First you say it...

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission


I spent my first few years out of school working for various auto parts warehouses. This was after two years of college, though to say I went to college implies that I actually attended a class now and then. No. Thus, I got jobs delivering auto parts around the greater Phoenix area.

I started with ___ , driving a Ford F150. It would do 90mph in a pinch.

Don’t ask.

I was assigned to shops north and west of the city; another driver was assigned to the south and east. We’d go out in the mornings, come back for lunch and then take the PM deliveries. After these were done, I’d come back, get the packages for out of town deliveries and take then to the Greyhound and Trailways depots.

This occasionally made for a very tight schedule, especially if I was to get back in time to be home by 6PM.(ish) So sometimes I cut corners. Literally.

For example: I came to an intersection (in a very industrial area) where the road crossed train tracks. The lights were flashing, the bells ringing, but there were no barricades at this intersection. The rails ran around a blind corner, but even at the ripe old age of 20 I wasn’t stupid enough to jump in front of a train.

I sat there like any law-abiding citizen while the train lumbered by. It was just a single engine, no cars - probably on it’s way to a yard somewhere, so the wait was minimal. As it went past, the intersection warning lights and bells kept going, as they will for a minute or two after a train passes.

The train was gone; I drove on.

The idea of a second train never even occurred to me.

Bill Cosby once commented that there was no reason to wear clean underwear in case of an accident, because “first you say it, then you do it”. Had it occurred to me what it was I was doing at the time, I probably would have proven his point. Ok, maybe I was stupid enough to dive out in front of a train. Worse, I was apparently too stupid to realize it until several minutes later.

How close was I to this moving iron mountain? I saw the expression of the guy driving the train. I’m pretty sure he proved Mr. Cosby’s point.

*********************************

One of the greatest miracles of my life happened in this truck. I had a delivery to a new store. Since they hadn’t opened yet, they needed everything. Literally. I had boxes piled higher than the cab, all tied, taped and strapped down.

The delivery took all afternoon. By the time I was done, I had 15 minuets to get back to the warehouse, gather the bus shipments and get them there or they would miss the bus. I was in a hurry. A big hurry.

I was also on the other side of the city. At rush hour.

I drove down the freeway (at that time there was only one) going about 80mph. I was in the left lane (remember that, there’s a quiz later) trying to move over because my exit was coming up. The guy next to me in the center lane was driving right on my fender and I couldn’t get past him. I was 20 years old; slowing down and getting behind him never even entered my head.

I kept trying to get in front of this @#!@ guy, but couldn’t quite get there. I kept looking over my right shoulder, judge the distance, whipping my head back around to look in front of me, and spinning back to look over my shoulder. I was up to 85, 90mph and as I whipped around to the front again, I discovered that traffic had stopped. The car in front of me was no more than six feet away at a dead stop. I was doing over 90.

Now, I have written many things here that are mostly true, or all true will a little hyperbole thrown in for flavor. I swear that the following happened just as I relay it here:

I sat straight in the seat and grabbed the wheel with both hands in a 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock position. I straightened my arms, locked my elbows and stood on the brake with all my considerable bulk, closed my eyes and said, “Please God, don’t let me kill anyone else”, and waited for the inevitable crash.

I knew, in that instant, I knew that my life had ended and the very best I could hope for was that my stupidity wouldn’t claim anyone else’s life.

The grinding off metal, the shattering of glass – never came. I still had my eyes clenched tightly shut, praying that same prayer over and over when it occurred to me that I had been waiting an awfully long time to die. I finally dared to open my eyes to find I was at a perfect stop with two feet to spare.

Now here’s the kicker – ready? I was in the middle lane. Remember the quiz earlier? I had gone from the far left lane at 90+mph and with both arms LOCKED in position, managed to change lanes and come to a complete stop with my eyes closed!

I swear this is a true story with no embellishment.

I would like to think that God saved me for a reason, but I am also forced to admit the possibility that it wasn’t ME He saved for a reason. Still, if it was me, or I happened to be close enough to someone else who has a manifest destiny, I’m just glad stupidity isn’t necessarily fatal.

As I sat there in traffic, trying to determine what had happened, I noticed the woman sitting in the car next to me. Her expression was like she’d just the red sea part when she’d been standing just a little close to the shore.

I regret never having asked her what happened, but I did do the next best thing.

I smiled real big and gave her a jaunty wave.

By the way, Bill Cosby’s right.

On the habits of the gym-crawling-mate-shopper

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

Yesterday was cleavage day at the gym. This festival is not restricted to a particular body type. Or gender. Men and women of all ages, shapes, sizes and chest hair content come to participate.

To enter, you only need a low cut top that shows off your … current pectoral development progress. In some cases, the entries are more appealing than appalling; however, these instances are in the severe minority. It’s not a matter of how much extra weight you carry - after all, even attractive cleavage is nothing more than a a pound or so of fat, what really matters seems to be in the way it’s presented.

For instance, if you have a chest full of hair, it’s really better if you’re male. This is not a forgone conclusion, nor is it a restriction from participation in the cleavage day festival.

If your breasts are bigger than Dolly Parton’s, it’s probably better to be female. This too is not a forgone conclusion, nor is it a restriction from participation.

There are some for whom cleavage day is a daily occurrence. These people generally go to the gym for other reasons than exercise. They still workout, but only to the point were they have an attractive sheen of mist about them. The gym is the natural place for them to find a physically fit someone of the opposite sex.

Attracting these potential mates requires showing to the sort of person they seek that one is a worthy conquest. In this regard, tight, revealing clothing acts much like the plumage of a peacock to their quarry.

This is not a special occasion like cleavage day; rather it is a twist on the most ancient ritual, the mating dance. Where birds may puff and twitter, they bounce on treadmills. Where a coyote may bray at the moon to call his mate, they may grunt and groan under the weight of lead barbells. These actions are quite analogous.

The ones who arrive to mate-shop stand out sharply. In women, they wear very little and exercise like they actually need to. If they did, they wouldn’t be caught dead in anything that revealing. The mate-shopping woman will normally gravitate to the treadmill or the stair stepper, as these machines induce the particular style of mating dance common to the gym-crawling-mate-shopper. Most of this dance takes place at the chest level. This is commonly called the “cleavage flounce”.

Gym-crawling-mate-shopping males are only slightly harder to spot. These cannot be defined as the ones who try to steal glimpses at the “cleavage flounce” females. Every male in the gym is engaged in this activity. Neither can they be categorized as the ones who stare openly. Anyone who acknowledges the flounce is removed or insulted/rejected/avoided by the female.

This selection process insures a line of polite humans who are more and more capable of looking without appearing to look. This implies a sort of natural selection.

I have no idea how that might be a survival trait.

Gym-crawling-mate-shopping males are typically those who wear “muscle shirts”. Also called armpit shirts, they are the ones that look like a grocery store bag, and have no function other than to cover the abdomen.

These shirts enhance the chest and upper arms, thus expressing to the potential female “Hey, check me, I’m buff”.

“Muscle shirts” are not limited to the gym-crawling-mate-shopping males, however. This is one of reasons they are harder to spot in the general herd. These shirts are also worn by men whose message could only be “Hey, check me out; I’m wearing an undershirt”.

There are also those who signal the “hey, check me out; I have a lot of hair in my arm pits.” Strangely, this last group seems to be convinced that excessive pit hair is a “babe magnet”.

Another indicator of the gym-crawling-mate-shopping male is the waiting period. When a gym-crawling-mate-shopping male sits at one of the weight machines, he will wait until a gym-crawling-mate-shopping female sits in a position where she can plainly see the vast amount of weights go up and down.

The gym-crawling-mate-shopping male believes that if you lift a thousand pounds, and no gym-crawling-mate-shopping females see it, you’ve only wasted sweat. The gym-crawling-mate-shopping male should not be confused with the gym-crawling-ego-massager who waits for another male to notice how much he can lift. This last is not (usually) for mating purposes, but rather an alpha-male challenge.

A quick note: when in the locker room, there is no alpha-male challenge. In the locker room, all males fixedly stare at walls, lockers, the floor and other inanimate objects to avoid even the remote possibility of being thought to be looking at the sweaty, hairy, out of shape, pale white guy stripping next to you. This social fear is probably left over from the common trauma known as “high school gym class”.

There aren’t any real cases of alpha-female. Certainly there are instances of female gym-crawling-ego-massagers, but when the females compete, it’s usually for a reason: getting on the treadmill or bicycle in front of the one television that isn’t showing the sports channel or competing over the cute guy in the muscle shirt (no, the one without the armpit hair). The gym-crawling-ego-massager male will compete in the alpha-male contest out of pure instinct.

There are many different types of people who converge at the gym. Not all are looking to mate, nor are all of them looking to attract someone else at the gym. Often there will be those who are there to attract the attention of someone who isn’t at the gym. Sometimes, they seek to attract the mate they already have at home.

There are those who arrive for medical reasons, for example - having been informed by a doctor that they need to exercise. This subgroup may be hard to identify, but identification is not required. Typically no one in this subgroup ever comes back.

There are those who simply defy rational explanation. For example, the woman who started up a treadmill and ran it at 10 mile per hour for 15 minutes straight - without ever once getting on it. She spent the entire time next to the treadmill, on the floor, stretching. When she was finished, she turned off the treadmill and left the building. It was the machine and the machine alone that got all the exercise.

There is a gentleman who gets on the treadmill everyday and walks at a good, brisk pace, though he doesn’t run. This may not seem unusual at the surface, but in this instance he walks backwards on the tread. This could be indicative of attracting a mate, or it could be a bizarre alpha-male challenge. A sort of “look what I can do” that may go all the way back to that most primitive time – junior high.

The machines in the gym have begun adapting to the environment into which they have been consigned. The other day a gym-crawling-mate-shopping male was physically thrown off of a treadmill. The machine ejected him, possibly for excessive armpit hairs, and he was thrust into a Stairmaster which, in turn, pitched him into the nearest wall.

The weight machines are a little more forgiving than the treadmills, Stairmasters, bicycles, etc. Weight machines seem to prefer to cause damage that won’t be felt until the next day.

The area of the gym that seems to get the most action is the little corner at the side, where for a mere $4.50, anyone – regardless of their reasoning for being there – can get a drink with enough sugar to give Al Gore ADD.

Highway to Heck

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission



        There is a road in California that goes straight from Bakersfield to absolutely nowhere, 10 miles north of San Luis Obispo. This particular stretch masquerades itself in every atlas as a winding country lane, gently meandering around a few hills and maybe a little river on it’s slow way west.
        This is how it lures its prey.
        I am sure that in a car or on a motorcycle, the drive is pleasant though somewhat narrow and twisted. This is mere speculation. The experience was quite different in a semi. Particularly memorable when hauling two flat bed trailers piled with drywall.
        I had to get to San Luis Obispo by 7:00 am to a construction site that actually needed about 500 sheets of drywall. The weight of the truck was 25,000 pounds empty, and the drywall came in at just under 54,000 pounds, putting me just under the legal limit of 80,000 pounds.
It was about 8PM when I stopped for dinner in Bakersfield.
        Side note: there is a saying “when on the road, if you want to know where to eat, go where the truckers eat”. No. Truckers eat wherever there is a parking lot big enough to park the rig. Period.
        I had just finished two rock-hard biscuits covered in lumpy grease masquerading as gravy. Looking at the atlas I saw that taking the interstate would bring me miles and miles out of my way, and I wouldn’t have gotten much, if any, sleep before I had to make the delivery.
        Then I spotted the solution. Like an insect looking at the lure of a venus flytrap I pointed and said, “that’s where I want to be.” I took off down the road anticipating an hour or two of a pleasant drive before taking a well-deserved nap.
        After the first twenty minutes or so, the realization slowly dawned that there were no other trucks on that road. After another ten minutes, I began to notice that there was no one else on that road. Blessedly oblivious to all this implied, I shrugged and settled in for the drive.
        The first sign of trouble was probably the single lane, hairpin, no warning, suicidal, widow-maker curve. The one my headlights didn’t catch until I was halfway through it. That one.
        I had already slowed down considerably by then, as the road had persisted in narrowing for some time, but 40 tons, however slowly moving still requires some effort to stop.
        A semi uses airbrakes; the tractor (the actual part where I sat) in front of the trailers generates the pressure. The tractor tends to selfishly reserve most of the pressure for itself, and sends the trailers whatever is leftover. Thus, the tractor tends to have a little bit better stopping power than the heavier and bulkier weight it’s dragging.
        Take a deck of playing cards and set it down on the top of a table. Now bump the table so that the cards lean into an angle. Now imagine that instead of cards, you’re actually looking at 54,000 pounds of drywall, each sheet arguing with its mate over which way the truck had actually meant to go.
        The straps I had tied the drywall to the trailers held, but when I was loaded up at the drywall factory, they had left a considerable gap between stacks on the trailers, giving them just enough room to rearrange themselves into a more comfortable position.
        I was now grateful for the lack of other traffic, as I had to stop in the middle of the road to tie it all back down again.
        This meant removing the tarps.
        If you have never seen a tarp used for a flatbed, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. One of these tarps could be easily used for a six room camping condo. They weigh nearly as much as a Buick and handle like lead sheets. They are put on and taken off by climbing on the top of the load (which was now roughly akin to rock climbing an avalanche while lugging this tarp) and literally kicking the end of the mess over the side of the load. Entire process on a solid load: about an hour. Entire process on a scattered load, in a totally black, moonless night in the middle of nowhere with coyotes, Gila monsters and rattlesnakes: about three.
        It was now midnight. The words “witching hour” kept running through my mind. I wanted more than anything to run back, but the road was too narrow to turn around and the shoulder was so soft I would have flipped the truck had I ventured onto it. There was nowhere to go but onward. This time, I kept it to 20MPH. I still had about 80 miles to go. You do the math.
        Fortunately, within a few minutes, I no longer had to worry about a soft shoulder on the road. Now there was no shoulder. I had climbed Mount Olympus. I call it this not because it was so grand, but because the road hadn’t widened any more than 8½ feet wide and there was neither guardrail nor shoulder nor anything else but air between me and a drop of about 35,000 feet. It could have been ten feet, it could have been 50,000 - there was no way to know in that stygian darkness. Besides ... the only difference would have been how long I would have had to scream before I hit.
        Did I mention that the width of a semi is 8 feet? I had three inches on each side to spare. I was going slowly enough now that I didn’t even disturb the vultures gathered on my truck in anticipation of breakfast.
        At about 3AM, I had been bathed in sweat for so long I ran out. I had been climbing that winding-sudden-death trail for so long, airplanes were passing below me. Even the vultures were getting bored. But the moment they had been awaiting finally arrived: There was a hairpin turn - without any shoulder.
        As I remember it, it was like the road stretched out over the void of space. There was nothing on either side, and a rather high penalty for mistakes.
        The truck I drove actually consisted of three parts: the tractor and the two trailers. In many cases this makes the turning radius smaller. Saying smaller for a semi is like saying you got hit with a low yield nuclear weapon. You have to drive forward quite a ways before you can start a turn, and there wasn’t much forwards to have.
        There is a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes, and I had a sudden rush of religious fervor when I cam to this turn. To this day, I don’t remember getting through it, but I do remember it was nearly dawn by the time I did.
        I started going back down hill after that, the little blacktop-covered-deer-trail never widened nor grew any shoulders, but somehow the idea of going downhill make a difference.
        Finally, as dawn streaked across the sky, I ended up on a flat surface. Not only flat, but also so much wider than my truck, I felt I could finally breath again. I got out for the sole purpose of pealing my hands off of the steering wheel and ripping the shirt I wore off the back of the seat. The vultures flew away, disgusted with my success. I was saved!
As I got out, I realized that I was parked on a bridge. To call this engineering afterthought a bridge is only to acknowledge that there was running water beneath it. One could easily give the same high sounding name to a piece of cardboard.
This structure was a simple cement slab, spanning a rather energetic river. That was all. I could only pray it was reinforced.
        All 80,000 pounds of my vehicle was centered on the very middle of this thin slab. The vultures came back. This time they brought a bottle of wine.
        Getting off the bridge was the only time I exceeded 40MPH the entire trip.
        I had to climb back up to get to San Luis Obispo, but by now there were so many trees that I was sheltered on the cliff side. These same trees, while tall enough to ignore cars, were not tall enough to avoid the windshield of the semi that plowed between them. Still, it was daylight, so I was doing better.
        Until opposing traffic started showing up.
        There were about six cars all told, each one voluntarily drove into a ditch. I would like to think most of them did so out of a sense of generosity, allowing me room to pass.
        I suppose complete terror and surprise could have played a part too.
        I emerged on state rout 101, a sensible road with four lanes and a shoulder wide enough to park on while I tried to remember how to breathe.
        I called my dispatcher when I made the delivery and told him of my harrowing adventures, the disgruntled vultures, the bridge, driving through outer space, and the horrible night I endured. I added harmony and background violins to my sad tale of great woe and ultimate manly driving prowess. I finished my epic, prepared for anything he would tell me.
        Or so I thought.
        All he said was “Ok, I have another load for you to pick up. It’s in Bakersfield.”