the toughest job that i'll ever... love?

gallows humour, that's how it begins in any driver's room... because you know that despite the insurmountable sleep deficit, attention to detail still has to prevail when you're on the road, but you know that you've worked pretty well into the farthest regions of that magical (to drivers...) figure of 70 hrs that are allowable by federal law in a period of 8 days. i get some time off due to that magical little number and when they realised that, they sent me on a bus that continued onto oneonta, while i stepped off back home, or close to it as kingston is...
but i love it, i think... new york city to hoboken and getting mileage under my proverbial feet while i cross that infinitesimal line between new york and new jersey that is linked within the confines of the echoes of the lincoln tunnel. how many times have i driven through it in the last four days? to drive in new york, you become a new york driver, i've found out, cut them off at the pass and get into that lane... otherwise you'll be sitting at the light until tomorrow night.
yesterday after the tunnel, i was making a right onto 40th, within sight of the port authority, just about to get ready with the announcement, get off the bus and take everything with you because god only knows (or smurf, as the port dispatcher likes to be called...), smurf only knows where this bus will be in an hour... when pop!, there goes the power steering and with it the wheel swings back in the direction of the wrong way into a one way street and set there firmly with 40,000 pounds of bus holding it right where it was, at a dead, dead stop, blocking the piling up of morning commuter buses pulling around from the dark of the lincoln only to find my bus halfway between the off ramp and 40th west with a puddle of red atf fluid beneath her... it took myself and the port authority tow truck driver ten minutes to wrestle that wheel around and dump the poor ole prevost h345 by the side of 40th street. a casuality of the tight turning corners of nyc, like many a poor soul who has come there and had the streets swallow them whole and leave them by the side of times square to bleed, so too was my bus. poor snorting beast that i rode in on but later drove another of its same pedigree to fleischmans.
what day is it? thursday i think though i hardly know where i am, oh yes, the cats, must be at home. if you can hear the trees and its not oneonta, then it can't possibly be even central park...

breaking in broken in

the term 'break-in' is being used to descibe the experience that i am going through and it's an interesting one. i ride and drive with regular drivers and with a regular frequency i am riding with drivers who have been driving for more and more years. whether this is a coincidence or a merely interesting vagary of chance, i do not know, but there is no parallel between the drivers' years of experience and the attitude and advice that i recieve from them. first there is ed, my trainer who has 11 years in, then there was gordie, a harvey keitel look a like. imagine driving with the bad lieutenant or mr. white and you can imagine gordie, fatherly, complaining in a good humoured, but burnt out sort of way and ready to throw anyone off the bus... then there was john, a middle aged black man who drove through freeport with the dash and verve of an f1 driver, the attitude of anyc cabbie for cutting people off, laying on the air horn and burning rubber @ 45mph in a residential street. he has been driving for 16 years. finally, yesterday i rode with tony, a danny aeillo look a like (though he claimed to not know anything of the resemblance...), who also like gordie was patient, but ready to pull his hair out when i suggested that we pull into the dirt drive in rosendale because thats the way that i was trained. those guys know nothing, tony meant of the many trainers and managers that he had long surpassed in driving experience, about common sense, as i unintentionally drove 15 feet beyond where he thought that i should pull off on a city street. tony has been with the company for 26 years and god knows how many years the other two drivers that we shared breakfast with in a little diner opposite the port authority, all the while joking and ribbing one another about wives and women and once again, management. i am definitely getting a good break in, but how far i will break and let this job get under my skin in a good or adverse way... well, lets see how many years i get into this before i break-in someone and who in the hell will i resemble by then?

my big fat cdl

so i got my cdl officially yesterday. it was a day without a whole bunch of fanfare or whoopdedoo... simply went to the roadtest site, skipped most of the formalities, the inspector was a friendly guy with an empty stomach who was racing through most of the official checking whether the hubs were leaking grease all over the brakes sort of thing and whether if we, for example, flip the bus, will the emergency windows open to save us from the rapidly spreading gas flames that were caused by the fact that we have an old oily rag stuck in the gas filler because we lost the gas cap? but hey, when you're giving a man a commercial driving license and you want to go get dumplings at the best chinese takeout place in town, why bother? anyways, i think that i did fine, no real lines crossed over anymore than they normallly are and no curbs scuffed... (ok, ok, except a little bit of one...). time to start driving on a big boys license with no fear nor guilt nor fear of failing a simple driving test.

a day meant for driving

thus begins my week of 'break-in.' i don't want to think of the metaphorical implications of the term 'break.' i am a bit nervous, this is the first time that i will have to deal with passengers on the bus, will they be loud, will they be obnoxious, talkative? can they smell fear? fear is too strong a term for what i am feeling right now. it is more an apprehension that you can feel jumping into a body of water where you cannot see the bottom. i may hate this, i may be indifferent, i may love this after all and not want to come home to wife and hearth, but i doubt that my affliction with it will be that strong. it's a shortened route, but still one that will not see me get home until 5hrs later... i think that that is also another part of my jumpiness. i want to be at home, kittens curled around my feet and beer in hand talking about the day to m and say to myself, see is wasn't that bad after all, nothing to fear. i've done scarier things than this in the past, buried my dad six months ago, learned to drive the bus cold with the peer pressure that only you can feel is there (but in reality, wasn't...), making love for the first time is a scarier thing, i've walked away from women and had them walk from me, left home, lived alone and by myself with barely enough money for food, but ramen noodles before, walked the empty woods at night and the lonely shores of a november in plattsburgh with only the dinging and ringing of the lines against the masts coming from the marina of drydocked ships without a friend for 250 miles. i've done lots scarier than drive a bus 25 miles with people aboard and regular driver with me, but this is the first time that i've done that, oh well, once more, unto the breech and break-in.

stranger than the fiction

wore and am still wearing some of my old man's clothes... namely a striped polo that he apparently loved as i've seen photo after photo with him wearing this selfsame shirt. why? it still smells like him and it reminds me of the man that once, barrel-chested filled out this shirt with magnificent gasps of air and strode around confidently in his giant shoes that i feel indebted to fill. why? why not... it is the same footfalls of our forbears that we need to walk in again, but not land exactly in his same imprints. this shirt reminds me of the man, the same occasional stains that dot this shirt were caused by the oil that he changed, the sandwich that he ate, the beer and coffee that he spilled and it landed on this shirt and he continued to wear it and them as medals bedecking his broad chest and it remained there, never ashamed, never turned away and i try to honour his one-time presence in this shirt by wearing it still, self-assured that he wore this shirt once too and now i am doing the same. happy father's day, papa.

changing a flat something or the other

so, i blew a tire out on the long island expressway yesterday... why does that seem so apropos a metaphor today? first of all, i didn't blow the tire, so to speak, the piece of road debris did, i just happened to be driving and when out from under a semi passing me skips a huge fucking... something. something that looked black and merrily dancing its way in front of me in a scant 1.34 seconds, black and skipping as it bounced from under the semi with wires attached to it and about maybe two feet long, i swerve a bit, but not enough to actually swerve into the longisland drivers passing me @ 65 on either side in a 45 mph construction zone heading west to... the hamptons? well, my life didn't flash before my eyes, but the piece of shit kicked up by the truck did, under my front axle, where a blowout would have been a careening course to danger and death, but under the bus to the inner tire of the rear axle and not the one that could have been simply changed or lifted out of the way and we all feel a whoomp! and the back of the bus hops up in the air a little bit like a horse that's been swatted on the rear end, startled and it doesn't act differently... and then a few miles more, its obvious that we have a flat that takes us to a repair place, limpingly and we delay the huntington and islip trip for two hours and finally crawl back dead dog ass tired at 10pm, after having begun at 6.30am... for the last three days... sheesh, why do i feel that this is apt? is it always darkest before the storm or before the dawn? just miss a little death, destruction and final rest for more of a what? 40, 50 years of weariness, fatigue and getting up early again the next morning to enjoy the struggle all over again? yeah, as my dad liked to say, what does it all mean? who knows? but yes, yes, yes, its all worth it.

its bloomsday, its happy bloomsday

dancing through mid town manhattan in nyc with the bus today and lo and behold, i could not get to any bloomsday celebration even though i was offered the very real temptation of slipping away and never coming back from the port authority (had 50 dollars in my pocket, the per diem...) and had the opprtunity of whilst on my sightseeing, people watching trips while on lunch of never coming back to the bus and just slipping off intyo a leopold bloomesque revery amongsth the towering fire eyed giants into the bomping and beeping midtown of autumn dreams and summer hopes to walk in the streets and watch and dream and sleep and buy a bar of soap, while everyone else was navigating 41st street and lincoln tunnel and hoboken, new jersey, to go imagine the traipse of bloom in the new world and seek out the time when i am not seeking for anything, but to wonder about reincarnation and the path of my progeny and forebears into the clouds and skies and watching for the drooping pigeon shit and singing and dancing bums and the traffic and lapse into the dreams that joyce had while composing a song to the greatest wanderer, ulysses and of his own father and mine, who took to these pages as though they could (and maybe can...) foretell future and past, human footstep and gum underfoot. mr. joyce, thank you for letting us all and fathers that forever be, the chance to dream.

coming down a mountain

drove down palenville mountain, which is as it sounds as easy as falling off a mountain, though thankfully not one of us did. hopping an insubstantial 'guide' (not 'guard'...) rail and plunging down a gorge in a 44,000 lb bus is not something that anyone wishes to do and still live to tell the tale about, asides from various new jersey drivers who had death wishes apparently... no, driving down is hard, but coming up, by comparison is simple and full of the false bravado that you get when you first go up, think, not so bad and then coming down realising the snorting behemoth underneath you, like riding a clydesdale who thinks nothing of taking a hurdle or two at speed with you clinging to its mane. its power underneath your feet and your only control is the engine brake, the jake brake as you want to stay off the real brake as much as possible and downshift to live the ride of your life as you are twisting some 45 foot section of steel and aluminum glass and plastic like a caterpillar down a road that it doesn't want to twist upon. but like i say, like a veritable amusement park ride everyday.
my dad would have liked to know that we have driven so much in oneonta that he would be proud to know that my driving faculties in and among the town of oneonta from whence he began teacher's college at yon suny and then dropped out when they told him that he would have had to cut his new long locks of dylanesque mayhem. fuck you, he said and then 40 years later, his kid cuts off his goatee to get the job with the bus co. while all along thinking of how much he'd always have that fuck you in the back of his head while tooling through the suny oneonta campus in a 45 foot bus, because his kid is as much the rebel in training that his old man was. a cultured barbarian as my dad was.
slip the surly bonds of earth young men while you have the chance. my advice to my kids will be something like it as i am still learning that cultured lesson in atypical fashion, learning to drive a snorting steed at 33 years of age. age, but with a bit of wisdom thrown in thanks to my dad, enough to at least not let the fuck you part slip from my lips, but be in the back of my head as i am driving. do everything that you think is possible or not possible and see what happens to your youth. it may grow old, it may lose its wrinkles, but it will never not change the debauched gentleman inside.

morning white light on a paper bag

morning white light and the day has just begun. all things are washed away to a clear indistinct wash of colour that has not yet become strong enough to define itself as a colour. watching 'girl with a pearl earring' with m. going to drive as a test tomorrow down palenville mountain in the catskills and not crash the bus nor watch the scene afraid and alone, but as a driver who is control. my mantra? don't hurl yourself off the side of the cliff, nor into the side of the cliff rising like a giant beside you. my mantra. i shall not fear, tho i drive through the valley of the catskills and into the port authority terminal, tho i should drive into the suburbs of the lost land of long island, i shall not fear for i have the jake brake in hand.
gwape... hmmm... not a real word, but is it? the acronym to the above movie that we are watching.... gwaping at, i suppose. m just told me that vermeer is played by the character actor, colin firth, but i believe it to be gary sinise. long ago, whenever a certain friend and i could not ascertain or remember the name of a certain male actor in a movie, we claimed it to be gary sinise, as gary sinise seemed to have a role in nearly any movie that you can think of, the everyday mensch. this could be gary sinise with long hair. gotta be gary sinise.
another favourite common misnomer that i enjoy spouting about besides gary sinise omnipresence, is the fact that ralph (pronounced ralph, like its spelled, not the namby pamby, fake falutin' 'rayf') fiennes and liam neeson are in fact, one and the same person. one actor, two stage names, c'mon, have you ever seen the two in one movie together?
the white light collects on this certain paper bag and becomes a bit more distinct, showing its edges and that it is already white.

the morning has arriven

arriven and passed me by like a train that's running mussolini-esquely on time. its morning and i'm sitting with coffee at least an hour past the time when i had expected to roll from bed. m and i are going to the aspca to get a kitten/ cat today. responsibilities, ah, yes. we've thought of names, if he/she is an all black cat, we'd like to name them poe, after edgar allan, and if she's a white kitten, then willard. but if they are somewhere in between then i guess that we have to find the name belonging to the personality. thoughts now of willard, my dads cat, who thought he was a dog, took walks with you, was as social as a dog and ate dog food every morninf with the rest of the dogs. and then i think once again of how funny death is a s a cyclical thing that walks hand in hand with life and of how there was so much death that preceded my father's own. his two long time neighbors, 1 year and six months beforehand, his dogs, the very loyal, zachary, hit by a car, dying in my fathers arms and then dillon, heart attack at my dads staircase a month or later... and then willard simply disappeared in the mists, hopefully to hunt mice forever in a happy hunting ground where i know that all the animals are with my dad, bringing back mice and laying at his feet.and now today, we are going for a cat, possibly to take on his progenitors name and then begin a cycle of life intertwined with all of the things that hide inside it.

sweet and clear as the moonlight on the pines

stuck in my head, as i would say, bouncing about my head like a half crazy shit house fly bouncing inside a lampshade... not that mr. ray charles is a bad thing, quite the contrary. just stuck with the empathy and mustiness of asome of my dads notebooks that i have been browsing through. moose 1999 bowling tourney pamphlet that lists my dad and a p corsi as bowling on lane 19 sun april 18 11.15am. notes from his ge metal working, engineering job where he said to his own admission mostly sat and read newspapers and books and later worked on his thesis and term papers for his masters in english. unfortunately not enough time to write while driving a bus or to sit back and relax too, too much. learning the route as they say. it feels like a morning paper route and hopefully get more morning runs than not. morning person and mourning person, yet. my dads stuff is bittersweet, feeling like i am constantly touching the tip of the proverbial iceberg and there was so much that only glinted like a mirage in the distance that i always tried to approach, but unlike a mirage, i think that it is there, but constantly far away.

this (past) morning

drinking orange juice, sleepy, listening to npr with m on the couch and geting ready to drive out to utica (or oooteekah, as ed, our trainer would call it...). tired, tired, tired. i am a bit lost in space and time. driving, though ironic as it sounds, has no real schedule nor set place where we are supposed to be at any given set time and place that i can ascertain at the moment, its a bit disorienting. i have to think real hard to realise that its tuesday morning right now and that i am at home. its a bit pleasant at times to not know where you are at this time, but in a headrushingly sort of rollercoaster sort of way, when you are at the top, on the verge of being pushed over and you have only the fact in your head that you are you and that nothing else matters before you go over that edge.
ah, coffee time, maybe i do want to remember, at least in a cursory off the wall, around the corner sort of way.
(this from two or three days ago, when i was so tired that i could not figure out how to publish it...)

contents of my fathers sweater pocket

one toothpick (used...?), yellow piece of plastic (broken...), $12.41 (in bundles of singles, a five and pocket change...), receipt for payment on one day's late fee on video rental of 'angela's ashes' from 2.04.03. what does this tell me? maybe he had a thing for frank mccourt (which i know to be true, as he told me...), he liked to stuff money in pockets and forget about it (a charming habit that i am trying to emulate...). my fathers sweater pockets, my dad kept all sorts of both useless and usefull stuff in pockets, drawers, shelves, boxes, envelopes, baggies, bookshelves, dressers, corners, garages, windowsills and alot more... i guess that i am alot more like him than i ever saw in the past. the more that i clean from his house and clothing that i wear of his and items that i then place in my apartment that were his, the more that i see that i am physically and emotionally and personality-wise him. if objects own us as he said, then i own parts of him in ways that are greater than skin deep. in the ways that i place all manner of stuff in my pockets, i have placed my dad in those same things and i am become him. contents... i am greater than the sum of my parts, but i am also broken down now into those component parts that make me and him up. he kept alot, a pack rat, as am i and things he had, i don't always know why he kept (years of scratch off lottery tickets... all losers...), but i am the same, who knows when we will need that piece of packing foam that came with my scanner? dunno, but i kept it until today.

as good an excuse as the need to sleep

Feel like sleeping, came back from grocery shopping with m and the need tocheck in on this like a newborn kitten or puppy or baby(?) exists and is as strong a reason i need to just begin to type. writing as a child? yes, i suppose, but rather than go into all of the needless, redundant and boring, so already been there and done that obvious reasons as to why this metaphor is apt, i just may begin to type again, cluck, click, clack and typing with my fingers beginning to blled a bit and just get started. need to sleep. work is tiring, but rewarding. driving as i have just did back to new paltz for a short rejoinder in a errand is tiring...the need to sort out my thoughts is also an obvious one that many a writer has used as an excuse and reaason to write. its why i began a journal as a mere recounting and recanting of my day, adventures, both adreline increasing and humdrum is always there but i hope to get this all out on the page of pixels. driving as a profession is both hilarious and like riding a roller coaster and like the many suitable trips of hoboes and riders and knights errant of old a good excuse and method of getting away from what you see everyday. i love the every day life that we lead, but... i never joined the military as i had said, but this is the toughest job that i so far, love... i know, mixed metaphor, but isn't life a series of them?

de d-day thoughts

well, it is dday and though i shouldn't rush to memorialise it in my words, maybe i should in my own head and that is that, but this is pretty well going to be a uncensored and (un)published assortment of my free flow from the rusty tap that exists in my head, it may gush with foul smelling rusty red water before it runs clean. its like that with water lines. sometimes it runs clean and others, nit. d-day... usually would run out to rent saving private ryan, as it was a momentous (for me) collection and stylisation of the drama of war from a dramatician like spielberg (even the name... spieling a story like a berg (mountain in german)). i first saw it in the theater with fellow amateur historians and friends and we were shocked and awed before the cheney team thought of the expression, but because of the emotion and sacrifice. now its onto band of brothers, which is if nothing else a well told and expressed true story.
what is it about the sacrifice and courage and well meant pull of a trigger, the simple pull of a a finger against the clip of metal that sends forth a mans soul and mind to the otherworld, to meet up with pluto and or neptune of the sea, that is so easy and almost admirable? don't know, but is it wrong of me to wish that i were of that group of men who have gotten to do that and live with it the rest of their changed and altered lives? because i almost wanted, almost... to join up in the military for better or worse and escape the daily grind that i had when i was home and caught in that tender trap of family and love and all of that then foul jazz... almost, almost... because i had wanted to throw up my fate and life and life in the very sense of the word, life, my being to the winds and watch where it scattered by the breezes to whatever four corners and see as a spectator where my life would go... almost...almost.... but instead i took it and held onto it... almost....almost. am i happier than i was before and happier that i did not let it take me? almost... lets see where this goes... almost there... once wrote a poem about being almost there and in a sense, i still feel almost there, but i guess that we never can see the forest for the trees and know when we are there or past it or never there, almost 20/20 vision, almost...

more of the same that is more of the same

yep, still sitting here and apparently, this is helping me to produce something, even if if this is nothing, because i am using the excuse of doing something new and heretofore entirely unchallenged by me and this human mind. i suppose that if this is so, then i need a new challenge every now and then to stimulate the ole juices... why i took my new job of bus driving. but this is stirring me fingers into hitting the old keyboard as though i were as bukowski once said playing the piano until your fingers bleed a bit. even the action of typing of slightly masochistic... pushing your digits against the keys that you know are solid and stop at a certain point, not like the chest of maybe a certain someone that you want to thump your finger against, but all the keys do are thump and click and cluck back at you and create tiny little symbols on the screen in front of you that in your possibly misguided delirium, believe that someone else will read, because, hey in the billions of computer users and surfers, SOMEONE may actually stumble across this and give it a read and like it, so that you may feel justified in sitting here on a sunday morning and writing and drinking coffee instead of putting away the laundry as you should be doing.... like i said, masochistic, but writing is in its best sense, masochistic. putting it out there and hoping that the wall will hold and center will hold against the grinding sands of time. but will it? who knows? as my father may once have said... what does it all mean...? and then laugh about it. i think that my old man had it right, there...

lets see how/if this works

lets see how/if this works and also try to interpret on this dismal sunday the breaking of the morning and why it is an excuse to actually write something other than in my journal without the use of trying to make my typing fingers (all five of them between two hands...) do their normal gymnastic and calisthenics routine...