Ramblings

It’s been awhile since I have written anything worth posting so I thought I would write something whether it was post-worthy or not. (I have been on the road a lot in the past few weeks and those endless empty miles just seem to numb my brain.) I have a lot of good intentions but most of them seem to blow out the window along with my cigarette smoke. So, this is a post written just for the sake of getting words down and a post up and as a feeble attempt to try to keep some semblance of life in this blog.

Blog. That’s a silly word. I don’t like it. I don’t consider myself a “blogger.” I began using a blog platform because it was so much easier than coding and updating my site in HTML and JavaScript. I use WordPress and I like it and it serves my needs well. Actually, one might ask why I even need a site at all, blog-driven or otherwise, and one (meaning me) might answer, “Well, I don’t need one but I like having one and I can have one so I do.”

I like fooling around with computers and learning programming languages and designing databases and hard-coding web pages and stuff like that. Why, I don’t know. I never liked or was good at math (not that that matters, I guess, but it seems as if most computer geeks are math whizzes) and I don’t consider myself the geeky type. My wife says that that tendency (liking computers) is true to my sign. I’m an Aquarius. I don’t know what that means.

This is a blog, then, but I’m not a blogger. I think true bloggers get off on interacting with their community of like-minded bloggers. You know, setting up feeds and link trading and commenting and all that stuff. I don’t interact very well, even with myself.

So, where does that leave me? Why, right here where I am, of course. And I’m going to write something that will take the blogging world by storm; it will be so viral that it will be more contagious than the bird flu; it will spread so fast and furiously that it will melt T1 lines and crash servers. Not only all that but it will be clever and witty and thought-provoking and…

Oh, hell, that was the phone. Got to hit the road again. Guess we’ll have to wait ’til next time.

‘Bye.

I drive a truck for a living: a big truck - the kind with 18 wheels. James Taylor once wrote in a song, “Mr. 9 to 5 in your Coup De Ville will never know how it feels to really roll roll roll.” I roll. I have been reluctant to reveal that information (that I’m a trucker) on this blog for some reason. Maybe I thought that whatever readers there were who might stumble across this site might think less of me for it. Pretty insecure, huh? That’s not all I’ve ever done for a living in my life and times, though. I’ve been a carpenter, a salesman, a manager, a teacher, a sailor, a cab driver and some other things I won’t mention. I have a bachelor’s degree in Music and an MA in teaching (English). Some of my favorite things are reading, writing, classical guitar, chess and fly fishing. But truck driving seems to stick. I keep coming back to it. What’s the point of all this? I don’t know. Maybe if I keep writing I’ll come up with something.

Back in 1982 when I went on the road for the first time, it was fun and exciting. Everyday was something new - new places and new things. I remember the first time I came over the mountains at night and saw Las Vegas below, lighting up the desert or rolled down I-10 into LA. I still love to drive through the desert at night. I remember drinking with an old Indian in Whitefish Montana and driving down Park Avenue in NYC.

Maine to Miami, San Diego to Seattle and everything in between. I’ve ridden down the old Route 66 from east to west and come down Cabbage Pass with no brakes. It’s a lonely life and a hard one and it’s starting to tell on me. Caffeine and nicotine keep me going now. Used to be reefer and amphetamines. Bad food and long lonely nights. Most of the good old truck stops and diners are gone now, too. Everything now is slick and sterile. No character.

I’m getting tired of the road. Mainly I hate public restrooms, fast food and being away from home. And the traffic is terrible. Everybody going nowhere real fast. I just take it slow and easy and kind of let the rest of the world go by. I don’t get in a hurry. No need to.

The fine moments of surprise and excitement are few and far between now. But sometimes I open my eyes and see white fluffy clouds in a sharp blue sky or snow-capped mountains in mid-summer or an old country lane going nowhere or a storm building out over the Gulf and I think, “It could be worse. I could have a real job.”

It’s honest work. We’re paid by the mile and we earn every dollar we make and it seems lately that we are mostly disrespected and misunderstood. We are probably among the most well informed people in America. Heck, we listen to the radio 24 hours a day, including NPR and Coast to Coast. If you have any doubt that we know a lot of stuff, just ask any one of us. We’ll tell you all about it.

I’m looking for a way out of it (the truck) now. I ride along and dream of having a little office in town and giving guitar lessons and doing computer work - maybe playing a gig now and then. I’m good at English. Maybe I could open an English shop. I could sell footnotes, undangle dangling participles and re-place misplaced modifiers. I live on (what could be) a small farm. I’d like to raise goats and chickens and grow organic vegetables.

But I’m too young to retire and too broke and scared to quit. There are bills to be paid. And the road is still out there, like a siren, singing its bittersweet song. And maybe, just maybe, there’ll be something new around the next bend.

I was thinking about grits the other day. I thought about eating grits at my grandmother’s house when we were all there. I remember my uncle Bill teasing my wife because her’s (her grits) were too thin. He said you could eat them through a straw. She makes them just right now: thick and with just enough salt. He put sugar on his. I loved Bill, but sugar on grits, in my mind, is just not right.

I was thinking that it would be neat to open a place and sell nothing but grits. I would call it, uh, Grits. I would have a grits buffet - grits and all the toppings. Butter (for the stout-hearted) and margarine (for the dainties) and cheese and bacon and country ham and red-eye gravy and salmon patties and grilled shrimp and sardines and buttered toasted biscuits with jelly and cane syrup to go along with it all.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but down in Louisiana the other day what should I read about but grits buffets. The article was in the lifestyles section of the paper and it seems that grits buffets are all the rage now for parties and entertaining among those in the know in Baton Rouge. See, I’m not out of touch.

Grits. It will take the country, heck, the world by storm. I will become rich and famous - an entrepreneurial guru. People will come to me for wisdom and advice and - grits. And I will not forget my humble beginnings nor the advice of my uncle Bill: make them thick enough to stand a spoon up in.

I once came upon a man as I was walking down an old forgotten road. He was walking, too.

He said, “Come with me and I will take you places you have never been.”

I said, “I have been a lot of places and I am tired of traveling.”

“Come, then, and I will show you things you have never seen.”

“I have seen so many things until I am almost tired of seeing.”

He said, “Well, what, then?”

I said, “Tell me something I have never heard. Something real and true.”

He said, “We must stop for that. Here, under this tree.”

We sat and then he said, “Son, it has been many years and many miles that has brought us to this particular place and time.”

I said, “Well, that’s true enough. Is that all?”

“Yes”

I was ready to go. I asked, “What’s down the end of this road?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Is that where you’re going?”

“You mean nowhere?”

“No. I mean to the end of the road.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll go with you that far, anyway.”

(Transcribed from notes recorded on March 18.)

I carry notebooks with me all the time. I have a small pocket-size Moleskine, a large Moleskine, a Notabilia and a large ledger. This is probably more notebooks than I should carry about, mainly because I’m always undecided over what to put in what notebook. I sometimes just sit and stare blankly at an empty page or copy stuff from one notebook to another and I generally spend more time just messing with the books than I do writing in them.

Now I’m starting to really be concerned about what I write. Times past, I would just jot down anything that popped into my head. Now I imagine people actually reading my notes (particularly my wife and kids) in the event of my death - an event I am becoming increasingly expectant of. I imagine my audience, then, as a body of curious mourners looking through my pitiful notes after my untimely death. I want them to find something promising and uplifting and that will reveal my inner-self to them in the best possible light. A tough chore. I probably should just stop writing stuff down altogether.

To make matters worse, I now have a blog. Stuff I put there is immediately accessible not only to them (my family) but to the whole online world. “We must consider our audience,” the experts say, but sometimes I feel safer and more comfortable imagining my only audience is me. “Why, then, write at all?” one might ask and I will have to ponder that for awhile and get back later on that.

Later -

I suppose the main reason I write is because I want to be a writer. Someone (Stephen King, I think) said, “A writer writes.” That makes perfect sense and is probably good enough reason, but the truth is that I want to connect with someone. I want someone to read something that I have written and say, “Yeah!” Another reason I write is it helps me “get stuff out.” Stuff such as now, March 18, 2008, as I sit here, the only customer in this Chinese restaurant at mid-afternoon on a cold, rainy day in Canton, OH and listen to the bubbling of an aquarium, the soft oriental music, the banter from the kitchen and feel my loneliness. Now, at my age, I realize there is nothing romantic about loneliness. No song or excellent journal entry or movie or book can ever make it desirable to me again. I have had my fill of it.

Sometimes loneliness can lead to despair- sometimes other things can lead there. Things such as finding out yesterday that my sister’s husband, Billy, had died after a long battle with cancer and the knowing that I have been more or less estranged from her and him and my brother and most of all my family for several years now for reasons too painful for me to write about now or probably forever and the fact that I am far from home and will probably not make it there for the funeral and that I would probably not go if I were home. And sometimes loneliness and despair can lead to depression and keep me there in its dark gloomy embrace until I break free, back to the light. And sometimes writing helps; helps get me back.

I write because I am a writer: because writing affirms that. “A writer writes.” It’s just that simple. And perhaps because my thoughts, sometimes feverishly, most times clumsily, scribbled down on paper, in whatever notebook I choose, may be all that I leave behind.

I think I will plant daffodils on my daughter’s grave. Have you ever seen them when they appear suddenly in the early Spring in a disused pasture, or along an old fence line, or on the side of a forgotten road? I like them best that way: in the wild, an unexpected treasure. I will plant a cluster of them at her head and at her feet and a few scattered randomly about as if dropped from heaven.

When I found out that Erin had been fatally injured in an automobile accident, her body only being kept alive by some machine so that her organs could be preserved for transplant, I was hundreds of miles away. There was nothing I could do but weep and pray. A man offered me a drink of whiskey but I refused. I wanted my grief to be pure and not dulled. I knew I had to get to the very bottom of it before I could ever begin to crawl back up again. That was almost 20 years ago. I am still crawling.

Yesterday, Valentines Day, I sent my wife three roses and asked her to place them on Erin’s grave and I thought about her and wept. I was, again, miles from home. The tears I cried were not bitter tears but were sweet tears of sorrow. God gave us tears so that we can cry out our sorrow from time to time lest it fill us up. We have to let out some of the sorrow to make room for something else. Maybe joy.

Erin was a sweet, gentle, loving soul. She was perhaps too delicate for this world. God took her, some say. I only know that she was here and is now gone and her passing left a hole in my heart. But I will not let that hole be always filled with sorrow. When it gets too full I will cry it out to make room for something else.

I will plant daffodils on my daughter’s grave and water them with my tears.