NEW STUFF

For the few of you who still look in on Road Notes from time to time, go to:

https://john-christie-8vkb.squarespace.com/

Check it out and let me know what you think.

John

jcbludevil8306@gmail.com

MEDIA NOTES

A few observations about stuff on television and elsewhere.

SCANDAL (ABC). Ridiculous. Unbelievable. Consistently over-the-top. Totally fun.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY (FX). Leads the league in OMG and ICFBWIJS moments. The story is okay and makes us want to come back for more each week, but the scenes with Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Angela Bassett are staggeringly rich and ripe and juicy and make up for whatever failings are found elsewhere.

BROADCHURCH (BBC). For what they lack in tasty food and good dental care, the Brits make up with tense, well-written, highly watchable and beautifully produced short television series.

MARVEL’S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC). Can’t figure out why this one isn’t better than it is.

THE BRIDGE (FX). Requires some effort and commitment at first, but soon enmeshes the viewer with a deft combo of plot twists, solid writing, and great acting. Dark and engrossing. And Ted Levine.

BLACKLIST (NBC). If you enjoy watching James Spader chew up the scenery half as much as I do, this is your show.

THE WALKING DEAD (AMC). This amazing show is about zombies in the same way that Moby Dick is about whaling and Breaking Bad is about crystal meth. It is really about who we are and may become when the verities and certainties of our world and our mythology crumble and burn. If you like your existential angst served up in a casserole of over-the-top zombie violence, don’t miss a minute of this masterpiece.

GOLDEN OLDIES. I never go anywhere without a generous helping of The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and Alias. This stuff satisfies and intrigues over and over and over again.

BREAKING BAD (AMC). Stop reading this and start watching. Now. Especially if you have in whatever ways large or small broken bad yourself.

WHERE AM I?

I drove by an old freight yard in Irving TX yesterday, the same yard where I picked up my first truck when I was driving for Harold Ives back in the day.  It was a 1995 T-600 Kenworth. Although it was only four years old, I and the driver who transported me down there from Stuttgart drove past it several times hunting for it. We didn’t notice right away it because it was so dirty and beat up it looked like one of the many abandoned rigs on the lot that had not yet been hauled off to the scrapyard.

But it was mine and after some TLC and a couple of trips to the shop and the Blue Beacon, it looked okay and ran great. It was equipped with an Eaton Super-10 and a 475 Caterpillar which the shop turned up after my probationary period was over. It has a flattop sleeper and enough shelving and cabinetry for the little bit of stuff I carried with me in those days.

But no sound.  No AM-FM radio. No cassette deck. No CD player. No nothing. Silence. Except for a few gauges the dash was, to say the least, spare. Eventually I commandeered a cheap battery operated boom box that sounded so meager and distorted in the loud ambience of a diesel rig that I kept it turned off most of the time.

At first it was not all that noticeable to me because I was so heavily focused on getting into the groove of a new and strange job.  I had wanted to truck since I was a kid but really had no clue about what it was really like, so anxiety and novelty made the silence less of an issue.

But after a couple of round trips to Los Angeles and one to Houlton, Maine where I almost collided with a moose during a whiteout, I was able to lay my hands on enough cash to purchase a Sony AM-FM cassette deck and have it installed at a store in a new national electronics chain called Best Buy. I think this one was in Ohio somewhere, maybe Dayton. I bought a tape called ‘Favorite Jock Jams’ and played it almost continuously for three months before it gave up the ghost.

Now I drive that truck’s grandson, a 2013 T-660 Kenworth. All leather. Quiet and clean (relatively speaking). A dashboard whose instrumentation by comparison looks like the control panel of a space shuttle. It is to trucking what an iPhone 5 is to telecommunications. Not a day passes that doesn’t find me marveling at the difference between the sophisticated advanced electronics in this truck and the barebones display in my first truck. I’m pretty Gomer Pyle about it.

No more boom box.  No more slow, shitty, expensive public internet connections. No more 13” portable TV-VHS combos.  Two laptops, a Wi-Fi hotspot that delivers a 4G connection to the web nearly anywhere in the country, a smartphone, an iPod Touch, an iPod classic, an iPod Nano, an iPad, Bluetooth everything. Satellite radio. I can listen to Michael Smerconish interviewing Alan Dershowitz about his new book on POTUS radio (Sirius Channel 124) and can buy it, download it and be listening to it two minutes later. Nearly every NCAA and NFL football game. An entire NCAA hoops season without missing a Duke game. Art Bell. NPR. Morning Joe. The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, Breaking Bad hours after new episodes air on cable.

Goooolly, Sargent Carter!!!

In the middle of it all is a Navistar GPS system with a nice, big clear 6” screen. Admittedly I usually know where I am going in advance of each trip, but the GPS is handy for calculating mileages and ETAs and alternate routes.  In dense fog it shows me where to turn and where to exit when I can’t see 50 feet in front of me. I don’t have to slow down to 3 MPH to read street signs on moonless nights. I can more easily trip plan and stay in compliance with the hours of service regulations that run a trucker’s life these days.

But there are times when the navigation system flounders. When the database is not current or when the satellite uplink is corrupt for one reason or another or when the system cannot acquire a good signal, I’d rather have the boom box.  It gets lost and cannot figure out where it is. And a GPS that doesn’t know where it is and cannot get its bearings is attractive but useless. Best not to throw out the atlas just yet. Don’t quit reading traffic and street signs.

If you don’t know where you are you cannot even begin to get where you want to go.

In the days and weeks following the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012, Republican leadership staggered around the country like a GPS system without a satellite signal. It was difficult for them to fathom what had just happened in the general election. They spluttered and stammered and blamed each other. They preached about the degeneracy of the electorate. They tightened the screws on voting rights and gerrymandered a few more precincts. As outrageous as this stuff is, none of it will come close to producing the results they seek.

If you don’t know where you are you cannot even begin to get where you want to go.

Whatever the Republican Party is now, it is decidedly not the bastion of American political conservatism. It looks and acts more like the Kyle character on the new season of American Horror Story -  a poorly-stitched, pieced-together monstrosity, helpless and uncommunicative, without any idea of who and what and where it is, unable to find itself in a bewildering new world. A few may still call the GOP the guardian of conservative political ideology in our country, but in reality it has become the teary-eyed, pot-bellied nostalgic former high school jock, many years past his heyday, but still longing for the good ole days when he was strong and fast and quick and heroic. It ruins and tears down and obstructs without adding anything substantive to the commonwealth.

If you don’t know where you are you cannot even begin to get where you want to go.

You reckon the database is not current?

As much as many of us would like to return to a different and perhaps more pleasant time, nostalgia never makes for good politics or good policy. Ozzie and Harriet was a great television show, not a national destiny. The culture and climate of post-WWII American is, and maybe always was, a figment – a figment whose decline and absence produces fury and outrage and avalanches of ain’t-it-awfulism and makes Sarah Palin a millionaire.

I miss those days. I grew up in them and was a beneficiary of them. But I can’t go back no matter how badly I miss them. They just aren’t there anymore whether I like it or not.  There are days when I wake up in the bunk of my truck and don’t know where I am, but I can figure it out and get on the right road to get me where I need to be.  Once you get a handle on where you are you can find your path.