Truck Driving Dad.

      Two years ago, I was a broken man.  My journalism career had dissolved and slid off into the night without a definitive whimper. My father was dying.  I was broke and I had gone into a local E-Cigarette shop where I had spent quite a bit of money to beg for a retail sales job.  So there I was, peddling electronic cigarettes, in a job that I hated, in an environment entirely unsuited for a person with ADHD. I was miserable.  I contemplated suicide regularly.  Then to add some icing to the cake, on my birthday in July, I got the call to come home at once.  My best friend died before I could get to his bedside—hours after my 44^th birthday had lapsed.  I found myself sitting in central Missouri contemplating what had gone so wrong with my life.  I wept a lot. Then, a powerful urge overcame me: RUN!  I wanted to run. I got in a car and just started driving across the Midwest in search of my Grandfathers grave so that I might pick a spot next to him to lay dad to rest.

     It was during that drive that I came to understand some things.  For the last 20 years of my fathers life, he had chosen to be a truck driver.  I had always secretly condemned him for that.  I thought he was above it.  I thought he was better than driving a damn truck.  But as I drove, it suddenly dawned on me, that the world had sank away with every mile I had put behind me.  I was feeling better.  I was overwhelmed with guilt and shame at having judged my own father for his career decision.  It slowly came to me that I wanted to know.  I had a burning desire to know what it was that he found so appealing about that job.  I knew we shared a joy of being behind the wheel.  I knew that driving jobs came with many opportunities for employment- opportunities that I desperately needed right now.  I knew what I had to do next.

     When I returned to Florida, I signed up for a driving School and got my CDL.  I have been on the road more or less since then.  I have logged nearly 200 thousand miles behind the wheel of a Semi Truck.  I wanted to take some time to share with you what I have learned in that time.  The first thing you should know is that the training period required to learn to operate these vehicles ABSOLUTELY SUCKS!  It’s intended to suck by design. You get paired up with another grown man for about 6 weeks.  You both live in a truck smaller than a jail cell. There is no privacy. You are fed information through a fire hose and expected to drink it all in. A big part of the reason for all the suck is to weed out people who wont be able to take life on the road.  If you can get through the six weeks of training, it’s like boot camp, life gets a lot better once you get your own truck.  A lot of people drop out during training.  I was blessed to have a great trainer who taught we well.  We are still friends to this day and he still gives me useful advice.

     Driving is one of the hardest and most thankless jobs you can do.  You are away from your family for weeks at a time.  You find yourself working 80 hours a week. However, because trucking is the only industry that is unregulated by the department of labor, you only get paid for a fraction of the hours that you work- usually 60-70 percent. You get dirty.  You get callouses. You destroy your clothes. You drink a lot of coffee.  You bleed. You listen to a lot of talk radio.  If you don’t have a supporting spouse like I do, you can find yourself eating a lot of gas station hot dogs-and that’s never good.  You end up spending a lot of your own time and money fixing other peoples problems and mistakes.  Because, at the end of the day, if something goes wrong with that truck out on the road- the fault ALWAYS falls on the driver. 

   But I haven't stuck this out because the the job is full suck.  I slowly found the things that my father must have fallen in love with.  The open road is still the best therapist I have ever found.  Hours of solitude can be very therapeutic.  The initial pain of leaving home to earn a paycheck was gradually replaced by learning how to fully enjoy the full attention of my wife for the 5 or 6 days a month that I got to see her. Our relationship began to improve. She enjoyed that I wasn’t home making a mess all week, and I enjoyed the time I got to spend with her when I was home.  I also began to experience something about this job that I had not felt in a good long time: Pride!  I work hard for my money.  I earn it.  I enjoy spending it. It all makes me very proud of what I do and the fact that I can do it legally and safely. Because lets face it: y’all driving around in your four wheelers are horrible drivers.  I take time to explore and enjoy the places I get to go.  I have seen some really amazing places. I have watched so many beautiful sunrises.

     I still have a hard time getting my head around the horrible reputation that truck drivers have.   I understand where it originates, but now I feel the judgement and disdain that I silently fed to my father- and I understand that too.   I need to be pointed out also that there aren’t nearly as many hookers out there running around the truck stops as people seem to believe. Hookers at truck stops really tapered off with the advent of digital currency exchange.  Drivers used to carry lots of cash for their companies.  Now days, drivers carry little or no cash- I am sure you can probably see the hooker correlation there.  Truck stops are not what they used to be, a fact that is both good and bad.  There is a perpetual shortage of parking in this country for commercial vehicles.  I have had to park in some terrible places to shut down for the night.  However, those nights were always soothed by a home cooked meal tucked in my freezer that heated up pretty well in my microwave.  I am here to tell you guys that nothing tastes better than the love your wife sprinkles in your meals for you before you leave home.

      When I started writing this blog, I was not entirely sure why I was writing it, or where I ultimately wanted to go with it.  As I sit here this morning, fathers day, fixing to head off and go drive a truck to Connecticut, I think I understand. Truck driving was one of the few things that I silently held against my father.  Now, I am following in his footsteps and I finally understand what he was thinking.  Unfortunately, he is not here for me to have that conversation with him.  So maybe it will help me feel a little better to tell y’all about it.  It probably bears noting that if you have your father around- you should have those conversations with him now.  Maybe you wont have to wonder these things after he is gone.  Besides, it IS Fathers Day- what better excuse do you need to start up a dialogue with dad?

I miss you so much daddy.  Happy Fathers Day.

I'm not a vegetarian.

The best description of our current political climate I have ever heard goes like this: “A conservative vegetarian does not eat meat.  A liberal vegetarian does not want you to eat meat.”  The blood of the victims in the latest mass shooting in Oregon was not even dry before liberal pundits climbed up on the corpses to scream for more gun control.   My social media exploded with people posting and re-posting state sponsored propaganda from pretend news agencies.  Lots of rhetorical questions like: “How did this happen?” And, “How can we prevent this?”  They are rhetorical because we know the answer already.  We have given you the answer time and again.  You just refuse to listen.

Every day across this country, thousands upon thousands of Americans, some responsible, some not so much, take their firearms to shooting ranges and fire those weapons.  Millions of cartridges are expended.  High capacity magazines are used and reused.  Fully automatic and semi automatic rifles are shot.  Some guns with pistol grips and barrel shrouds.  Some are benign and some are black and scary looking.  Ammunition designed to pierce body armor and sub sonic ammo is fired.  But do you know what absolutely NEVER happens at those shooting ranges?  Mass executions.  Do you know why?  Because it would be foolhardy at best to walk into an area where every soul is armed and start pointing a weapon at people.  In fact, it has generally been my experience that folks at the gun range are all extraordinarily polite to each other.  It doesn’t take a whole lot of common sense to understand the folly of picking a fight with a person holding a loaded gun in their hand.  Yet, according to the arguments put forth by the liberal gun control advocates, these places should be littered with corpses on a daily basis, yet they are not.

The military uses the term “soft target”.  It’s defined as “A person or thing that is relatively unprotected or vulnerable.”  Every mass shooting execution in the last several years have one thing in common.   They all happened at soft target locations.  Just about every single successful attacker commits his crime in “Gun Free Zones”.  They do this because they know that there will not be anyone there with the capacity to stop them.  Gun free zones have been created across this country as “common sense gun control” with the intent of making people feel safe.  When in reality it is creating a danger zone for those very people.  All they successfully do is disarm the people who would have the capacity to defend themselves and others in a violent situation.  Congratulations, your common sense gun control laws just created a bunch of soft targets for these psychopaths.

When these psychopaths strike, the reaction from the media is swift.  My television has been lit up for hours now with “Mass shooting” and “Gun Control” stories.  If you have not been paying attention, let me clue you in on something.  Every one of these psychopaths who have left behind some kind of manifesto, have all cited a common thread:  They ALL wanted the attention given to the killers that struck before them.  So much so, that they repeatedly cite them by name.  If you want to know what is causing it, just turn to the media.  We are giving these people exactly what they desire; Story after story about the incident. By giving these animals the notoriety they desire, and showing it to the world, you are only creating future killers from the pool of psychopaths who are watching you glorify these idiots.  Who is to blame? Easy, the media, combined with your common sense gun control laws- end of story.  Your gun control is contributing to the problem, not preventing it. 

I saw an article recently that made the claim, that the notion that only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun, was hogwash.  Their logic was that they never hear about this happening.  The reality is that it happens EVERY single day in this country.  I see it every day, posted on low key websites.  Stories about armed citizens stopping criminals from committing a crime.  Here is the difference:  Media outlets do not publish those stories.  It does not fit their liberal agenda.  An agenda that includes making sure you follow your new vegetarian diet.  The media is canonizing the criminals and ignoring the heroes that actually do manage to stop them.  Then has the audacity to wonder why we never hear about it. When they do publish those stories, half the time they don't even mention the heroes name.  In Warren Michigan last month, an armed customer at a bank stopped a bank robber in his tracks.  The Washington Times posted less than an entire paragraph about it, and never cited the hero by name. 

These kind of criminal mass shootings are a relatively modern phenomenon. But guns have been around for centuries. So why is it happening?  It’s happening because the media makes instant celebrities of these criminals, so that they can use the story to push their agenda to disarm the common citizen. All the while, creating more soft targets and future criminals.   So how do we stop it?  You will never legislate crime away.  If you think that banning guns in this country will solve the problem, think again.  Even the liberals in Washington have the common sense to understand that attempting to ban guns would most likely result in a civil uprising. You will also never be able to fully prevent animals from committing violent acts.  The option we are left with is to be prepared to protect ourselves. If you want this crap to stop, then we need to start educating ourselves, and our children about firearms, how to use them responsibly, and how to defend ourselves with them.  This is something that all of our great grandfathers did before us, and they didn’t have these problems.  You have the right to chose not to do that.  But you have no right whatsoever to tell me that I can’t.  Now pass the pot roast, I’m sick of these vegetables.

The Working Man.

On Monday, a man named Bob will get out of bed before the sun comes up.  He will get dressed and fix some coffee and set off for his days routine.  Bob will drive off to spend the day on the second floor of a run down office building in Jacksonville Florida.  Usually there is a whole office full of people that work to manage the 500 or so employees in the company where he works, but today he is the only one here.  Bob is a dispatcher for Cypress Trucking.  Bob covers the weekends most times.  He has been doing this way too long and usually works a 60 hour week. He is that one guy that goes above and beyond to keep the ship afloat and takes the most grief for his commitment. Management is constantly on Bob’s case about logistics while drivers call and whine about the load assignments and getting home.  A couple months ago, Bob had to take a week off work.  It was almost instantly visible to the drivers he deals with that things weren't being handled quite the same.  Bob left because his brother passed away.  He had to take care of some things, including how to handle an invalid family member that his brother had been taking care of.  That responsibility now falls to him. It’s wearing on him, and the stress is reflected in his eyes.  It might be easy to mistake Bob for a grumpy guy, but he deals with a disproportionate amount of grief—especially lately.

Across the country, a man named Kevin will be awakened by a beeping coming from his computer.  It’s an email from Bob wishing him a happy holiday.  Kevin drives a truck.  He is also working today, in Texas, halfway across the country from his wife and child. Kevin is sharing the cab of his truck, which is smaller than a jail cell with a trainee for the next 4 weeks.   Kevin is the sole breadwinner for his family and despite the extra pay he gets for training the new guys, it’s hard to make ends meet. He stays out on the road on weekends and holidays like this because it provides a little extra income for his wife and 12 year old daughter.  She is growing up while he is away and he knows it. But the responsibility of providing for them far outweighs his desire to be home today grilling up some burgers and having a beer.  He needs this extra holiday pay to cover the cost of a new mini fridge for his truck.  His old one died and he cant carry food with him right now to save money, so he is forced to eat out at a lot of fast food joints.  Kevin will wake up his rookie and hit the road.  He has a delivery of construction materials to make on Tuesday morning.  Those materials will insure that the folks home celebrating the holiday will have work to come back to tomorrow.

Back in Illinois, a young woman in her 20’s named Amanda is already moving.  She has two young children to take care of, but she wont be able to see them long this morning.  She has to get to the Flying J across the county where she works as a manager.  Truck drivers like Kevin are out there in her lot.  They will need fuel and clean showers and most definitely coffee—LOTS of coffee.  Sometimes she wonders if they don’t just pour it in their radiators and come in for another thermos. Amanda is working to make her own ends meet.  She lost her dad two weeks ago to cancer.  He died too young and he left her in charge of handling his affairs and his tiny estate.  She still has a lot of things she needs to work through, but it will have to wait.  She has a job to do and she needs to get to it. Despite the overwhelming grief she feels, she picks herself and heads off to work for the day.

Down near Cleveland Florida, a woman named Leslie is checking on her husband Raymond.  Ray was also a truck driver, but he has fallen ill with age and can no longer get behind the wheel.  Leslie is working hard to take care of him and she loves him dearly.  Ray’s truck is up for sale.  That might help cover some of the medical bills, but there have been no serious offers yet.  So Leslie needs to get in to cover her shift today at the grocery store in town.  Like Amanda, she works retail and has to deal with all manner of ill tempered patrons.  Today is going to be especially bad and she knows it.  The mud park down the road is open for the holiday and that always leads to intoxicated, self serving idiots running through the store tearing things up.  She has enough to worry about with Raymond.  She should not have to be babysitting these people.  Quite frankly she has earned this holiday with her ailing husband.  But she has a responsibility, and a job, and bills.  So Ray will have to spend the holiday without her.

Across town, a man named Dylan is slipping into his bullet proof vest.  He does not want to wear it.  It’s hot in Florida this time of year and that vest is a sweat box.  But there have been so many random attacks on police officers these days that there is no way in hell his wife would let him leave without seeing it on him.  Dylan has four beautiful young daughters.  He wants to work this 12 hour shift today because its holiday pay.  He too can use the extra money.  The police Department where he works has not offered up a decent pay raise to officers for nearly a decade.  After paying into his medical plan and his retirement, he brings home a pretty small paycheck for what we ask him to do.  Christmas is right around the corner though, and Dylan knows that the extra money will help put a few items under the tree this season.  Dylan will spend most of the day keeping an eye out for intoxicated drivers.  Revelers who don't know their limits and head out on the road possibly endangering the lives of people like Leslie Amanda and Kevin.

In Wichita Kansas, a woman named Abby is also stirring.  She is slipping into her scrubs and talking to her husband.  Abby is an RN.  She works taking care of people like Raymond.  During her down time, she has been studying to get her doctorate.  Abby’s husband has a pretty good job.  They don’t want for much, and they would probably be just fine if Abby chose to stay home and focus on trying to raise a family while he worked.  But Abby feels a deep sense of responsibility for the people that she cares for.  It’s a thankless job that no one really wants to do.  But it absolutely needs to be done and she knows it.  So while her husband is firing up the grill and watching football, Abby is probably going to be cleaning up vomit and other nasty stuff.  RN’s all across the country just like her are also preparing for their shifts today, just in case something goes wrong.  Dylan and Kevin are working today at jobs that are consistently listed in the top ten most dangerous professions.  Someone needs to be on standby—just in case.

Later in the day, Dylan may just take a quick lunch break at the restaurant where an attractive young lady named Felicia is working her shift.   She gets the unenviable job of serving drinks and food to holiday patrons all day.  Felicia is a magician when it comes to dealing with horses. She has an unrivaled love of everything equine. She has a couple of her own, but horses are an expensive habit.  She needs to work through the holiday in hopes of landing a few extra tips to keep her animals in feed.  Ideally, she would be working a career training horses and the people who want to ride them.  But fewer people these days can afford the luxury of time and money that it takes to care for such an animal, and horse training jobs are hard to come by.  So Felicia works full time serving drinks and part time with her passion—when she can find the work. She is working tonight because holiday customers will usually tip a little better.

At the Crossties farm and garden store across town, where Felicia buys her feed, Kerry is fixing to close up shop for the day.  Kerry has been struggling the last few years to keep her small business afloat.  She came in with her most loyal employee Velvet today to open the store in case any of her regular customers like Felicia needed anything.  Kerry has been running her store for years.  Lately business has taken a swift hit in the gut.  The down turned economy means that fewer and fewer people can afford to take care of farm animals, especially horses.  She has seen her customer base dwindle off over time.  She wonders how long she can hold on, but she feels a driving need to be there for the people who have loyally shopped at her business for years.  She came in to work today herself so that several of her employees could enjoy the holiday.

While we take time this Monday to celebrate the working men and women who built our great nation, lets not forget that scenarios like this are playing out all around the country all day.  I’ts not hard to look around and see the people working on the working mans holiday.  People who should be celebrating with their own families, but have commitments and responsibilities that take greater precedence.   It wouldn’t hurt to say thanks to Kevin, Leslie, Amanda, Dylan or Abby if you see them. Tip Felicia an extra 5 and find a reason to spend some money at that locally owned business… They earned it.   

Me?  I chose to work the holiday simply because I wanted to.  If I read my cards correctly, I will probably be sitting at the Hooters in Waco Texas about a hundred miles up the road from my trainer Kevin, waiting to make my own delivery of construction materials on Tuesday morning.  I think that maybe I will have a pizza, breadsticks and a 2 liter of soda delivered to our dispatcher Bob in Jacksonville--and have them put Kevins name on the receipt......

Happy Labor day my friends.