For those who haven’t read these yet, please enjoy this small and incomplete selection of my various writings on the world of trucking.
The first time I found myself on the non-Facebook Internet was as the subject of an 'Exit Interview' over at the geography nerd website, Atlas Obscura . Sarah Laskow did an admirable job trying to extract my life story out of me over some pre-Zoom audio chat, and then transcribed it quite well. This was in 2015, when I was stuck in Melbourne because of two bureaucratic limbo situations, which I hope to erase from my memory.
The guys and gals without peer over at The Glibertarians gave me my first opportunity to wax poetic on the situation truckers find themselves in, way back in 2017. Many thanks to Old Man With Candy, Swiss Servator, and the rest of the incorrigible degenerates over there, whom I have neglected for far too long in visiting. If I ever get a *real* job, I hope to resume commenting. After a brief history of trucking, the piece describes a day in the life of a trucker subject to The ELD Palantir, and generally fulminates at the mandate which brought this upon us.
In a further effort to get my life story out of me, ‘Long Haul’ Paul Marhoeffer over at Overdrive Online conducted this interview with me on an old fashioned telephone. Paul is a wonderful musician, trucker, and story teller - you may have heard of him from the 'Over The Road' Podcast, a wonderful 8 part series documenting life as trucker in America today. Oddly enough, ‘Over The Road’ did amazingly well with a certain type of NPR listening podcast nerd, and made almost no penetration into the world of truckers at all - a fate I hope this Substack avoids. I have invited Paul to be a contributor here - stay tuned!
As a man of strong opinions and many experiences, I often feel that trucking should be structured much differently than it currently is - from how drivers are treated, to how many trailers we are allowed to pull - much of which rests on questions of efficiency. The wonderful Micah Meadowcroft over at The American Conservative magazine invited me to share these opinions in this missive here, amusingly titled "Lighten The Truckers Load".
During the past two and a half years of troubles, the plight of those members of the working class who keep afloat our material reality has (finally) come into focus.
Oren Cass and his crew at American Compass hosted myself and a bunch of other working class people to write essays from our positions as Essential Workers during the Wuhan Plague Overreaction. When I was still hauling propane, I used this opportunity to lambaste the "Email Job Caste", hiding behind their laptops while the rest of us kept their houses warm and refrigerators full. It should be noted that my contribution was included in a print version collection of these "Edgerton Essays" which were distributed to every single member of Congress. Never before has a group of people so deserving of the lash been subject to the views of one single trucker; I am very proud of this.
And from DC Think Tanks to the very edgiest of edgy, dissident emprasario Mark Granza had me opine on what I call "The War on Truckers" in his fabulous magazine, IM1776. The format could have been longer, but I give a general overview of what truckers have been up against, both legislatively and culturally, over the past 45ish years in America.
My latest piece appears in the pages of the fresh and new Compact Magazine, billing itself as a ‘Radical American Journal’. I’m in good company, given they host some of my favourite writers, including Malcolm Kyeyune, Geoff Shullenberger, and the hottest Marxist to ever grace humanity, Ashley Frawley. In the piece titled "Give Truckers a Break", I argue that truckers are the first to ‘feel the lash’ of the surveillance state, and the tender mercies of our regulatory overlords, and that, at very least, we should be compensated properly for our troubles.
Some of you who know me well enough may have made it this far into the list and asked, “What about your defense of The Freedom Convoy?” or all of the podcasts I have been on; given that I believe this issue deserves much more explanation, I am reserving it a separate post.
There is more writing for other outlets in the works, please stay tuned here, and don’t forget to subscribe and tell your Friends Of The Road, as Ray from The Trailer Park Boys might say.
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This link seems to be broken, where you say, "gave me my first opportunity to wax poetic on the situation truckers find themselves in, way back in 2017."