) each of the jobs I’ve had, and made life-long friends, and had great adventures. But the way this society has turned out, let me talk to myself, I’m better company.

There are times I think I’m high-functioning autistic. Kind of a trendy thing to say now, but it’s always been there, from childhood, in a mild sort of way. I’ve always hated lights, especially flourescent light. I like it dim, always have. I often have trouble reading other people. I can figure out what’s up with them, but not what signals they’re sending, or what they’re looking for from me. I do understand their thinking and what they’re saying, but the interpersonal is difficult.

I’ve always been very self-contained. I far preferred to be playing by myself or hiking in the woods, riding my bike alone, reading by myself, to being social. I didn’t care that I had a small core group of a couple of friends and no wide social circle. Did not and does not matter. I do have friends coast to coast. I love them dearly. But what I do not have, nor do I want, is to have scads of close friends. I’m no social butterfly.

I have some obsessions and sometimes can’t let them go. I talk too much. It’s a problem sometimes with job interviews. Hopefully, it didn’t sink me today when I interviewed at a trucking company that would be pretty awesome, especially the pay. School and on-the-job training is provided. You drive for them for two years and you’re golden. I need to drive for either three-and-a-half years or longer. This would work very well. The pay is double what I’m currently making.

While I will not like being away from home for four nights or so at a time, I do crave the solitude in the truck cab after a lifetime of working always around other people. I feel claustrophobic and stifled in cubes and even on retail sales floors after so many years of it.

Yes, you’re surrounded by people on the interstates. Doesn’t matter. You can’t hear them and they’re not in the cab with you. I can listen to music or books or hum or sing or curse or yell or talk to myself without anyone else listening.

I know I won’t like some restrooms and showers on the road. Always sleeping where you work is not always a nice thing. But I’m a nester. And I can put up with anything for a short time during a rest stop or sleep over. Every single job out there, including all the ones I’ve had in the past, have issues you have to deal with … traffic and America’s interstates are this one. I’m okay with that as long as I’m in a truck. Can’t go too fast like I do in my car. I just make time, deliver each load safely, and there’s no extra agenda. I deliver on time, accept the next load, advocate for myself and my safety. I don’t have to wonder what the hell the lady in the next work station is going on about and why she’s so annoying.

Drivers are annoying, yes. Saw some self-centered and ridiculous behaviors. It was a 120-mile round trip. But what I saw was no worse than 25 fourth graders in a classroom. And I did not have to hear or even really see the people on the road. It was frankly blissful.

Whether I get this position or not, I’m moving forward with trucking one way or another. It will be great if this works out. But, as my cockeyed optimist father would always say, “It’ll all come out in the wash.” Meaning, everything will work out. It may not be exactly what you envision or even necessarily want, but it works out. We have options in how we live our lives. This is my next choice from the available options.

Catch you on down the road.

Nothing to Say

F. Murray Abraham in his Oscar-winning role as Antonio Salieri in “Mozart”

I have nothing to say. On paper. Probably in person. Mute all my life except brief bursts of productivity. Newspaper/school PR work 1088=1994. Northpoint Communications internal PR 1998-2000. That’s work. But what can I write personally? There’s a story about eternal life I’ve worked on for years. Another book about plane crashes— midairs this time. That’s it.

I don’t need immortality. No problem with dying. Just want to express … something.

I am Salieri (in Mozart). Many loved Mozart, wanted to be him. No one wanted to be Salieri, especially not the one in the movie. I would love to be even that good. Be at least the patron saint of mediocrity. I loved that line. Of all I remember of Amadeus, that’s the line.

I’m a jack of all trades, master of none. It’s my epitaph, along with “Yet Another Patron Saint of Mediocrity.”

No problem doing a variety of things through life. I am not just one thing. But it would have been nice to be good, even great, at one thing during a lifetime.

“The potential for greatness lives within each of us,” said American track star and Olympic medalist Wilma Rudolph

Well, it might live there within us, but it rarely goes from potential to actual greatness. Especially in folks like me. Or in 99.99% of us.

I’m the “Incredibly Average Vernon Persons” from M*A*S*H, the hometown mediocrity who was always in the newspaper from Hawkeye’s Crabapple Cove. Hawkeye hated that guy. Except I don’t get even Vernon Parson’s recognition (Not that I need it-I just want to do anything that would would be worthy of anyone’s notice. I’m not even average and recognized. Just average.

In a majority of deaf, dumb, blind, scentless, touchless people often incapable of feeling even adequate in life.

So yes, without hearing, sight, taste, touch, smell. That’s me.

I don’t want to “just feel something.” I feel too much already, but I don’t feel with greatness. I don’t feel anything of greatness.

“Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude,” said writer and entrepreneur Ralph Marston, who is probably incredibly average, but gets quoted in books.

Excellence is attitude? No, it means actually excelling at something. Actually doing it.

I’m not competitive. I don’t have to be the “best” at something. Best whatever is often fabricated, artificial.

I hate competition, actually. And “excellence” is subjective as hell. Just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so too is it that one man’s “Excellent Best” is another man’s “You suck.”

Which puts me on another old man tangent: To us gays, “You suck” is a compliment not an insult. Yes, I suck, but I also SUCK. It’s fabulous. But to straight boys, it’s the feminine role, it’s submissive. And real straight boys don’t do that, they believe.

I seriously don’t understand straight guys. They’re kinda filthy all the time. Now I’ve met a couple of gay slobs over the years. But they can’t hold a candle to a straight guy. When they live alone, they have no taste for creating a comfortable environment whee=re they live. Their laundry probably hasn’t been done in weeks. Dressing means a sniff test. Which rarely passes, but they wear it anyway.

But the biggest question I have is, “Why do straight guys think we gays just want to get in their pants?” What is their obsession with butts and their terror that something is going into their butts? I don’t get it. First, they’re missing out on some really awesome fun. But why, with so many gay men around, would I want to violate a straight guy? Good god, boys, get a grip.

The very large majority of us want nothing to do with straight guys. We’ve been bullied by them all our lives. They grow up and try to get us arrested, eliminated through legislation and terroristic assaults. Some of them are admittedly pretty. But you, the gay guy, will always get stung if you touch. Stay away.

More quotes: “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity,” said Albert Einstein, who is described in the notebook as a “German-American physicist and Nobel Prize winner.

Yes, the opportunity to fail or succeed. The opportunity to just roll with whatever result comes from the difficult moment.

Another quote: “Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest,” said Mark Twain, described simply and without excellence, as an “American writer.” I can get behind this one. Do the right thing is more important to me that doing what others perceive as the “excellent” or “best” thing.

It is good to do right. That’s all the best excellence I need.

I guess that’s the end of tonight’s stream of consciousness. As usual, drying up. And as usual, I suck.

The Road

I dream of a different future which might just be possible only if I win a lottery. Or a semi-truck runs over us and a TV lawyer collects a big ol’ settlement.

A house. Built from scratch. In my home state. A meditation/de-stressing center where anyone can go to have some simple peace and quiet and be alone if they want to be or with others if they need community or a therapist or advisor if they need help.

I dream of book ends to my life; the first part of it was New Mexico, so let the last part be the same.

I first hit the road that is US70 when I was a day or two old. A block east to 70/North Main, a right on 70/Second, a left on Wyoming, a right on Juniper and there I was.

I hit the road long-haul when my uncle was killed in Oklahoma when I was six months old. We were due to go anyway for an extended family vacation; it was an extended family funeral with long-term repercussions for everyone. US70 was my first road, and it was often a route of sorrow. Visiting grandparents who were fading away. Watching my grandfather take his last breath after eight hours on US70. Visiting my grandmother after yet more hours on US70 as she, deep in Alzheimer’s, told me a story that made perfect sense to her, about her mother, that was mostly gibberish to me. Our last moments together.

Whether it was Roswell-Duncan or Duncan-Roswell, US70 was the thread that bound the two halves of our lives: Mom’s immediate family in Roswell, her extended and Dad’s family in Duncan. A road ran between them. I knew every spot on the road. An area just east of the Pecos River that I loved and thought of as “my” canyon. The Dairy Queen in Floydada is the halfway point of any trip. Gas stations. Shabby courthouses and dusty, shuttered downtowns every thirty miles in west Texas, ticking off the miles on the road. Vernon, Crowell, Paducah, Matador, Floydada, Plainview, Muleshoe, Farwell. We knew which restrooms were decent.

Dad would light a cigarette every 20 minutes. I’d try to roll down the window, he’d roll it up to a crack, and we’d breathe in the smoke and sigh relief when he put it out. Irritation would again mount as the next one was lit. He would get speeding tickets rather often around Matador, Texas. My sisters got the window seats and I was often squashed in the middle. I would kneel on the floorboard, lay my head on the seat, and sleep. Sometimes, there wasn’t as much cigarette smoke that way. It was like I was kneeling at an altar, the altar of US70, speeding along at 70 mph. With the speed limit often being 55, this would result in attention from the Texas Highway Patrol.

US70 is always two lanes through Texas. It took decades for the 90-mile stretch between Portales and Roswell to be expanded to four lanes. Now it’s smooth and wide and there’s no dangerous passing and the speed limit is 70 and people go 80 because there’s nothing out there. Derelict towns like Elida and Kenna, the Elkins bar, the abandoned schoolhouse from the 1920s, my canyon, the bridge over the Pecos which meant we were 10 miles from Roswell, either our home between 1957 or our destination from 1971.

When we moved from Roswell to Clovis along that road, my sister and I sang “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” over and over in the cab of the U-Haul while Dad was driving. He probably went a little insane and maybe smoked a little more. Another U-Haul along the road in 1974 took us to my 19 years, 10 months, 28 days, and 9 hours of exile in Oklahoma, a suffocating and hard experience for my teens and twenties that I still have difficulty with, for many, many reasons.

Now I use US70 often … going to work, shopping at Target, getting the car washed, going to Publix or Sonic or out to Mt. Juliet, or going into downtown … it’s all along US70. It’s not as mean a road or experience as taking that road to Oklahoma. It’s a kinder/gentler US70 in Tennessee, more benign. US70 West from Oklahoma to Roswell and Ruidoso was always a joy, a mounting excitement at going home. US70 East was always a hated road. It took me down from the Sacramento and Capitan mountains and ushered me back to ugly, flat west Texas and then to hated Oklahoma. US70 East here is just a trip to Kohl’s, US70 West takes us back home. A benign road. A central thread in life.

For my part, they could tear up eastbound 70 and make it one-way westbound only. It would always take me home and I’d never have to leave.

#EmptyThePews

FRICKIN’ HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD! JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH! POPE PAUL VI AND ALL THE SAINTS! AND DEAR GOD WHY ARE ALL THESE WOMEN IN EXPENSIVE ULTRASUEDE DRESSES RUNNING UP AND DOWN THE AISLES SCREAMING THEIR FOOL HEADS OFF???!!!!!

I posted this elsewhere and on the bird site first, but it also belongs here on 70West.

Why my pew has been empty since 1982: A long thread for anyone who may be interested, et al. Perhaps someone may relate or need to hear. Inspired by @C_Stroop and #EmptyThePews on Twitter.

It starts in 1975. I’m 12. A budding little gay boy. At the C. of the Naz., we get a spiffy little sermon, which runs like this: “Speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession!!!” Amens, claps, whistles, “Kill the Devil!”

Fast forward a week later. Someone in charge of our family’s spiritual development decides to follow info bestowed by the Holy Spirit Fairy, an entity which seems to act rather … impetuously. Or at least that was my experience with Him.

The Spirit has moved someone that we must immediately abandon the C. of the Naz., where, remember, I’ve just been told on the authority of the church into which I was born and raised that speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession.

[An aside: 12-year-old me had memorized the 1960 Church Manual so I could know how to perform weddings and funerals because … get this … I thought I would become a C. of the Naz. preacher.]

Given a choice about which church to attend would have been lovely. Alas, it was not to be. I was the young, stupid child who couldn’t possibly be trusted to know what was good for him, spiritually speaking. At best, a “baby Christian.” (These buzzwords sound familiar?)

Actually, after just one hour of being exposed to the new church’s … shall we say, bizarreness and cultish overtones … I’m confident I would have scurried back underneath the skirts of the mother church (of the Naz.) if I had a driver’s license and a car. But I didn’t.

So I wasn’t given a choice. Remember the previous sermon, supposedly delivered by a stern God to CotN Leaders possessed of “Utter Sanctification” and who are therefore qualified to speak on subjects Most Weighty: “Speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession!”

Again, I was 12 years old. Puberty was dawning. Teenage outrage, hatred of hypocrisy, self-righteousness, inflated sense of injustice, and general all-around questioning and boundary-pushing are imminent. I needed constancy. But the Spirit had spoken and must be obeyed.

The next Sunday, we don’t drive over to be with the sanctified who hate devilish tongue-speaking. Instead, we head straight for the new church, an Assembly of God knockoff/alleged “non-denominational.” “We’re going here from now on,” says Parental Dearest.

What happened the first Sunday at the new church to which we had been led by the Holy Spirit? Well, I’ll set the scene one more time: The previous week, the church of my birth told me speaking in tongues is evidence of demonic possession.

This week? FRICKIN’ HOLY MARY MOTHER OF GOD! JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH! POPE PAUL VI AND ALL THE SAINTS! AND DEAR GOD WHY ARE ALL THESE WOMEN IN EXPENSIVE ULTRASUEDE DRESSES RUNNING UP AND DOWN THE AISLES SCREAMING THEIR FOOL HEADS OFF???!!!!!

Then: The kicker. If I am to understand the main belief point through hours of gibberish, a complete lack of any catechism, no orderly service of any kind, no regular communion, and a multitude of other things, a central belief is this:

“If you do NOT speak in tongues, God is withholding His greatest blessing from you and therefore there is something wrong with you if you don’t immediately babble in tongues in ‘the presence of the Lord.'”

In other words, NOT speaking in tongues was evidence of God withholding his greatest gift from you & you were opening yourself up to … you guessed it, demonic possession. As soon as I hit 16, my pew began to be empty. By 18, only bribery could get me in it. So…bye!

It would take a long thread to describe coming out (yeah, the Spirit got involved there, too), getting away & being an adult in charge of myself & the joys of life since I got myself to #EmptyThePews. Thanks for the inspiration, @C_Stroop and thanks to everyone who read!