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what i did on my summer vacation
I am back from my vacation and ready to get back into my regular routine. If anyone is interested i picked up my friend from Toledo Dave Smith in St Louis. We had a beer at a faux Irish Pub across from Union Station where the bar tender was able to leave a four leaf clover on the top of the foam of the guiness draft we both enjoyed. We then drove across the river and got dinner and a room in Fairmont IL and hiked around the Cahokia Mounds the next day. For anyone not familiar with the mounds they are an incredible site with a definite vibe of intense history. I spent a lot of time visualizing what it was like when 20,000 Missisipians lived there and it was the largest city in North America, before they simply just disappeared. We then drove back to Columbia and caught a little of the Sierra Leone All Stars at the Columbia Blues Fest. After that we kept it pretty mellow with barbecues and a lot of frisbee golf. We made a last visit to the St Louis Zoo, best free zoo in the country, and enjoyed all the animals. One of the last times I was at that zoo was in maybe 1995 with my brother John and Joe Mold who had come down for a student environmental conference. As we walked through the great apes section there was an Orangatang behind a glass wall. Joe Mold put his hand up on the glass and the orangatang did likewise. Joe began to ohm in a low and sustained way and both Joe and the Orangatang began to rock gently and it was obvious to all the crowd of bystanders which it drew that they were in some type of psychic communion. We were doing a lot of head humming back in those days and i had certainly felt the unity of the self break down in some kind of group communion, so i was not too surprised to see an orangatang join the fold. All of the great apes are such close cousins and so obviously intelligent and self aware it breaks my heart to see how we treat them. We are down to hundreds of Mountain Gorillas, a shame we will bear threw all eternity should we allow them to pass from this beautiful and threatened land. We definitely saw the interspecies barrier broken down that day, and if you don’t believe me ask John, as an incorrigible skeptic, atheist, and materialist he will corraborate my story in its totality. Dave and I didn’t have any mystical experiences, the organgatangs seemed tired of people looking at them and children shouting and kept pulling sacks over their head to catch a little shut eye. Finally i got to drop Dave back off at Union Station and return to my regularly scheduled life. We did write several very good poems together, one of which i retained a copy of and will try to post in the near future. I plan to write an intro to the blog today and will resume my Amsterdam narrative early next week. Thanks for reading and please post a comment. I have only had one and that was a spam-bot from a hypnosis site.
going crazy part 4
So my last night in Amsterdam, I hadn’t slept in 10 days, and Jennifer had given me a 100 guilders with the instructions to spend it on something frivolous. I left the mind spa immediately; I had been out of tobacco for a while and had been chain smoking like a fiend so my first order of business was to try to scare up a pack of smokes. Not so easily done in Europe where everything kind of closes at 6:00. I started walking, it was chilly and drizzling and I didn’t have a jacket. I had “People Are Strange” running through my head, probably because I’d had a couple of drinks earlier at The Doors, which is a bit of a franchise over there. It’d comforted me to know that somewhere Jim Morrison is always still crooning. I thought, I felt intensely, so intensely I can still summon up the feeling vividly now 12 years later, I was “strange” to be out late without a jacket and sure enough a face came out of the rain. I heard someone speak, a voice speaking a strange language behind me, but I felt like he was talking to me. I thought it could be the language of the angels and I could almost understand it. I turned and there was a Rastafarian standing at the edge of a street lamp so the glow backlit him like a halo. He had a holy look about him. He asked what I wanted and I told him I thought he had spoken to me. He asked me if I spoke some language I’d never heard of and I told him I didn’t but I thought he was talking to me. He asked, “What are you looking for?” which I felt had tremendous implications but was too much to respond too so, so after a pregnant pause, I told him I wanted a pack of cigarettes.
He said follow me and led me off into a part of The City I’d never been through several long and dark alleys and I started to get a bit anxious about where he was taking me and was of course hopelessly lost, but I pushed it out of my mind thinking he could be an angel and not wanting to be ungrateful, untrustworthy. Ultimately we arrived at an after-hours club with loud music blaring and a young white crowd apparently having a good time. He told me I could get cigarettes in there. I asked him if I could buy him a drink and he shook his head sadly and said they wouldn’t serve him there and walked across the square. I was immensely saddened by this and I stood by the doorway for a bit torn between the pull of nicotine and justice. I wandered a little down the sidewalk and saw a series of 7 playing cards laying face up on the sidewalk and read them as a tarot spread. The cards showed a perilous journey whose ultimate destination is confusion. As I pondered this the Rastafarian came back and asked why I didn’t go inside. I told him that I was not going to go somewhere where they wouldn’t let him in.
He seemed pleased with this response and he walked me across the square and introduced me to an African immigrant and told me that he could help me. In his broken English the immigrant offered to find me a prostitute and some cocaine. I told him that that wasn’t what I was looking for. I told him that I had 100 guilders that I was to spend on something frivolous and that I wanted cigarettes. He led me on a long walk and as we walked I attempted to explain what frivolous means. “You know something spontaneous needed. Something fun we don’t need.” We talked a little about our lives and the state of race relations in Amsterdam and I felt we quickly developed a sort of camaraderie that transcended our different backgrounds and agendas. Once we were accosted by a gang of blacks and my new friend stepped forward and told them I was with him and he was helping me find a good time. Once we were accosted by white policemen and I stepped forward and explained he was with me and he was giving me a tour. We talked about how this was a model of how relationships should be, mostly walking side by side but sometimes one than the other stepping forward as the situation warranted. We walked through the seedier part of the Red Light district than what I’d walked through with my friends touristing. It had made me uncomfortable seeing the women displayed in large glass windows like puppies at the mall pet store. This was grittier but more real and we bought beers and loose cigarettes from some of the whores and hung out for chit chat. We walked about a good part of the night most of what is a blur although I remember a short ride in an unregistered taxi which I was scolded for as an exorbient waste of money and smoking crack in some alley. I was so spun I couldn’t even feel it.
Ultimately 100 guilders will not take you very far especially if your guide is a crackhead and we found ourselves at the train station. After ascertaining that I really didn’t have anymore money my friend left to run a short errand and did not return.
I was still driven by this incredible restlessness and a cop had rousted me and told me to move on. I didn’t have a key to the mind spa at this point and didn’t want to wake everyone up and started wandering the streets. I was overcome by a great weariness and began to count the days since last I’d slept. I began to see the extent of how much I was spun, it had been upwards of 10 or 11 days, I was not sure, I sat in a bus shelter and pondered what had transpired, I was so exhausted. I thought of this new gift of gab I’d acquired and remembered how I’d talked our way from the cops earlier. I thought about ecstasy and what was its nature, not just the drug but that peculiar feeling of grandiose rapture that it so expertly duplicated but that I thought I’d had felt before. I wondered what the connection was. I tried to recapture that feeling and that voice of persuasive charm even though I was just speaking thoughts in my head,that I’d used in the furious tabling session, 450 guilders in 45 minutes, money was now meaningless, raised virtually at will, functionally unnecessary. I began to see that I’d been able to tap into that energy before when speaking to large crowds. When you have that rapt attention of many, and you are speaking to each like they are an individual. I thought of The Voice as described in Dune or the Jedi mind trick, “These aren’t the droids your looking for”. I remembered the terror before stepping onto the podium during my speaking engagements as an activist. That raw terror, and then a deep breath, and a plunge into The Word. I saw that the heart of ecstasy was overcoming fear and I began to remember how that felt in my body. I stretched out on the small bench, devised to keep the homeless from an easy rest, and began to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth slowly and deeply casting my focus on the feeling of air going by my septum. I relaxed all the muscles in my tired and battered body pushed way too hard for way too long. As I reached a state of total relaxation I felt my palms become moist like before addressing a large crowd. Ignited by the oxygen I was again burning brightly. The boundless energy returned and my exhaustion was no more. I was beyond the collapse and could return to the mind spa to face my future. Later I encapsulated this idea into a formula: fear + oxygen = ecstasy.
going crazy part 3
I had been spending the most time with Aaron. Aaron was in crisis. He had at first turned down Debbie’s invitation to return to Amsterdam as his business was pressing. He was a co-owner of a new marijuana dispensary and had a small grow operation in Marin keeping him busy. After he learned I was going he decided he could go. That fact later became important in my delusional system. Last year Aaron was the newbie this year I was.
Shortly after we arrived Aaron had learned his partner had declared him corrupt and taken control of the business and his grow operation saying they were company assets. His partner also called High Times and told them they were employing a swindler and wanting to avoid controversy they fired him before he started. Aaron was obsessed and went on and on about his troubles back home. As he was largely my guide to the city I was the recipient of his angst and tried my best to listen and provide guidance. I remember we had a long talk about “energy vampires” those who take and take without giving. There is a reason you never invite a vampire into your home.
Aaron and I had purchased some “organic ecstasy” from our host at the mind spa. That night we did a gram, sometime later we did another. Being crazy for me is a lot like being on ecstasy. That same sparkling of perception and words unbidden uncensored easy on the tongue. We stayed up all night mostly talking about Aaron’s situation. That day I worked the door at some Cannabis Cup event and did whatever we did, go to dinner smoke cannabis its all really a blur and truly I have little idea of what happened when or even what really happened and what was delusion. Keep that in mind throughout this narrative have the names have not been changed under the assumption that time and the statute of limitations protect the guilty, if there be any.
That night I was again hanging out with Aaron and he raved on in his obsessions and wanted to do the rest of the ecstasy. I didn’t want to do any because it was late and I hadn’t slept. Aaron said he would do it all (4 grams I believe and it was more intense than any I had ever done) if I didn’t do it with him. One of the bad things about ecstasy is the tripping dose and the fatal dose are just too damn close. So I did a gram and later another and again we stayed up all night talking about Aaron’s obsessions. Taking ecstasy was probably the last rational decision, poor though it was, that I made for months. On night three I did not need to take ecstasy to stay up all night nor did I sleep again in Amsterdam though it must have been another 8 or 9 days before I left.
I can’t really describe what I was feeling through this time. I had this rush of ideas, incredible confidence and energy to the point of laughable grandiosity and I was putting things together at an incredible rate. I was so intensely in the moment that a coherent narrative is impossible. Perhaps insanity at its core is the lack of a coherent personal narrative. Stan Davis my first sociology professor at good old Monroe County Community College called insanity a worldview of one. But that is insufficient as I often could easily explain my charged world view to folks and take them along with me to what I now believed. Because with the delusions of grandeur came an incredible charisma.
I believe I continued to work security for the Cup. At one point I was able to work the CAN table. Part of our deal with High Times was we got a free table at the vendors area. We brought no product, the heart of CAN’s fundraising was selling pot stickers, t-shirts and hemp products but we produced nothing and our vendors and their competitors had tables so we just had literature. We had our glossy flyers for the medical marijuana initiative and we had copies of the initiative. We were a bit of rock stars for just passing the most significant piece of marijuana law in the world. Aaron had been desultorily working the table as he was not allowed to work which left it all to Debbie and myself. At one point I worked the table for 45 minutes. Within minutes there was a crowd around the table as I gave my rap. This is how we passed it this is what we passed. That was the essence of it. We had a basket that people through coins in. I only worked the table for 45 minutes because Debbie felt we were endangering our place by taking business from the other vendors. The ones who had products. As we excitedly counted our take it came to 450 guilders or about $300. I had done 3 fair days of tabling income without any products to sell in 45 minutes. That’s when I realized that money was valueless. I felt I could sing it up out of the aether at will, and perhaps I could.
Later perhaps that same day I took a break from working the door and walked through the exhibition booth where there was an open mic. Rappers were bustin out rhymes and I thought I had important revelations to share. I took the mic and explained that the economy ran on magic and that money meant nothing. I said wild eyed that we could actualize the idea behind “that insight book” that if you see someone doing the right thing than give them money so they can keep doing it and we could be freed from the shackles of shameless commerce. I made the challenge that I had a pocket full of money that I would try to give away and that it could not be done because by doing the right thing it would flood back to me. I of course quickly found it was no problem at all to give away all my money.
I left the stage and an older hippy gentleman took me aside and told me that while he heard the truth and compassion in my speech that there was madness in my eyes and that I needed rest. I almost cried from his gentle hand on my shoulder and the care in his words. A young woman approached me for my money for some feminist cause. We talked and found her organization’s needs exceeded what was in my pocket and I gave her enough for a phone call and my number in Berkeley and promised to work with her to raise that money with an infallible plan that rose in my mind. Debbie approached and told me to cool it I was making a fool of myself. I pointed out the young woman who had been touched by my words and she said she just wanted my money.
Back at the mind spa I was scolded for interrupting a poetry event for speechifying. I announced I could write poetry though I had never been able too before. I knocked out one on the pains of being me on the spot. Jennifer saved it and later sent it to me and it was pretty good. I may still have it somewhere. My friends challenged my growing grandiosity and my challenge of their sacred cows. I had always felt an air of hypocrisy and shameless commerce ran through the drug legalization crowd and with the death of my self-censor I no longer held back.
They challenged my unequaled genius with comparing me to my host who spoke three languages flawlessly. After they slept I broke out the German English dictionary and wrote a haiku. I don’t remember it in German but in English it went:
Sunrise War
Around dying Autumnal fires
Until sleep intervenes
I was having flashes of what I felt was genetic memory. At least one night I walked all night. I felt my body had walked about Europe for millennia. I had vague memories of marching with compatriots a squad of warriors sleeping around campfires in piles like puppies for warmth. I wanted to capture the old warriors sitting about the fire telling horror stories through the night as one by one they drift off to uneasy dreams.
At some point I had picked up a nasty huge swelling bruise and was walking with a heavy limp. My friends wanted me to go to a hospital. I knew enough that I was too crazy to go to a hospital and not risk admission in some foreign system. By then I was afraid my friends were out to get me. To push me into insanity. To force me to wager my soul in an unholy game of Risk with our host. To induct me into an international secret organization of drug dealers. I felt that if I slept someone would be whispering hypnotizing words into my ears and I would be lost, damned or both. I vowed I would not sleep again until I was safely out of this infernal city. The damaged foot was a problem. I laid in a special relaxation chair, leather, like something you would see in a dental office. I breathed into my nose and out of my mouth slowly and evenly concentrating on the air going by my septum. I clenched my fingers and toes and felt all of the incredible tension of my wire taut body. I released all of it and felt the incredible sense of total relaxation. I visualized the swelling leaving my foot and it becoming perfectly whole. Time passed I guess. I looked at my foot and the bruise was gone. I showed my friends my foot whole and restored and they were unimpressed. They still wanted me to go to the hospital as I was clearly mad thinking I could heal my foot. They asked if I had slept and I told them I had. Later I would lay down and close my eyes and pretend to sleep to try to allay their concerns but would also drop hints that I was only pretending.
One night fairly close to when we were supposed to leave I came in from a day of wandering and found Jennifer dipping CD sized sheets of hash into a pot of wax bubbling on the stove. We discussed in a roundabout fashion drug commerce and my possible participation in it. I had always made a very clear distinction that I was comfortable possessing and using drugs but not in their commerce. Sanctions are too great, the rewards too tenuous. Jennifer said at one point: “Act out of love and not fear”, a great line. I responded with: “Love of what and fear of what? Love of money is the root of all evil and fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”. She was unimpressed. She did give me a 100 guilders because I had given all of my money away. She told me not to give it away but to spend it on something “frivolous”.
next: going crazy part 4
first: going crazy part 1
going crazy part 2
I really became obsessed with the idea of vibes when I was working for High Times. They are the sponsors of the Cannabis Cup and on my first shift working “security” I was instructed to clear all the vendors out so we could close up the hall. I was told to go up to the top floor and clear everyone out without being pushy but to just “vibe them out”. That is apparently the hip New York stoner way of doing things and so I walked up to the top and kind of just started looking at people like they should leave. I don’t think I had any badge of authority and was just in my typical jeans and t-shirt but it worked people would just start to leave when I would look at them and wish they would.
I think I more or less held it together for a week or 10 days but looking back I could see where I was becoming a little unhinged before that. There was definitely a precipitous break with reality but I’m still trying to lay down the background of what was leading up to that and of course I haven’t even mentioned the paranoid conspiracy novel.
I have always been a big reader and when younger had hoped to be a writer some day. In high school I thought there might be two ways to become a great writer. Become a master of the craft, a real wordsmith and just pump out the great literature seemed one way but I wasn’t sure I had the skills and natural aptitude to do so. I thought an alternative route may be to have truly astounding and interesting experiences and learn to write competently enough to convey them. After attempting to travel a ways down the latter path I realized that rather than writing a novel it might just be better to live a novel. Why drudge away at a keyboard when you can be a protagonist in your own story, out living those life changing events rather than just imagining them and writing them down. I began to think I would just live those experiences and maybe write about them when I was old and couldn’t really do them anymore. And then I discovered the paranoid conspiracy novel.
Probably the definitive paranoid conspiracy novel is the Illuminatus Trilogy, by Wilson and Sheah (sp), which though dated is still highly readable. In this genre the protagonist is faced with increasing evidence that a mysterious and all powerful conspiracy is fucking with his life for some barely understood purpose. I loved it when I discovered it and went on to read all of Robert Anton Wilson’s fiction stuff and some of his non-fiction where he sort of alleges some of this stuff is true. Probably the best paranoid conspiracy novel is Umberto Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum about a coterie of conspiracy book publishers who make up a conspiracy and then start getting killed off by it. The one that bears most on this narrative is the Pulitzer Prize winning Gravity’s Rainbow by Pynchon.
I had never read Pynchon before I started working for the pot group. Debbie and I used to talk conspiracy lit. a little and she would share some of her own insider information on real conspiracies of the sort like the CIA farmed out exotic hallucinogens to the Yippies for informal focus group testing. I took all this conspiracy talk as just that talk. People also talk about ghosts, UFOs and Big Foot. She did loan me Gravity’s Rainbow sometime before the trip and I ended up drawing on elements of it as fuel for my own delusions. Or there was a huge international conspiracy of unknown motivation organized to blow my mind, frankly I’ve never been sure. The most telling elements of the story was the plot line about “Rocketman” stumbling into becoming an international smuggler of hashish and the idea of questions answered, answers questioned. The latter I thought was my own invention thinking that someday I would travel the world setting up a table (like the tables we sat up with CAN selling hemp products and cannabis propaganda) with a banner reading questions answered answers questioned. It was only upon re-reading GR that I realized I had lifted that from Pynchon as well as the paranoia.
going crazy part 1
I have not blogged in a while and I think even more than being busy is that I am apprehensive about telling the story I am going to try and tell. A couple of weeks ago I went to pick up my friend Terry from KCI. On the drive back he asked how I was and I told him that work had me feeling crazy. He asked me what that was like knowing I wasn’t just making a figure of speech. I told him since we had a drive ahead of us I would tell him about when everything went insane. The first thing you have to realize about being crazy is that you don’t just go crazy. The world goes crazy and you are just able to realize it. But first some background people always want to know how these things happen and I am in the somewhat unique state of kind of being able to answer that.
Leading up to the Fall of ’96 there was a lot of wild stuff going on in my life. I was into my 3rd year as a full time radical grassroots activist in a wildly intense experiment in identity politics and voluntary poverty. I had stumbled into a job with the Cannabis Action Network working for room & board and free drugs working on coordinating the grassroots campaign for medical marijuana. It was high stress often busting it from the time I got up till the time I went to bed, of course smoking huge quantities of cannabis and cannabis bi-products. On top of that I had taken to doing ecstasy on the weekends and continued to do some bad LSD from time to time and occasionally some mushrooms. I also worked weekends at an adolescent psychiatric unit for the culture shock and pocket money. I was also experimenting with sleep deprivation. After work on a Sunday morning I would often go the neighborhood bar for a couple of beers. I would smoke a few hits of something premium and then lay in bed. I would do progressive relaxation until my conscious mind turned off and I would fall into the most intense hallucinations I had ever experienced even more than when on mega doses of hallucinogens.
All of that was well and good as far as I knew, looking back that lifestyle didn’t leave a lot of time for self reflection as I was also an active reader and there are only 24 hours in a day no matter how intense your life, until we went to Amsterdam. We went to celebrate our victory in the polls, we had changed the world. We went to get away from the grind of politics. We went to work security at the Cannabis Cup, the international pot growing championships of the world. We went early to pre-party and stayed late. What happened there is of course fragmented and poorly understood but aspects of my subjective experiences still shine out of my memory like no other time in my life. I will do my best to convey my experiences but in the end they are my experiences and I make no guarantees to their external veracity.
We stayed at a mind spa for the 3 weeks we were apparently there. It was pretty cool. There was a sensory deprivation tank and syncopation machines by synchrotech. Syncopation flashes lights and plays rhythems in particular beats to generate certain consciousness states. Sensory deprivation was very big in the 70s and involves floating in salt water in a soundproofed chamber in total darkness. There was also television but no channels came in and there were only Terrance McKenna videos to watch and there was a well-stocked library of esoterica and mind expansion literature whose titles I do not recall. I do remember I read 5 or so books including Gurdijeff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson.
The mind spa was not open for business and made an excellent crash pad and we got to sample the wares. The syncopation didn’t do much for me I remember seeing some red and some green. My compatriots reported vivid hallucinations with narrative but didn’t really have the ring of truth to them when they told their tales. The sensory deprivation tank is difficult to judge because I was far gone into madness before I ever tried it. I remember floating in the salt water and being able to hear and feel my heart beating and feeling my pulse pulsing from my finger tips into the water making ripples. It dawned on me that that was what “vibes” were picking up on people’s emotional state through feeling waves from their blood pressure. I remember feeling utterly alone, like being in the womb without a mother’s heartbeat. It seemed cruel, an infernal device and I fled from its confines, but as I said by then I was quite mad.
I remember being pretty sane when we arrived. We all ate pot cookies to make the long flight endurable. We hit the first coffee house after leaving the train station from Shipbol and were smoking massive quantities of cannabis. Aaron would roll up these huge cone joints and we were on a constant quest to see how many different varieties we could smoke at once. I believe the record was 14 kinds of cannabis and 6 kinds of hash. We had been smoking a lot of pot just living and had definitely taken it up a notch. We didn’t do much touristy stuff besides hit the coffeehouses. We had also just one a big legal victory for pot and carried ourselves like gangsters.
Debbie had a gig selling poetry books and CDs for Fishbone as her man was a guitar tech and roadie for them and they always played Amsterdam during the Cup. I went to the Van Gogh museum with one of their roadies, as we were the only 2 in the scene into doing anything besides smoking pot. The museum was set up chronologically and Van Gogh’s early stuff was very Dutch Master’s stuff, all browns and blacks and heavy on the shadows. The most emblematic was a basket of potatoes. And then boom, his pallete exploded and their was the Van Gogh we all know in his one-eared mad-eyed glory. I pondered what in the hell happened to him that he could suddenly see full spectrum and at some level even then I knew it was coming to me.
To be continued. I promise not to make you wait 2 weeks for the next entry. I still despise George Lucas for ending Empire Strikes Back to be continued and then waiting 5 years to make Return of the Jedi. More by weeks end I promise.
truck loading redux
Yesterday I helped my friends Terry and Kirsten move. They had a household’s worth of stuff to put in a 32’ rental so Terry could drive their stuff from the garage of their old house in Columbia Missouri to their new home of Corvalis Oregon. I always think of Corvalis as the last bastion of civilization because of David Brin’s The Postman. They kept the lights on when no one else did. Good science fiction serves as a thought experiment; a way to illuminate “what if”. Brin convinced me that when the shit hits the fan communities survive, not individuals, no matter how strong the redoubt or how advanced the warning.
I’d told Terry after he asked for help that I would be happy too, as loading trucks was something of a specialty of mine. My dad drives truck, when I was a youngster he used to haul furniture. When I was three years old he gave up his career as a meat manager at Foodtown to drive truck for Beacon Van Lines, after my little brother drowned in our swimming pool. It was a way to runaway without really running away. He took one trip on his own, discovered he was powerful lonely, and grabbed me up for the next one, and all the ones after that till the accursed state decided I should be in school “learning something”. By kindergarten I’d been to 43 states but my moving days getting limited to Summer it took me till I was 12 to get the 48 continental states, and I’m still waiting on Alaska and Hawaii.
My main job was keeping Dad awake on the long night drives. I used to sit “Indian style” on the doghouse, the plastic console covering the engine raised up between the seats in the old cabovers he drove back then. He would confide in me and share his plans and dreams, hopes and regrets and tell me about the world we were driving past and what excitements lay ahead. I would share questions, jokes and stories and my thoughts on all we’d seen and what lay ahead.
Driving truck is brutal. Getting paid by the mile, it’s the last piecework. There is heavy pressure, Darwinian survival pressure even, to drive fast and even more so to drive long. There was no getting off work, only getting laid over when there was no work. Furniture haulers have it the worst. Hump heavy shit all day into a metal oven whose ambient temperature is running 20 degrees higher than outside than drive all night so you can hump it back out the next day. I was not only told the value of hard work but also, observed it first hand, and was soon enough actively participating in it. Carrying lampshades and the like and learning quickly the art of staying out of the way led to ever increasing workloads. By eight I could handle an end of a dresser and we didn’t always hire an extra guy anymore. I felt pride and a sense of accomplishment. I realized quickly how lucky I was to see the world and all the different ways that people could live, later how rare to have my father’s undivided attention for hours and hours day after day as we drove across this grand land of ours.
I also learned a thing or two about the loading of trucks. Just as my dad would survey the assembled objects that were to be carefully arranged for the long haul, I surveyed their things and sketched a plan in my mind. “I want the washer and dryer and we’re going to have to unbury the deep freeze for the first layer”. I tried to explain the process so I wouldn’t sound imperious as I pretty much stayed in the truck building the first layers and calling out for what I needed next. Between layers we started roping box springs and mattresses as they became increasingly less elegant as the game of Tetris was played with increasingly bizarre shaped pieces.
Terry and Kirsten’s 4-½ year old son Kai started carrying up some of the lighter items. I called him sir and thanked him and marveled at the size of his carries as I remembered the many workmen doing over me when I was his age. I praised him and his parents in front of him for staying out from underfoot and following directions. Even Ben at 2 ½ waddled up an item or two, his pudgy toddler legs pumping up the sandpaper ramp like mine must have in those early days.
It brought a smile to my face and the heady joy of some serious nostalgia even in the hard work in the heat and the humidity. My carriers faded in and out as more helpers arrived and other helpers got engrossed in conversation or childcare as the day progressed, but I didn’t relinquish the loading job till the very end. I’d paid my dues carrying and watching Dad build the layers, thousands and thousands of layers, trying to anticipate what he was going to need next. I’d earned my “Alright I want those three purple tubs and all the rest of the heavy boxes. Then I’ll take those long handled tools.”
The saddest part of the day was when the layer got seriously funky and I had to say; “Lets keep the kids out of the truck now, its no longer safe.” Saddened to see my remembrances cut short I was still glad to be done before the serious heat of the day. Hopefully Kai will have as sweet memories of driving truck as I do.
Michael Trapp
7/29/07 1:00 pm CST
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