The Great White Caboose

Today’s blog, begins with an excerpt:

I am the caboose of the great white American locomotive.

Whoo! Whoo!

Here, take my hand. Climb aboard. I’ll give you the tour.

Let’s start with engine.  That’s where the power is. You’re looking at history’s generator. Feel your thighs rattle like you’re straddling a jackhammer set to “thrill?” That’s 200 years plus of phallic power thrusting this sleek beast into greatness. George Washington, Tom Edison, Bill Gates, they’re the coal and steam, the insatiable hunger and the lust lunging the great white head toward the Eve of manifest destiny.

That’s one monster dynamo of locomotion! It has to be! That’s what it takes; hauling all these bloated white cargo cars at immeasurable speeds.  Don’t stand in its way! The full weight of white wrath will knock you back like a tribe of Indians—but that’s another history stop along the way.

Let’s go to the next group of cars. Here you’ll find the robber baron boxcars. They supply fuel to the white machine. They only take up a few cars, but these are the primo luxury cabins, so slip on your white gloves, and don’t even knock without donning a day coat.

The other cars? Oh, they’re loaded with the apathetic, lazy and voyeuristic masses, yearning to be carried for free by the steam of other’s greatness.

Step quickly to the caboose! The languor here is contagious!

Woah!  

Watch your step! A history hic-up, has uncoupled my great white caboose from the great white train. Quick! Wave to the baby boomers as they hurtle into the pasty sunset.  See them smile? They made the train.

The rest of us on the caboose? Take a look over my shoulder, to the barren tracks stretching to the American wasteland. That’s my future. That’s the white train legacy: a trailing generation birthed in the last car of a runaway train and raised on the promise that the tracks of the manifest blessing of the great pale birthright would go on forever.

And so it does, even if we’ve stopped.

It’s a history that was good enough for generations before, and damn-it, it would be good enough for me. If only I had made the train. If only I wasn’t the uncoupled caboose in a generation sitting dead on the tracks. Left behind to be a white dot on a statistical map.

You are here.

            Our choice is to walk the rails and hope to catch up, or strike out on our own, setting our own destiny. We chose neither of these. We chose a different path; a road less traveled by the on-the-go generations that came before. We chose to wait for another train to come along while whining about our horrible mistreatment by fate.

———

And ends with a whimper:

That caboose ending is how a happy go lucky book I began writing a few years ago started. It was good. It was true. It was exceptionally whiney.  Nobody needs that, not even the great white caboose. We need a call to action, and when I started that book, I didn’t have one. Which, seemed to prove the point I was making by writing the book, really.

But I’m a hopeful guy. I wanted a better ending, so I shelved the effort.

I was told that somebody else has since written the book, using different words. Good for him. I hope he caught the train. Me, I eventually struck out across the wasteland forging my own path.

Funny thing is that along my path I tried becoming a cog in the great machine, and the machine has found me wanting. Not because I’m some mal-shaped malcontent Robcog, but because the machine looked at my gifted teeth and said, “No, we don’t need you.”

Luckily the machine loves MyQueen more than it loves me. Still, life would be a lot easier for us if, for my part, we didn’t have to wait for the occasional writing job that paid, like desert wanderers waiting for rain.

“Oh, look, the vultures are leading us to prosperity!”

I could go back to retail and such, but MyQueen has already said, “no,” and I breathed a sigh of relief when she said it. I hate that work, but I would do it.

The pill that gags me is the big oval one that’s supposed to relieve the angst I get from failing to use the skills and training I’ve been given. 

My skills? I’ve got a face for radio, and a voice for mime. No, that’s not true. Well, not the voice part, anyway…

Back in my high school fast food days, I worked the drive through. A simple, but high pressure task for a fast food place, because there’s one row of hungry drivers needing to get back on the road before they realize the food they’ve waited for is a flat bun beef-puck and a soft drink, sans straw.  Me, I had a great voice. I worked it. Seriously, ask the ladies, they loved me, until they drove to the window and saw Opie-boy Robby. Then they felt like dirty old ladies.

“Oh my gosh, you’re young!”

“Oh yah, baby.” I’d say in my Barry White best, flipping my mullet through the windy air. Oh, ya, those women were butter baby.

I had a gift. After high school I thought I’d use it for good, in radio. I loved music; it seemed like a perfect fit. One year of broadcasting school, and four years later to complete my BA in Mass Communications, I was a trained communicator.

Then life transmitted something else.

If one excuse is a train leaving Chicago at 150 mph, and another excuse is a super-train fast thingy leaving L.A. in one flash per second, they’ll explode into nothingness somewhere around Omaha. But the bottom line is I took a different track. I used my skills in a non-traditional sense and that train hummed along pretty good until all tracks vanished.

Which left me with ten-year-old non-traditional experience baggage filled with my traditional communication skill set. So now I’m walking a wasteland trying to MacGyver my collective media skills into a career.

“I can take this microphone, switch it through a TV mixer, and take the “CNTL” key from a computer, a Photoshop image, some HTML code, and wrap it all together with three strips of duct tape…and there ya go: a career.”

I continue my free writing, which I enjoy immensely, but my years of riding the great white rails are deeply ingrained; I feel the guilt that my skills are not providing for my family. So I continue looking to other work to pay the bills. Other work that uses the skills I’ve learned over 44 years of life experience. Except when employers see my non-traditional experience baggage, and compare it to the traditional baggage they’re looking for, it doesn’t match. Funny, the baggage and experience always worked for me.

They got me here.

Wherever here is, I’m there, with MyQueen, and my great white caboose, snuggling together in my hand woven American Dream blanket.