dr_lizardo

Went out for one of my typical weekend bike rides today. Ddin't go all that far owing to shortness of day and being a lazy bastard late getting out of the house. Though I had been out earlier having breakfast at IHOP with my old girlfriend Julia.

All over Western Massachusetts there are a lot of old disintegrating factory buildings like this one in Chicopee, Mass. a couple of miles from where I llive. That photograph was taken past dusk, a four second exposure with the camera sitting on my gloves on the seat of my bike which was lying on its side. Rather less than a phemomenal photograph but I liked the improvised technique I used to take it.

Old buildings lke this one fascinate me on certain levels. It would be really cool to be able to go up into the tower to take in the view. Dangerous as all hell to do that, as well as illegal as It looks on the other side of the building like it burned at one time.

It was a different world when that building was built. There was a great deal of thriving industry here in western mass. People worked away their lives in these buildings. I'd like to think that I can feel their presense but I think I only really feel the grandeur of the building itself. I guess there are any number of directions you can go in, when old buildings like this make you think about the passage of time and change.

When I'm doing road time as part of my training at NETTTS, we'll often go through an area in northern CT where there is a large prison complex and the old factory building where Lego corporation used to be before they moved their manufacturing down to Mexico. If I had the power to save america from a mistaken overreliance on the market economy to make such decisions, I would generally close America's borders to the import of manufactured goods. I would push the development of hybrid vehicles as hard as I could. Most people probably don't know that canada has 75% as much petroleum as Saudi Arabia has, in the form of tar sands. I would work out something with the canadians and push as hard as I could to develop the technology to utilise that petroeum resource. The US also has significant resources of Coal and Nuclear fuels. The US could stand on its own two feet, and not bleed its life away on imbalanced trade, if only there were the social and political will and wisdom for it to do so.

Another direction that thoughts about time could take pertains to how right now I'm 36 years old and I'm thinking that I'd probably like to be a truck driver until I'm 50 and then become a photographer or a potter. I suppose that I'm overly attached to the person that I am now. At 36 It's not too wildly abnormal to be on a website where the average user is probably around 23, but what about when I'm 50? In a certain sense it seems like I have an obligation for my tastes to change to those of an older person, as being someone 50 years old on here would be just weird and pathetic. On the other hand there are a couple of people that old that I've run across on the site, and I haven't found them weird and pathetic, so this is maybe just some kind of attention whoring "feel sorry for me because I'm getting old". I really do like younger people though, before they get old and boring, when they are at the peak of their sexual fire and creativity, when they talk about the parites that they went to with their firends, the new places they've visitied. Sometimes I feel like Dorian Grey, frozen in time while other my age are fat bald breeders who have real careers and complain about twentysomething employees of theirs that are unprofessional in ways very much lke me. I once heard that the best thing in life is to die young, but to delay it as long as possible. I guess I shall have to go with my tendency not to give a crap about my fellow man, and just be me, and the rest of the people can handle all of the getting old that's necessary for whatever purposes it serves.


As far as the trucking goes, I didn't get the company I had most wanted to work for, but I did get my second and third choices, Swift and Werner, though at this point I'm not sure which is my second and which is my third choice. A lot of people call Swiift a crappy company but I personally have heard more horror stories about problems with Werner. I'm leaning toward Swift right now, mostly because Werner drivers are under a very high degree of electronic surveillance by their company, and that's not the direction I want to be headed in with my employment and career. Another reason which may or may not be substantive is that Swift runs all Volvo trucks, which have relatively short noses compared to a lot of other trucks out there. The short nose gives you better road visibility and I'm little worried about not being strong enough to lift up the hood on a longnosed truck like a Peterbilt. They have a couple of longnosed Freightliners at school; I shall just have to see if I can oipen the hood on one. I really ought to have tested for my CDL this weekend but the available slots were all filled by the time I got my paperwork in. On the other hand it's going to rain tomorrow and I hate doing backup manoevers with raindrops all over the mirrors. I'm paying for 20 weeks of school so I might as well use it all.

Anything else?

Well, a while ago it occurred to me that since I have a tendency to eat cake and cookies before dinner when I'm really hungry and impatient, that these things should not be called desserts, but rather Presserts.

One reason why I had wanted to work for TMC, the company that passed on my application, probably due to how much my work history sucks, is that their six-week training period is three two week stints with weekend breaks in between. At Swift and Werner you're out for six whole weeks on the road, and I really did not want to have to do that. Well, it's about like setting out on a sailing ship for america in the 1800's. At least I'll be able to get out of the truck and walk around some, where people could not get off of the ships that were in transit across the ocean.

I still might sell my .45 to free up a little cash. I have a .357 magnum that has had too many 38 specials fired in it, which has eroded the forward portion of the chambers, with the result that 357 cases get stuck in it. Not that big of a deal. you're not exactly naked against your ememies with a single action 357, or oversized 38 if you're going to use those in it.

Three Halloweens ago, in 2003, I was in a car wreck when my girlfriend pulled out in front of a tow truck. I got a borken arm and she was pronounced dead the next day. i couldn't say whether she was killed instantly or not. Millions, billions of things could have been just slightly different and we would not have beeen in that exact spot at that exat time for the accident to happen, but they were just so. Halloween itself doesn't remind me too much of the accident, as I didn't see anything of Halloween that year. Warm, sunny, perfect days in October do. I send her mom a letter, this time of year, and in a month and a half I'll send a Christmas card. Not much else really to be done. As time drags by there's not much left to feel about it any more. You don't want to slight the person but sorrow just eventually bruns itself out. and then it's just another day and another day and another day.




My life is still full of her influence, all kinds of fragments of her being are part of me. I guess beyond that it's just extra verbiage, to say much else.