The Long Road Home

There’s a saying: “You can’t go home again.” Yorkshire wrote about the emotionalist without convictions from the Old Country who found she couldn’t go home again. The resident fifty-dollar-wordsmith (he’s very good with his fifty dollar words) wrote about how the emotionalist emotionalizer tried to rationalize her rationalizations (I’ll leave the big words to the one who is so good with them, heh). Well, my daughter went home again, after 5.5 years in the Army and 15 months in Iraq. And she agrees, you can never really go home again. Everything has changed. Or, like she said, it’s not that everything has changed necessarily, especially in hick-town fly-over country. Sometimes everything has, indeed, changed. Sometimes, it’s that nothing has changed, except for the one who is trying to return. In my daughter’s case, she had changed dramatically and she returned to find everyone she knew from home to be in their same ruts. Floyd still sat in front of the barber shop with next to no customers. Barney still kept his lone bullet in his shirt pocket. Otis was still a drunk. But Laura… Laura had life experiences that forced her to be a different person and made her Rockwell portrait of our hometown completely out of place with reality.

I’m home again. More accurately, I’m in my daughter’s house, having no home of my own. I pay her rent to be able to claim this as my home. But don’t feel too bad for me. I live in my truck. And I’m satisfied with that, for now. See, I have a plan, and that plan requires me to be on the road as much as is possible.

Since March 15, 2013, I had spent a total of 62 hours in my hometown: 30 hours once, 20 hours another time, and 12 hours the third time home. That is, until yesterday. I’m spending yesterday, today, tomorrow at home, leaving out Saturday morning. And I’m really only home now in order to complete an application for a US Passport. I’m just extending my stay, and losing money while doing it.

It costs me about 800 dollars a week to keep up with my truck, if I don’t turn the key to the ignition. So, it’s best that I keep my truck rolling. And my plans of owning a fleet and semi-retiring early require that I keep rolling and maximizing my earnings potential. And that’s what I have been doing.

I leased my truck on June 1, 2013. Since then, I have traveled just over 260,000 miles in my truck and purchased just under 34,000 gallons of fuel, all while training tomorrow’s truck drivers today. I voluntarily stayed on the road for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Easter, Memorial Day, etc, etc. More miles, longer trips, quicker re-loads mean maximized profitability. And means a better opportunity to quit driving altogether more quickly, which is my ultimate goal: I sit at the house and let other drivers make me money. How anti-socialist of me. How American Dream of me. How “corporate shill” (something some clown socialist on Hot Air called me) of this “corporate owner”.

Truth be told, I’m one of the laziest people you will ever meet. And constantly running, constantly rolling, never going home is the ultimate in lazy. It means I can sooner quit working and still living the good life.

But yeah, this retirement community masquerading as a small city is more undesirable that I’ve been gone so much and so long. It feels dreary, too tightly squeezed (after driving across west Texas, west Nebraska, Wyoming, etc), too je ne sais quoi. I spent over 44 years in this town, but it doesn’t feel like home.

It may be emotionalist, and I’m much more into logical than emotionalist, but there it is. I came back, but I’m not home. It just doesn’t have the home feel. The cab and sleeper of my truck has more of a home feel than this place.