Ontario, California is somewhat of a Mecca for truckers plying their trade around Los Angeles. It has two big truck stops just off I-10 that many of them use when doing business in that area. The truck stops used to belong to competitors, but the big chain bought the other one up and now it's just one megatruckstop on different sides of the same road. Hundreds if not thousands of trucks moving through there every day. All day, all night, they never stop coming and going. Most of the trucks, although they do park there for a while leave their big diesel engines idling, and so there is a giant dull thud of a noise that permeates everything in the surrounding area.

The place is well lit at night. There is a modicum of security, but most of it serves the interests of the truck stop rather than the truckers. Those lights and the exhaust from all those diesels belching smoke and rising in the desert air looks eerie from a distance. The ground trembles with the constant vibration of the idling trucks. I had been riding in one of these rumbling, grumbling big trucks for two days. I wanted to get away from the noise.

I didn't really know where I was, but since I wasn't going anywhere in particular, it didn't really matter where I went. I started walking. I began thinking about how, when I was a young person before I had joined the Navy, there was no television sets around much. The most viewing I had ever done was seeing the glare of the round, greenish-looking pictures through a neighbor's window. The only outside entertainment up to then was the family radio. We listened. If there was some program on the radio we wanted to hear we would sit close to the radio that we could hear well enough to pounce on every word, every strain of music. There weren't that many diesels around in those days. I walked a little faster.

As I walked the noise made me think of the big Naval destroyers I had lived on. There was always noise there. I could practically hear the thump of the big propellers turning and feel the vibration under my feet. I thought of the shrimp boats I had worked on the the Gulf of Mexico. The diesels never stopping from the time we left the dock until we returned, day and night, night and day. Noise and vibration without surcease, and my heartbeat entraining to their rhythms. The interpreter becomes the interpreted.

Off to my left I saw the familiar shapes and textures of a plowed field. Even that field was lit by street lights. I thought it might be the gateway to some quiet space among some bushes that I might stretch my body out full length without have to curl it among seats and gear shift sticks and listen to the silence. Maybe even hears some crickets or frogs. Anything not man-made would do. I walked along the road along the edge of the field until the big diesels were just a hum in the distance. It was better, but I still couldn't hear myself think.

It felt good to walk after being cooped up with a nelly driver for two days. I was alone again. Sure, I was somewhere in the outskirts of one of the biggest cities in the world, but it was getting quieter. I could smell the fresh plowed dirt. It was like an old friend that was comforting me as I sought refuge in the dark. I became almost desperate to become unhooked and unconnected from the implements of civilization. Enough! No mas! I just had to find a place I could hide away, sit and wait with great expectations. I gnew it was waiting for me. I walked a little faster.

Suddenly, I remembered I was walking; left, right, left, right... I changed my breathing so that I was inhaling on the left step and exhaling with the right step with two steps in between. I pressed my tongue up against the top of my mouth so the earthy aroma in the air would go straight to the bottom of my lungs. There was no traffic at all on the road, and as I walked and paid attention to my breathing and letting my legs stretch out into a more natural pace I began to relax a little and felt the smoothness enter my gait. I wondered from one side of the road to the other as I ambled along feeling myself. I was alone again.

Up ahead, in the ever present dimness of the never dark road I saw a bridge ahead. As I came to it I could see it was an irrigation ditch. The ditch was paved with concrete. Not unusual in California. It was empty. I stopped at the edge of the bridge and listened for the trucks. I could barely hear them. Probably as good as it was going to get.

Carefully, I edged my way around the guard rails to explore the underside of the bridge. The slope down to the ditch was concrete slabbed too. It was darker under the bridge. I tried to see if there were any people there. I stopped and listened to see if I heard any talking. Nothing. I creeped along the slope away from the buttresses where the big steel beams lay anchored on their pads to see if anybody was there from one side of the bridge to the other. I saw no one, and then went up to the buttresses to see if there was a flat spot I could lay down. There was, and there was enough space between the beams to lay down full length. Without hesitation I put my bag down and sat down to be alone with myself since it seemed like it had been... forever.

I uttered my road chant over and over again, waiting for the time to come when the chance was gone. The paralysis came slowly. I questioned whether it was really there a coupla times and it went away. I started again, and again, and the third time it came over me completely, and I was home.

Recently, I read an article on the BBC site that said that Einstein and Newton both had a form of autism called Asperger's Syndrome. I read the article out of curiosity. By the time I finished it I was convinced that I did too. I have thought I have epilepsy too. Something is just a little off the beaten path about me.

Sometime, I just don't get it. Like a lot of people I have been given a series of IQ tests by people who were professionals and ought to know the proper way of administering these tests. I have always made some pretty good scores, and have been assured that a lack of intelligence is not a problem with me. I don't believe it is either. Admittedly, my intelligence quotient is sort of specilized in a way. I only seem to have it when I'm really interested in the stuff I like to study about. Otherwise I can be pretty much of a dummy. As I wrote in an earlier entry, I suspect that what is really going on in this arena is that, when I'm interested in a particular subject, I appear to have the ability to explore things related to that subject with an intensity of purpose that goes beyond where many others lose interest. I have an unusual type of memory system that allowed me, in the past, to retain things critical to the integration of stuff I learned a long time ago with my current interests. Again, this only applies to the stuff I'm really intrigued by.

My ability to concentrate on a given subject has it's drawbacks though. I seem to be able to get more deeply involved in my interests at the expense of ordinary events that are going on around me during these times. Many times I have been told that I don't have common sense. My response to statements of this kind is that I have no real need of common sense because I am not common. I'm special, just like everybody else.

I seem to go into some sort of trance when I'm concentrating on my interests. Being in this trance allows me to ignore events that can be distracting. The root word of ignorance is "to ignore". So, as far as concentration is concerned, ignorance is my best friend. It also exists as my worst enemy as far as social affairs are concerned. When I ignore stuff my significant others feel is important, it always gets me in the doghouse. It seems like in relationship with the other, I find myself constantly apologizing for not paying attention to their interests, as if I don't, they can't maintain that interest.

Even worse, it seems, ignoring stuff that gets in the way of what I am concentrating on allows me the discovery that if I can ignore those things that distract me, then the stuff I ignore seems not so useful to me. If I can live my life without cluttering my mind with what the other considers important, and find a way not to insult them in the process, then bully for me.I find it easy to be around people who don't depend on me to keep their own interest alive and kicking. I can pretend I'm interested in stuff that is not important to me for only so long, and usually they find out that my pretense is a sham, and then I have to apologize even more to get back into the good graces of the other. Many times, much more often than suits me, I come to the place that not only are the personal interests of the other not important to me, and according to how much they require of me to live their own life, I can lose interest in the other along with their need for enabling. That may have a lot to do with my staying by myself most of the time. This seems to be just fine with me, I've lived alone for much of my life. I seem to have problems in relationship, very similar to what I read in the article on Asperger's Syndrome. When people start yelling at me for not paying attention to them when I'm caught up in my interests, it's time for a change in my habitat.

Another area of relationship I have encountered in the past few years has to do with love and jealousy. Many people seem to like to say that if you don't love yourself, then it might appear impossible to love others. With the question being, if we can only see ourselves in others, and we love ourselves, how can we not love others as we do ourselves. Some people don't find this to fit with their agenda. They seem to expect exclusivity in regard to love, and loving anyone but them upsets their apple cart. I do seem prepared to offer exclusivity, but only in regard to fidelity. I'm ready to promise not to sleep around, but I am not ready to promise not to love others. The process of aging and satisfying my curiousity has finally prepared me to pledge fidelity, and yet I intentionally remain alone. This may change, because I feel I have finally come to the point where I trust myself in this regard.

I seem particularly attracted to studying systems of thought. The systems of thought that interest me are generally not considered by many people as worth the effort it takes to learn them. Most of them have been developed to facilitate an intuitive response rather that proofs that such and such are so and so. I don't seem to require proof of things that my more scientific friends find valuable. Most things obtained by the scientific method have been proven wrong eventually, and only have temporary value. So do intuitive results, but intuitive results are not considered by many people to be written in stone anyway, so why go to all the trouble to prove them. The only thing I have ever encountered that has remained the same during my brief sojourn on earth in this particular body is that I have always been me. Me doing this, me doing that, me saying such and such, and so and so. These things have value for the moment they are useful, and easily discarded if they lose their value. I attempt to live in the flow of the specious present as often as I can, and hanging on to things that will eventually be proven wrong seems to interfere with my focusing on the flow.

The next morning we got up and used the facilities of the truck stop to straighten up a little, got some coffee, and continued on our way to Los Angeles. I have always been partial to Flagstaff, Arizona. I have approached this city from all sides at various times in my life, approaching it from the east produces a very odd sensation in me. I was raised in the coastal plains of North Carolina where the geophysical nature of the area consists of really flat ridges between swamps.

There are not many high places there. What we call hills are really just places in the road where one dips into the swamps and then climb back out of the swamp when the road returns to the flat land. The only place where you can see for any distance at all is where the forest has been cleared for farming, or you climb up to the top of the city water tanks and fire towers. Otherwise, even to see the sky you have to look up.

The odd sensation I felt as we approached Flagstaff is that when we went up a hill, we never went down again on the other side. There is no other side. It is a continual climb. Some special places I could look ahead and see the road in front of us going up and up until it disappear into the horizon.

There are not many trees, as such, until you get within about fifty miles of Flagstaff, but as the mountains Flagstaff is located on comes into view, the Ponderosa pines start appearing, and there is something to look at besides the flat plateus that appear as steps leading up to Flagstaff.

As we closed in on the city, the driver started pointing things out to me he thought interesting. He was a veritable tour guide. His constant chatter about his family life now changed into a conversation about his interests about the land. He had already told me to be on the lookout for various animals. Deer, antelopes, bears, jackrabbits loved the high country and the trees that seem to come outta nowhere just like the humans who lived there.

He pointed out some pretty high hills on the outskirts of town and asked me if I knew what they were. They appeared to have a cone-like shape, and I wondered outloud if they were extinct volcanoes. He told me they were the same material, but actually were the slag and refuse from coal mines. People used the stuff to pave their driveways and farm roads. The color of the stuff seemed familiar to me, so I asked him if that was the same stuff Texas used to pave their highways before asphalt come along. He said it was. When he realized my interest in volcanoes, which didn't exist near my home, he started pointing out little ridges of lava that had popped up in jagged lines all the rest of the trip. Even though I had seen these ridges in various locations out west, I hadn't realized they were real lava before.

The Ponderosas around Flagstaff were interesting to me because as we climbed in elevation they were grouped closer together and there was more underbrush amongst them. The driver pointed out that the higher one got, the more snow there was to feed them. When they first appeared they seemed spaced pretty far apart compared to the forests east of the Mississippi River, and I could see pretty deep into the woods through them, but as we climbed in altitude they were closer together and it became more difficult to see very far into the woods. After we got past the actual city of Flagstaff there were lots of other kinds of trees and wildlife there, and it seemed like a lot more water and streams about. The drop out of the high country and mountains around the city was much more abrupt than on the eastern side and sooner than wanted we were in the salt flats and the everpresent brown of the basin and range country.

The driver started talking about his intention to visit his brother in San Diego when he delivered his load to Los Angeles. He told me told me a lot more about his family and his relationship with them as we breezed through Nevada and eastern California. I had seen this country a hundred times before, so I listened and nodded in and out of a series of naps as we drove along. The little dog had appeared to adjust to my presence and sat in my lap much of the time now. The driver told me that he was going to spend the night at a big truckstop about fifty miles east of LA, and that's where he would let me out. We got there about dark, and he gave me five bucks to get something to eat. I got out of the big Red Ranger, waved goodbye, and wandered off to get some food and find a safe place to sleep for the night.

I tripped the light fantastic into town and found the busiest intersection of the Interstate. There was a big truck stop located just across the street from the on-ramp. I had just enough money to buy a cup of coffee, so I went inside, found a safe looking place to place my stuff, just across from the restaurant cash register, and found myself a seat at the counter.

I gnow waitresses. They have been my only friends in many desperate situations. I gnew just by looking at the one who waited on me was a single mom. She also gnew me. We didn't talk much, she was busy, but she kept my coffee cup filled until I had no excuse to sit there any longer and my poor belly could not stomach any more acid. I left her my widow's mite for a tip, paid for my coffee, and went near the driver's lounge where I found a stool at the noisy video machines near the door the drivers used to come inside and return to their big trucks.

As I sat there, all the fatigue from the previous night and the trip crept up on me. I kept nodding off, nearly falling off the stool several times. Occasionally, I got up and went to the restroom to relieve myself from all that coffee I drank. Eventually, a grizzled trucker came up to me and told me that I should go inside the TV room and sit in there or the management people would run me off for loitering. I hadn't realized I would be allowed in that room or I would have gone in there first. My fatigue plagued me even worse there because the seats were fairly comfortable like those in a movie theater. I kept falling asleep. After an hour or so, I decided to get back on the road.

The on-ramp to the Interstate sloped downhill. It wasn't very long, and there was a semi parked on the shoulder of the ramp so that it would have difficult or even impossible for someone who might stop for me to pull over. But, the traffic there was pretty good. A couple of cop cars passed me without stopping or hassling me, so I knew I would eventually get a ride if I just stood there long enough. I didn't stand there very long at all. A big red Road Ranger stopped right in front of me without pulling over. A dark-haired driver in his mid-thirties motioned for me to hurry up and jump in, and I grabbed my pack and got in the truck. He took off and entered the Interstate traffic before he turned to me and said, " I didn't know if you would still be there. I watched you inside the truck stop for a while, and figured you was alright, and hoped I could pick you up to have somebody to talk to." I thanked him.

After that, for a good long way I didn't even have the chance to talk much. He did the talking. That was fine with me. He told me he was going to Los Angeles, and that if I behaved myself I could ride with him as far as he was going. I wasn't exactly sure what he meant by behaving myself, but not to worry, I soon found out that all I had to do was sit there, and everything that had ever crossed his mind would eventually be revealed. This boy needed somebody to talk to in the worst way. Since he was going to give me a thousand mile ride, I was glad to oblige.

He told me he was a Mormon. He had been raised in Utah and followed his father to Arkansa after he had moved there for a job. He was married and had two kids. He had worked as a diesel mechanic before he bought his own truck and started driving. His wife stayed in Fort Smith, Arkansa and kept the books and arranged all his loads through the internet. He used to have a satellite hookup in the truck, but since he had cosigned for his father to buy his own truck he didn't have the money to keep it up. He was worried about his father, who was a year older than me. Him and his wife had bought a coupla acres of land just outside Fort Smith about ten years ago, and built a house that wasn't finished yet. He had two big dogs around the house that protected his family, but they eat a lot of food.

He went on to explain exactly why he had bought the Road Ranger instead of a Freightliner. He had wanted the 'Cadillac of all trucks', one of them big ol' Peterbilts with everything on it, but with a family, he just couldn't afford it. But, one of these days when he got the kids through school, it was a done deal. Course, he didn't aim to drive trucks all his life. Up until two years ago he had two trucks, but the ol' boy he had driving the other one went to sleep at the wheel one night and tore the damn thing up. He had told him not to take them damn pills and drive day in and day out, but noooo, did I think he had listened? Damn rednecks, you can't tell 'em nothing. Since then, he decided to wait awhile, and since his Daddy come hitting on him for some help to buy a truck for himself, things had been kinda tight. He couldn't really afford to help his Daddy buy that truck, but then again, he was his Daddy, and he couldn't just let him sit there after he broke his arm and got layed off. The damned thing hadn't healed right. He told him not to go to that quack, but he went anyway. If he had just listened to him he wouldn't have had all that trouble.

We rolled on down the road. We got through El Paso a few hours later without much hassle. As we turned north up toward New Mexico I noticed how much El Paso had grown in that direction since the last time I had passed through. Surprisingly, it was the area on the eastern side of the Interstate that had grown the most. The Rio Grande pretty much controlled what happened on the other side of the road. The dairy farms with the thousands of Holsteins seemed to have gotten bigger, but it was hard to tell. Seeing a dairy in the middle of a desert had always been a strange sight, but after seeing all those irrigated fields of alfalfa it made sense. The smell hadn't changed a bit. It always made me remember those before-daylight forays I made to milk our family cows when I was a kid. I had to tote warm water to the cowbarn to wash the manure off the cow's udders. They liked to lay down in their own droppings in cold weather because it was warm. I knew the smell of cow manure from a long time back. so did the kids I went to school with. I only had one pair of shoes back then.

I find it interesting that no matter how many times I pass through an area there is always something it seems like I missed seeing in the previous trips. This time it was noticing the huge pecan and walnut orchards along the Rio Grande. They obviously had to irrigate them. I don't think I have ever been through there when it was raining. The old familiar pecan trees, so prevalent in the South where I grew up, seemed to conjure a wave of nostalgia from me. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why I had not seen those orchards before. The trees were not that young. But, neither was I. I had passed this way at least a hundred times or more and never noticed them.

Meanwhile, ol' Motormouth was telling me why he didn't go to church anymore. Didn't see any sense in it. Sure, the Mormons would help you, but they extracted a price for all that neighborliness. They wanted you to do this, they wanted you to do that, ya just didn't have any privacy. That's why he liked moving to Arkansa. A man could get away from all that, buy a little place of his own, and mind his own business. Did I like Mexican food?

I told him I did, generally, it depended on the cook. He told me that he had a favorite Mexican restaurant. It was located on a shortcut that connected I-10/20 to I-40. He hadn't been there for a good while, but was thinking about shifting north up to I-40 to go to Ontario, California instead of the way he had intended on I-20, just so he could get hisself some of that Mexican food. Would I mind if he went that way?

That's when I began to wonder what he meant when he had told me earlier that I had a ride as long as I behaved myself. Still remembering that it was late March, and I didn't have any warm clothes with me, and I-40 was just far enough north that I had to consider what weather conditions might arise, I decided to ask him what he meant by "behaving myself"?

He started talking about homosexuals, he said, "You ain't gone start none of that stuff are you? I mean, we gone have to stop and sleep somewhere, and the restaurant is at a truck stop, and I'm sleeping on my bunk in the back, and you ain't gone try none of that stuff are you? Because, if you are, then you gone have to get the hell out of my truck. You ain't... are you?" I assured him I wasn't. "Well, there ain't enough room in the back for two of us. Do you mind sleeping up here on the floorboard? It's got a rug on it, and you'll have to sort of curl around the seats, but it's better than being outside." Again, I assured him that would be perfectly okay, much better than where I tried to sleep last night. "Well, the dog pees there sometime. I try to stop him, but it don't always work. Sometime I just can't get off the road in time for him."

I forgot to mention the dog. He traveled with a small dog. Made sense to me. Kept him company, he just couldn't talk. The dog was jealous of me being in his seat, but after a while he got used to me being in the truck and got up into my lap. When he did that, it seemed like the ol' boy was jealous of the dog accepting me. Most of the trip, however, the dog stayed on the bunk in back.

The emphasis he placed on me not starting "none of that stuff" made me wonder if he knew why he really picked me up, but as long as my not being put out in cold weather depended on my actions, I figured I'd be okay heading north, and since the Mexican food would be my first chance to eat in a coupla days, I'd worry about what he did at the truck stop later.

We headed up through New Mexico on the shortcut to I-40. I hadn't been on this road before, so it was new territory for me. We passed through little towns I had never seen before, so I liked that. The small towns were about like any of the other small towns out west. Motels, filling stations, farm implement dealers, cotton gins, bars, and restaurants. The every present churches and county courthouses here and there. After a while we got to the town where the truck stop/restaurant was, and he found a spot to park the truck.

The Mexican food was okay, not much different than much of the Mexican food I had eaten all over the Southwest, but since it was the first food I'd had to eat for a while I was happy to get it.

When we'd finished eating, and he had told the waitresses all the jokes he'd heard since his last visit, we went back out to the truck to sleep. He warned me again about "starting some of that stuff", and when he finally shut up, I tried to find a comfortable way of arranging my body on the floor to try to sleep with the smell of dog piss wafting up to my nose. But after not getting much sleep for two days I crashed fast and hard. He...didn't "start none of that stuff" either, or if he did, I was so far gone I wouldn't have noticed.