Introduction I Suppose

I know what you’re all thinking… Brian McMahon? Truck Driving? WHY? Some of my Springfield people are rolling their eyes. I know for a fact my Chambana friends are cheering me on. WADDUP URBANA!!!

Don’t you know how hard that’ll be!?

Why!?

Aren’t you going to get bored!?

Keep asking questions and you’ll see me bored (YAWN).

Yes! Truck driving! That’s what I’m doing. After five years with ‘my nose in the books.’ 160 credits down, I feel just as lost and incompatible with practical America. I’m a young dude still confused with has unrealistic dreams of filmmaking and mountains of student debt. How does one navigate with the impractical compass!?

Last fall I was hiking the beaten trail my peers of a privileged class are all too familiar with. The hike of my college education was coming to an end.  ‘Real life’ was on a downgrade a few steps away. Getting near the water, feeling the mosquiters biting.

When are you going to get a job? What’s the plan!?

This meant interviews and haircuts. This meant walking down a route that, honestly, scared the shit out of me. Before I reach that sunlight past the trees… Should I continue this path? With an inauthentic grip on a briefcase of likely regret!?!?!?! Are there alternative options!?

Surprise! Earlier this year I found one! Actually a dear friend of mine found it for me. Yes, many of my Springfield friends are aware of the great Robert Langeiller! (Classic Robert) The journalist! Guess what! His experiment into the trucking world turned out to be a major success. He had free space to write and think on the open road! (Audiobooks! Music! Mountains! Prairies! Podcast! Texas!)

And!

He paid off his student loans within a year (This is HUGE, young AMERICA!). I can do things, really anything, without my student debt!


AND!

And!

He experienced a part of America that is irresistibly intriguing.

The distribution of food and junk to the everyday people (Hooray for my Environmental Economics degree!(hypocrite…)). From my week trip with him back in March, I was able to see what he called “the space behind the walls.” Piles on uneaten cereal unable to biodegrade. Plastic bags within piles of cinder blocked paper plates and plastic cups, next to coal run power plants. All from the view of the worst carbon creating big rig on the road. Real America, that’s where I’ll be.

You want a hint of what America/ this voyage looks like? Go to the DMV, go to Rural King or Target. ORRRRR, Follow me on this journey!

Remember to drive safe. Don’t text and drive!

-Brian

(First poem I was assigned to memorize - 7th grade English class)

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.