What Can I Say? I Am My Father's Son

     Like most boys, I grew up idolizing my father. Strike that, I grew up idolizing what my father did for a living. I would revel in awe when he told me stories of the places he had been to, the things he had built, and the experiences he had. The people in his stories became legendary characters to me.
     Most kids would be impressed by another's father who was a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, etc. Those professions are pretty impressive, but to me, nothing could top what my Daddy did for a living. In the wintertime, he would spend month building ice roads over the frozen Arctic Ocean. In the summer time, he would construct gravel pads on the barren tundra. In my mind, my father was a great Arcitc adventurer like Richard Byrd, Ernest Shackleton, Robert Peary, and Roald Amundsen. He was always out on the edge of the world performing some sort of spectacular feat.
     As young idol-worshipers do, I imitated my hero. My mother's garden became my frontier. My army of Tonka toys set about bringing progress to the wilds of the turnip patch. Rows were widened and smoothed into roads. Mounds became impromptu drill sites.
     When the snows came, my fleet was out making sure the trail to the dog kennel was open. I was determined that mother nature would not impede my dog McD from traversing the backyard. I spent many long hours braving the cold and dark to fight back the drifting snow with a one-foot dozer blade.
     As my childhood turned into my adolescence, the Tonkas gave way to footballs, hockey skates, and books. I stopped dreaming of being a pioneer on the last great frontier and longed for the "professional" life.
      The one genetic trait my father hoped I would never realize brought my "professional" pursuits to a halt in my original senior year of college. A drunken mess, I found myself bouncing around from one worthless job to another. When things finally started to straighten out, I found myself driving big trucks and working with construction machinery.
      When I started truck driving, my imagination came back to me. When I was hauling beer, I was always imagining it was something else, something more important. I started moving rental equipment around the Phoenix area, and soon imagined that I was hauling my Dad's gigantic machinery around the Arctic Slope.
      In the Fall of 2008, my world came to a halt alongside the U.S. economy. With no houses to build, builders quit renting equipment from my company. With the loss of business came the loss of employees, and I was one of them.
     My Dad made some phone calls. Two months later I was living my childhood dream, for real. I may not be doing the same things Dad did, but I'm definitely in the same ballgame. Just like me, I doubt my son's friends have fathers who have driven 300,000 pound trucks across frozen oceans, watched the Northern Lights illuminate the largest drilling rigs on the planet, or seen 4000 caribou in a single hour.

49. Selling Storyboards

Author's Note:
This posting is a bit of a two-for deal. I wrote the office dialog in an airport lounge two days ago, while the personal narrative came up today while I was writing my Writer's Journal entries and staring at snowdrifts this afternoon.

     "Look, I just don't know what to make of this," the agent said.
     "What can't you make of it? It's my memoirs," I replied.
     "It's just… this doesn't really fit into any category that I'm comfortable dealing with," the agent said, running his hand across his bald head.
     I looked around the office. After months of sending out my pseudo-manuscript, I'd finally been given an audience with a literary agent, only to have him tell me he was unsure of my work.
     What is this guy doing? If he doesn't think he can sell this, why the hell did he call me down here?
   

      I began to think that perhaps I should just call it quits. I'd been trying to get my story out there forever. I started my quest with a screenplay. It received a couple of interested nods from the movie making crowd, and I'd had some meetings to discuss it. As part of the process, I needed to develop my tale into storyboards: rough, cartoon-like sketches to represent different scenes. I spent quite a lot of time coming up with my storyboards, but I just couldn't close the deal.
     "Your work doesn't seem all that visual," was a theme that seemed to come up constantly when producers would turn my storyboards down. "It all seems like something that would be better represented in a book than a movie."
     Every time, in the end, I wound up at home, staring at my storyboards. I'd spent so much of my time over the past few years trying to relate my unique life story to be represented in film. Now I was being told that my representation was not visual enough for Hollywood. Soon, after a  healthy dose of marijuana and the movie 300, I got the notion that I would shop them around to literary agents, hoping that I could get them published as a "graphic novel".

    

     "Ever since that damned swords and sandals movie with all the man-ass and dudes running around looking like cut-up show cats, everyone's been thinking they can pass anything off as a 'graphic novel' and make millions of dollars publishing it," the agent started in.
     "Truth is, graphic novels are a niche item that tries to bridge two worlds and ends up as little more than a series of cartoon notes. It's like Kurt Vonnegut once said about semicolons, 'They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing'," the smartly-dressed agent said, his voice rising.
     "You might be wondering, why have I brought you here if I'm not interested your graphic novel? Well, because I think your story has promise. I think your sketches are worth something, but not the use you think they are worth," the agent was talking and walking across the room towards my large drawings set upon an easel in the corner.
     "I think you need to decide which way you are going to go with this. The way I see it, you've got three options. First, you can focus on your drawing skills, and learn to create works of visual are that stand on their own. Second, you can carry on making cartoons, like you're doing here, and find sub-moderate success working a niche market. Third, you can focus on developing your story from the boards and beyond the mere guttural sounds that the captions of this form afford you and really write something," the agent was looking at me with pure excitement in his face.
     "I like your story, I really do. I just think that this form of expression doesn't allow you to truly convey a message with any strong significance. You're limited in both the amount of visual and written expression you can convey in each cell. I think you would be better served to write your story, and perhaps, use an image here or there to show a more difficult to describe concept."
     I was starting to feel what the agent was telling me. I think I had been more excited about being able to put "graphic novelist" by my name than anything else. In reality, all I was trying to do was sell my old storyboards. If I came to see things his way, that the graphic novel tries to bridge a gap, but falls short, leaving the reading stuck in the middle wishing he was on either side, anywhere but the middle.

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"Graphic novels" make me feel like I am being cheated out of something. What is that something? It's the experience of soaking up pages of words that describe something. It is something I must visualize in my mind. It is the joy of reading

I can see why this form of expression has become popular. It's just a part of our overall culture of instant gratification. The journey is no longer what's appreciated, only the destination.

When I read line after line of prose, my mind imagines real people and real scenarios, vividly. When denied this beautiful process,  I will always imagine the two-dimensional world of the childish drawings that are presented to me.

Like text message shorthand and expressions limited to one-hundred and forty character "Tweets", graphic novels represent a laziness that is leading to a wholesale erosion of the written word.

45. Over the Road OCD

     Truck driving taught me compulsion. For the most part, my private and professional lives have always been a scattered mess. There was very little, if any, organization or structure in my world. One look at the pile of clothes scattered on my bed would be an indication of things. I had enough presence of mind to wash my garments, but lacked the discipline motivation to put them away properly.
      All that changed when I was granted a Class A Commercial Drivers License. There may be some truth in the stereotypes about the people that operate the biggest vehicles on the road, but one thing they aren't is disorganized. Lazy disorganization in this particular line of would, at best, result in an incorrect delivery or a fine from the DOT. In the worst case scenario, it could lead to a catastrophic accident, possibly resulting in death. People that can't keep organized don't keep jobs driving trucks very long.
      I learned the attention to detail at my first driving job, delivering beer for a Phoenix-based distributor. Everything had to be accounted for, right down to the plastic pallets the product was stacked on. Coming up short or making paperwork errors meant losing out on bonus incentives, losing money. When the base salary is only twelve hundred dollars every two weeks, the added four hundred a month in possible bonuses is more than just a luxury, it's a necessity. Say what you will about the inherent unfairness of taking food off someone's table based on just one clerical error, it's still legal in Arizona. I had to learn really quick to make sure my paperwork was in order after every shift.
     Paperwork doesn't just apply to cargo, there's also a strong regulatory element. Show up at a scale house with the wrong set of permits, registration, or insurance cards; have a nice fine. Forget to fill out a pre-trip inspection, enjoy watching the DOT man fill out a ticket. Make a mistake on your hours of service logs, enjoy getting shut down for a few days and pay more money in fines. Carrying hazardous materials, better have the right manifests and placards on your vehicle. Not only will you face a big fine, but if you truck runs off the road and spills a mislabeled load, people could get hurt or killed responding in the wrong manner.
     When I left the world of nice and neat palletized goods, I was introduced to a whole new world of compulsion: flatbedding. Where the man or woman pulling a box trailer or a tanker has the fortune of having their load secured by the vehicle itself, the flatbedder has to come up with a acceptable means on the spot. Chains, binders, straps, tarps, decking; these are the flatbedder's paint, brushes, chisels, canvas, and marble by which he conducts his art.
     It is a compulsive art trying to finagle one's way through a sea of codes to make sure something as simple as a warehouse forklift is correctly secured to a deck. What's the weight of said forklift? If it's under ten thousand pounds, it only needs to be secured with two chains, otherwise it's four. But wait, what grade are those chains? Grade 70 three-eights inch? No problem then. Anything in a lower grade or size, and it's gonna be a lot more than four. Are the forks strapped down? If not, that's a ticket. Are my binders the proper grade for the chain? Nope, well that's a ticket too.
     Compulsion, attention to detail, these are things no commercial vehicle operator can do without.