Tuesday, December 6th, 2011
Again with the lessons! Having updated this blog's format to look nicer, I decided to include a subtitle, “the zen of trucking.” I'd like to thank Todd for this idea, since he inspired it. then again, I feel as if it gives me a standard to live up to. A standard which I may not always live up to.
Waking up in Ritzville, Washington was nothing particularly spectacular, although waking up in and of itself is a daily miracle. I had just arisen form a series of amazing dreams, one of them lucid, in which I could control my actions. I lost control shortly after remembering to ask a question of the narrator. This set the tone for the morning drive.
Dark and quiet, traffic was non-existent at 0430 on US 395. Just how I like it. Pondering what it is that connects us all as humans, and why we miss each other, when we are all really the same thing. Up and down the hills, in a chaotic undulating motion, driving towards Pasco and a scale to check my truck’s weight. The Flying J down there smelled of stale urine... either that or ammonia, I can scarcely tell the difference. I can't leave soon enough.
Coming out of Pasco and driving into Umatilla, the landscape is normally a shrub steppe, with large rounded hills. Even in the darkness, there are silhouettes to see, and stars to count. This morning yielded neither of those blessings, rather I was blessed with thick banks of fog. visibility was certainly less than a quarter mile for a good stretch of highway. All the while I hoped that nobody was mad enough to stop on the road way. Then it occurred to me.
You become what you think about the most. What is on a good trucker's mind? Safety. Day in and day out, safety gets hammered into your brain. Being of a somewhat convoluted mind, my brain then made the connection to the general conservativeness of truckers. I began to hypothesize. Truckers want safety because they want to keep their income. Income is needed to maintain security. Ergo, truckers are fairly risk averse (in general). However, there is also the pressure to deliver on time, which leads me to question a bit further. Truckers must accept some form of risk, since at any time someone else's stupid driving stunt could cost the trucker's life. Taking this along it's natural course, I reasoned that truckers, for the most part, are very risk averse, yet want to feel as if they are doing something risky. This risk is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the task is repetitive and can be managed with care and skill.
This all seemed so much more profound this morning. Maybe I'm just tired and cannot fathom my previous brilliance. Or it could be that I've forgotten something. Even more likely, perhaps it was not that profound, but only seemed so at the time because it was early and I was still a bit tired. Thus far, since I've reset my 70 hours, I've worked over 35 within the span of 3 days. I'm even being careful with my logs.
Coming back to the zen thing, today I was shown how far from that I can be. Especially towards money. Last week, I was off-loaded in Kingsgate, BC. Every pallet was taken off the truck so the CBP could look for non-existent drugs. All told, it cost the company $290. Well, the company called me today and said that I needed a receipt, which i failed to procure at the scene of the incident. This means that the $290 is coming out of my pocket until I can get proof of the deed. So, like any reasonable human being, I kinda lost it. I didn't get angry so much as simply lost my shit. I freaked out over a paltry $300. This is less than what Donald Trump carries in his pocket (I saw that on Oprah). In the end, it is truly nothing but a simple device by which we exchange energy for goods. The zen master would have quickly realized that by simply getting the receipt, that the money would be restored. I, on the other hand, made a whole shitload of phone calls, and freaked out in general. *faceplam* SO much to learn.
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