trucks

The drive out to my new job is so beautiful. I'm certain that eventually I will despise the traffic and the time in the car/truck/whatever, but for now, the postcard landscape from Sherwood to McMinnville makes it a joyride. Cresting the hill into Newberg at six in the morning takes my breath away. I have learned not to see the powerlines and obstructions of human occupation and still see the green green valleys and white white farmhouses of rural Oregon. I am an Oregonian, rare breed now, and doubt I will ever find my way to the end of fascination with the geography of this place.

The return commute... not so much. Tigard sucks. I am really hoping for an automatic car for the long haul. The stop and go of rush hour wears on my clutch and my mood. There is a symmetry to it as we, the organism that is the batch of cars heading back into Portland from the outlands, move inexorably east, country to city, ease to disease. If we could just PACE OURSELVES. But somebody is always in a hurry. Somebody is always more important than the rest of us. And that's how it gets fucked up. Yesterday, some little commuter car, not unlike the one I intend to drive, gouged the side out of a Trimet Bus and took out about four other cars in its wake. This in The Curves. I slid by, barely threading the traffic needle, as everyone behind me was lodged in a two hour bottleneck.

Ah, the city life.

At work, I will try to explain: there are two nuthouses on one property. One is just completing construction, the other, up and running. Both are located on a flag-lot in one of those new subdivisions with tiny streets and many cul-de-sacs. Very neighborhoody. Yesterday, the furniture arrived for the new building and nobody seemed to know it was coming. And yet there it was, the call that said, oh, by the way, some furniture is being delivered tomorrow. What nobody bothered to figure out was how much furniture, and in what kind of a truck. Well, turns out it was ALL the furniture, in a big honkin', 80 foot truck and trailer rig. Joe Parker was the driver, from North Carolina and said he got a Driving Award on his way there for doing 66 in a 55 along the Columbia Gorge.

He made it into the parking lot through the neighborhood that is one of those new, contrived things with tiny streets as though we were in Europe and drove small cars. And, long long story short.... had to eventually take it to a storage unit for many reasons, mainly that the contractor is a whiny little biatch. But it was fun to listen to an old truck driver. He was used to waiting.

There is much more to tell.