I had some personal business I needed to conduct in the next state over. It was a good excuse to get out of the house and see how the world beyond my local area was doing. The trip was 300+ miles, round-trip, mostly all interstates and toll routes. Started out early in the morning and didn't get home until after 10PM. The first thing that struck me? The number of 18-wheelers on the rode.
On the drive to my destination there was a definite lack of passenger vehicles -- nowhere near what you'd normally expect to see. I suspect that's because those who can are still working from home and a lot of people are not travelling on vacation. Most of the traffic I encountered was due to trucks. There are trucks EVERYWHERE. I saw multiple Amazon trucks, Aldi food trucks, a truck loaded with crates of apples, trucks transporting gasoline, even a truck loaded down with a shipment of plywood. There was definitely no lack of trucks on the highways.
I must admit to being surprised, as we're being led to believe that there are shortages of goods, truckers who are losing out because they're not jabbed, not enough truckers available to haul, etc., etc.
As surprising as all of this was, I was even more stunned on the drive home. The highways were teeming with trucks. At night, they're about the only thing on the road -- encountered very few passenger cars. When it got late, the rest stops were packed with truckers laying over for the night. Trucks were parked in every possible parking spot and every available space. Even saw truckers pulled off along the sides of the roads for the night.
I don't know what was in all of these trucks, but there's definitely stuff being transported somewhere. So where is it all going and what are they doing with it? In my area, I'm already having problems finding things in the stores and seeing empty shelves. Things are getting curiouser and curiouser, frens.
That passage is one of my favorite of all time . . .
all in a hot and copper sky, the bloody sun at noon, right above the mast did stand, no bigger than the moon
day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean
water water everywhere and all the boards did shrink, water water everywhere nor any drop to drink
Wonderful! A fellow English/Literature major, perhaps? This brings back an amazing memory: my youngest was a senior in high school a couple years ago, and she competed in speech in the poetry event. She performed the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner... it brought goosebumps to my skin watching and listening to her. Thanks for sharing the quote.
Side note on Coleridge... he was a laudanum addict and frequently wrote his poems following a "dream" from his trips. It is said that when he wrote Xanadu that someone woke him up toward the end of his dream and he could not recapture how it ended, so what we read as Xanadu today is really a truncated piece of the intended work.
Most of the Romantics Era artists (poets like Coleridge, musicians like Berlioz, etc.) were massively stoned when creating. Also the days of the Opium dens, etc.
Ah, more interesting-but-useless information to clutter up my brain. My family refuses to play Trivial Pursuit with me, and I occasionally get an intellectual rush when I can get the Final Jeopardy answer and none of the contestants can. SCORE!!
Yes! And TNBanjoMan alluded to the poem Kubla Khan, which I thought was fascinating... the idea of composing so many lines while in a drugged creative stupor. I wrote a short story about that incident, where I invented a character who interrupted Coleridge to talk about his accounts in town, preventing the poem from being completed.
Damn whoever woke him. I need to know the ending!!!
not an English major but I did memorize that passage in high school and did a bit of poetry reading in competitions : )
I wish I could have done that in school. I don't have the capacity to memorize thngs, though. It gave me so much joy to see my kiddos do it...they inherited their mother's genes in the memorization department.