Hello again.
I started another drawing today, thinking to make a habit of illustrating my blog entries with them, but I didn't get too far as I had a touch of that sad depressed feeling I sometimes can't shake and I had various things on my mind. But I'll finish the drawing and do others, and you can always add things to blogs.
Earlier this week I got an email from my most recent ex-gf saying that she's going to be up from Philadelphia next weekend and would I like to see her. I said OK but it kind of got me into something of a depressing state of mind thinking about my relationships and whether I have any future with respect to them.
In the summer of 05, after we had broken up in march, Julia was up from Philly with a friend of hers and her friend's son, and I took the lot of them fishing. That evening Julia and I were hanging out, it turned out to be one of the most romantic evenings of my life, we drove out to an area of farmland and sat on the hood of my car watching a meteor shower. One thing that Julia said to me is that she couldn't figure me out, as in what was eating at me, what obstructed me with just going forward with a normal happy life.
Well, it might not seem related, but what you see in this photograph has a lot to do with why.
This picture is from a recruiting flyer put out by TransAm, a trucking company. It has nothing specifically to do with TransAm, what is has to do with is the fact that all these guys are wearing more or less the same hat, except for the mostly hidden black guy in the back who is bareheaded. There are a lot fewer kinds of people in this world than there are people, and people work very hard to keep it that way. "cultural diversity" is in fact an inherently contradictory phrase, as people are only identifiable as a distinct culture to the extent that there is a some degree of uniformity in their dress, beliefs, behavior, or most usually a great complex mass of these things. If the photograph above were of the Puerto Ricans who work up at Yankee Candle through the temp agency Aerotek, as I do, you would see them wearing rather larger hats that come down over their ears, and have brims with little or no curvature, and most having the NY logo for the New York Yankees; for reasons unknown to me the Puerto Ricans have no love for the Red Sox. Not meaning to take any particular shot at the Puerto Ricans beyond the fact that they visibly work just as hard to be a non-diverse group as the North-European descended truck drivers in the photograph above.
And that's what's important. Culture and the drive to conform is overwhelmingly important to people, and to me, because culture gives people a framework within which evaluate their lives and decide on what courses of action to take with respect to their careers and breeding prospects. A while ago during the classroom portion of my CDL training there was a brief random discussion about Mongoloidism, aka Down's Syndrome, and some guy made memtion of having seen or heard of a Mongoloid Japanese person, or something like that, and I said "you could even have a mongoloid mongol" and then I remembered and started to talk about a TV show I saw on the discovery or History channel that was about some Caucasion tribes that had wandered across Asia thousands of years ago and interbred with the locals. People had found remains of apparent women warriors of these tribes, and had decided to see if any of their DNA might still be kicking around in Mongolia, so they went looking for it. And indeed they found a blond Mongol girl out with a nomadic band in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, but before I could get too much of that out, I was interrupted with " well, I've never seen one" and that was that. Noone wanted to hear about the Caucasian DNA still surfacing in mongolia. Two observations you could make from this are 1. These guys, and me for that matter, are not too scrupulously politically correct, and 2, that these are very, very basic men. They're interested in fast cars, pussy and getting jobs. There's NOTHING else to say about them, at all. And truthfully I don't give a rat's ass about a single one of them either. Fortunately trucking is one career where you really don't need to give a damn about anyone else, since you're working by yourself. During the half hour midmorning break they all stand around talking and spitting and complaining about how expensive the food from the lunch truck is, and I go wandering off to the other side of the field by the old truck graveyard and contemplate the sky and clouds and my thoughts go where they will.
Perhaps Im getting sidetracked. I think what women want is a guy who has some idea of where he belongs in the world and some kind of plan for taking his place, if he hasn't already. That makes it possible to evaluate him as a partner for the human reproductive cycle. Women from blue collar backgrounds know to relate to and evaluate men in those fields; women whose fathers are engineers or college professors know to evaualte and relate to bespectacled overeducated dorks. Problem with me, in part is that I am a bespectacled overeducated dork from a family of factory workers and truck drivers. Much as cultural diversity is touted as some sort of desirable social goal, if you have a random mix of sensibilities from different cultural groups that have no love for one another it's real hard to belong somewhere, and be someone that other people can relate to and feel a sense of belonging with. My brother is a more basic sort of person and he's got him a redneck girl who likes motorcyles, guns and NASCAR.
Why do rednecks do it doggie style? So they can both watch NASCAR.
I like bikes and guns, but not nascar. My overeducated girlfriends have at best tolerated my guns. There might be a redneck girl out there for me who likes bikes and guns, and also likes modern art and buddhism, Jazz, blues and photography, but my pyschic powers aren't crackling with anticipation that I'm going to find such a person.
When I was in college the ADD fucked me up massively as an engineer; I sure look like one and I get test scores like one, but I can't do much of the hard grinding study of physics and chemistry textbooks cuz I can't lock my mind down on things that aren't interesting. I did rather better as a classics major, but I hate people and I hate work, and that's not a good combination for going into teaching. So I could never figure out where I belonged in the world. I have never been able to meet anyone's expectations of me, in school or jobs or anything.
Driving the big rigs, I'll be making decent money, but I won't have much time for relationships, and I get depressed thinking about meeting up with Julia and not having anything hopeful to say about my future connectedness to some other human being. It's not really hopeless, it's just that I want to go over the road and see the country for a while, but If I met someone, I could move pretty much anywhere and be a local driver and have some time at home for a relationship.
Kind of vexed about my bank account. When I deposited my paycheck last week I found that the $750 that I had paid for that disastrous Cutlass Ciera had not been taken out of my account after three weeks. I thought maybe the seller had had an attack of conscience of something. But when I deposited my check today the money was gone. Kind of a letdown because I need to pay NETTTS $1200 which is the outstanding balance on my tuition, and I absolutely, positively am dumb enough to have written a check based on the assumption that the check I had written for that car would never be deposited. And risk being prosecuted for fraud. At least that moral quandary has been solved for me. I guess I'll have to sell some things on ebay. I could sell my bike and it would be just that one thing, or maybe some cameras and a couple of guns, the latter not on ebay of course. I have a nice SIG .45 auto that I could probably get about $300 or so for, but I was so looking forward to blowing someone away with it when they tried to hijack my truck. I'll just have to get another one later on. There are loans available that I could get to cover the outstanding balance on my tuition, but I would have to ask someone to cosign on the loan, and I'd probably prefer to cut off an ear rather than ask someone to do that for me. Maybe I will. But so far this trucking thing is something I've done entirely by myself, which is a strange thing to think.
I guess that's it for now. I hope that was at least readably coherent. I love how coherent my thoughts are when I can get m ore than four or five hours of sleep.
Suday edition:
Yesterday after I got up from my table I wandered into a large discount shoe outlet that I kind of like. Shoes are like watches, and endless opportunity for new design and I think a lot of them are pretty cool. I have maybe a dozed pairs of shoes/boots sneakers, a few more thean the average guy has, I would imagine. Women wonder why I have so many guns, and I counter by asking them how many pairs of shoes they have. They seem to average around 50 or so. Imelda marcos was really not at all that unusual considering her spending power. Anyway, I've ended up accumulating, (not "collecting" which is highly systematic and deliberately done) a couple of dozen guns because at various times I thought it would be cool to own and use one gun or another. I think what I was doing was trying to add dimensions to my personality, or rather getting tools to manifest dimensions of my personality, or dimensions that I would have liked to think I had. And I think that's what shoes are to women; semipractical tools for manifesting the dimemsions of personality they have or they'd like to think they had.
Similarly, I think electric guitars and basketballs are very nearly the same thing to white and black teenagers, the fantasy ticket to a glamourous career fraught with money and chicks, as B & B would say.
I started another drawing today, thinking to make a habit of illustrating my blog entries with them, but I didn't get too far as I had a touch of that sad depressed feeling I sometimes can't shake and I had various things on my mind. But I'll finish the drawing and do others, and you can always add things to blogs.
Earlier this week I got an email from my most recent ex-gf saying that she's going to be up from Philadelphia next weekend and would I like to see her. I said OK but it kind of got me into something of a depressing state of mind thinking about my relationships and whether I have any future with respect to them.
In the summer of 05, after we had broken up in march, Julia was up from Philly with a friend of hers and her friend's son, and I took the lot of them fishing. That evening Julia and I were hanging out, it turned out to be one of the most romantic evenings of my life, we drove out to an area of farmland and sat on the hood of my car watching a meteor shower. One thing that Julia said to me is that she couldn't figure me out, as in what was eating at me, what obstructed me with just going forward with a normal happy life.
Well, it might not seem related, but what you see in this photograph has a lot to do with why.
This picture is from a recruiting flyer put out by TransAm, a trucking company. It has nothing specifically to do with TransAm, what is has to do with is the fact that all these guys are wearing more or less the same hat, except for the mostly hidden black guy in the back who is bareheaded. There are a lot fewer kinds of people in this world than there are people, and people work very hard to keep it that way. "cultural diversity" is in fact an inherently contradictory phrase, as people are only identifiable as a distinct culture to the extent that there is a some degree of uniformity in their dress, beliefs, behavior, or most usually a great complex mass of these things. If the photograph above were of the Puerto Ricans who work up at Yankee Candle through the temp agency Aerotek, as I do, you would see them wearing rather larger hats that come down over their ears, and have brims with little or no curvature, and most having the NY logo for the New York Yankees; for reasons unknown to me the Puerto Ricans have no love for the Red Sox. Not meaning to take any particular shot at the Puerto Ricans beyond the fact that they visibly work just as hard to be a non-diverse group as the North-European descended truck drivers in the photograph above.
And that's what's important. Culture and the drive to conform is overwhelmingly important to people, and to me, because culture gives people a framework within which evaluate their lives and decide on what courses of action to take with respect to their careers and breeding prospects. A while ago during the classroom portion of my CDL training there was a brief random discussion about Mongoloidism, aka Down's Syndrome, and some guy made memtion of having seen or heard of a Mongoloid Japanese person, or something like that, and I said "you could even have a mongoloid mongol" and then I remembered and started to talk about a TV show I saw on the discovery or History channel that was about some Caucasion tribes that had wandered across Asia thousands of years ago and interbred with the locals. People had found remains of apparent women warriors of these tribes, and had decided to see if any of their DNA might still be kicking around in Mongolia, so they went looking for it. And indeed they found a blond Mongol girl out with a nomadic band in the middle of the Mongolian steppe, but before I could get too much of that out, I was interrupted with " well, I've never seen one" and that was that. Noone wanted to hear about the Caucasian DNA still surfacing in mongolia. Two observations you could make from this are 1. These guys, and me for that matter, are not too scrupulously politically correct, and 2, that these are very, very basic men. They're interested in fast cars, pussy and getting jobs. There's NOTHING else to say about them, at all. And truthfully I don't give a rat's ass about a single one of them either. Fortunately trucking is one career where you really don't need to give a damn about anyone else, since you're working by yourself. During the half hour midmorning break they all stand around talking and spitting and complaining about how expensive the food from the lunch truck is, and I go wandering off to the other side of the field by the old truck graveyard and contemplate the sky and clouds and my thoughts go where they will.
Perhaps Im getting sidetracked. I think what women want is a guy who has some idea of where he belongs in the world and some kind of plan for taking his place, if he hasn't already. That makes it possible to evaluate him as a partner for the human reproductive cycle. Women from blue collar backgrounds know to relate to and evaluate men in those fields; women whose fathers are engineers or college professors know to evaualte and relate to bespectacled overeducated dorks. Problem with me, in part is that I am a bespectacled overeducated dork from a family of factory workers and truck drivers. Much as cultural diversity is touted as some sort of desirable social goal, if you have a random mix of sensibilities from different cultural groups that have no love for one another it's real hard to belong somewhere, and be someone that other people can relate to and feel a sense of belonging with. My brother is a more basic sort of person and he's got him a redneck girl who likes motorcyles, guns and NASCAR.
Why do rednecks do it doggie style? So they can both watch NASCAR.
I like bikes and guns, but not nascar. My overeducated girlfriends have at best tolerated my guns. There might be a redneck girl out there for me who likes bikes and guns, and also likes modern art and buddhism, Jazz, blues and photography, but my pyschic powers aren't crackling with anticipation that I'm going to find such a person.
When I was in college the ADD fucked me up massively as an engineer; I sure look like one and I get test scores like one, but I can't do much of the hard grinding study of physics and chemistry textbooks cuz I can't lock my mind down on things that aren't interesting. I did rather better as a classics major, but I hate people and I hate work, and that's not a good combination for going into teaching. So I could never figure out where I belonged in the world. I have never been able to meet anyone's expectations of me, in school or jobs or anything.
Driving the big rigs, I'll be making decent money, but I won't have much time for relationships, and I get depressed thinking about meeting up with Julia and not having anything hopeful to say about my future connectedness to some other human being. It's not really hopeless, it's just that I want to go over the road and see the country for a while, but If I met someone, I could move pretty much anywhere and be a local driver and have some time at home for a relationship.
Kind of vexed about my bank account. When I deposited my paycheck last week I found that the $750 that I had paid for that disastrous Cutlass Ciera had not been taken out of my account after three weeks. I thought maybe the seller had had an attack of conscience of something. But when I deposited my check today the money was gone. Kind of a letdown because I need to pay NETTTS $1200 which is the outstanding balance on my tuition, and I absolutely, positively am dumb enough to have written a check based on the assumption that the check I had written for that car would never be deposited. And risk being prosecuted for fraud. At least that moral quandary has been solved for me. I guess I'll have to sell some things on ebay. I could sell my bike and it would be just that one thing, or maybe some cameras and a couple of guns, the latter not on ebay of course. I have a nice SIG .45 auto that I could probably get about $300 or so for, but I was so looking forward to blowing someone away with it when they tried to hijack my truck. I'll just have to get another one later on. There are loans available that I could get to cover the outstanding balance on my tuition, but I would have to ask someone to cosign on the loan, and I'd probably prefer to cut off an ear rather than ask someone to do that for me. Maybe I will. But so far this trucking thing is something I've done entirely by myself, which is a strange thing to think.
I guess that's it for now. I hope that was at least readably coherent. I love how coherent my thoughts are when I can get m ore than four or five hours of sleep.
Suday edition:
Yesterday after I got up from my table I wandered into a large discount shoe outlet that I kind of like. Shoes are like watches, and endless opportunity for new design and I think a lot of them are pretty cool. I have maybe a dozed pairs of shoes/boots sneakers, a few more thean the average guy has, I would imagine. Women wonder why I have so many guns, and I counter by asking them how many pairs of shoes they have. They seem to average around 50 or so. Imelda marcos was really not at all that unusual considering her spending power. Anyway, I've ended up accumulating, (not "collecting" which is highly systematic and deliberately done) a couple of dozen guns because at various times I thought it would be cool to own and use one gun or another. I think what I was doing was trying to add dimensions to my personality, or rather getting tools to manifest dimensions of my personality, or dimensions that I would have liked to think I had. And I think that's what shoes are to women; semipractical tools for manifesting the dimemsions of personality they have or they'd like to think they had.
Similarly, I think electric guitars and basketballs are very nearly the same thing to white and black teenagers, the fantasy ticket to a glamourous career fraught with money and chicks, as B & B would say.
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Oh no, my snake fits my mothering needs quite well. The temperature and humidity in his cage need to be carefully regulated, since he's coldblooded, and I spend some nice time fussing over that each day. He also likes to cuddle, he just cuddles by gripping my arm.