Eighteen Wheeler Quotes

The way I see it, living in New Jersey is a challenge, what with the toxic waste and the eighteen wheelers and the armed schizophrenics." Connie Rosolli

He’d actually hit me! It didn’t matter that hitting me wasn’t really like hitting a regular girl and I’d be completely healed in a matter of hours. I was still a freaking girl, and he damned well knew it. I’d just have to hit him back. With a lead pipe. Or an eighteen-wheeler.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

The difference between forgetting something and not remembering it is big enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through.

In the hush of the emptied campus, he could faintly hear the mightiness of Illinois, the rumble of a freight train, the moan of eighteen-wheelers, coal transported from the south, car parts from the north, fattened livestock and staggering corn yields from the middle, all roads leading to the broad-shouldered city on the lake.

Otis, on the other hand, didn't miss home a bit. He had always hated the stairs in our house in Massachusetts. He was now five years old and very large for a golden retriever. I thought he was fat, but Bruce insisted he was just "big-boned". Either way, climbing the steep stairs at home was a challenge. Whenever Bruce and I went upstairs, Otis would sit near the bottom step, carefully calculating whether we would be on the second floor long enough to make it worthwhile to heave himself up the stairs. And on the way down the stairs, Otis was like a fully loaded eighteen-wheeler barreling down a steep hill. We just got out of his way. But in the new Washington apartment building, Otis had an elevator. As far as he was concerned, life was sweet.

On my drive from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah, I passed an eighteen-wheeler with mud flaps on the rear tires. The flaps were black and featured the silver silhouette of a very statuesque naked woman. I’m sure you’ve seen this artistic expression in your travels. I wondered: has this ploy ever worked, like some kind of perverted fishing lure?

Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.

Everyone was glaring at them. The pressure just popped those two women out the door like corks. I wanted to run out after them and beg them to take me with them. And all the while I was thinking, Oh shit, that’s gonna be me.” Angie shook her head. “It’s tough when you see it coming, ain’t it?” “Yeah,” I said, “it’s like driving on a single-lane highway and seeing an eighteen-wheeler heading right for you.

My job title was youth advocate. My approach was unconditional positive regard. My mission was to help the girl youth succeed in spite of the unspeakably harrowing crap stew they’d been simmering in all of their lives. Succeeding in this context meant getting neither pregnant nor locked up before graduating high school. It meant eventually holding down a job at Taco Bell or Walmart. It was only that! It was such a small thing and yet it was enormous. It was like trying to push an eighteen-wheeler with your pinkie finger. I was not technically qualified to be a youth advocate. I’d never worked with youth or counseled anyone. I had degrees in neither education nor psychology. I’d been a waitress who wrote stories every chance I got for most of the preceding years. But for some reason, I wanted this job and so I talked my way into it. I wasn’t meant to let the girls know I was

It’s actually entertaining.” “You say that like you’re surprised.” He looked like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler, and I realized I’d really put him on the spot. What could he say to that? Based on our numerous conversations, I was under the impression communication wasn’t your strong suit? “Never mind,” I said, taking the steam kettle off the stove and filling it with water. I was a British-breakfast-tea-in-the-morning girl, and I made it using a real teapot and everything. “I’m not fishing for compliments.” Okay, I was a little. “I just…I just didn’t expect it to be so funny,” Jason said. “You wanted a serious column about hot dogs?

Code Blue! We’re losing him!” The EMTs hustled the gurney containing Erik Dawson’s broken body into the operating room where the surgical team waited. The nursing staff literally ripped his clothes off as they worked to stabilize him. “What do we have here?” the lead surgeon asked. His assistant didn’t bother to look up as she answered, “Auto accident. An eighteen- wheeler smashed his car into a guardrail.” The lead surgeon whistled through his teeth. “It’s a miracle he’s still breathing. Let’s keep him that way.” As the surgical team moved into action with skill born of practice, Erik drifted on the fringes of consciousness. Erik’s thoughts raced. What? Where? Anesthesia put him under, but as the doctors began their work and his parents prayed fervently in the waiting room, Erik spasmed and stopped breathing. Family Matters, from Home Again

Well, back in ’94, it wasn’t a truck driving, but rather idling on Guinevere, on the back side of Gethsemane Baptist Church, the very day Deanne went missing. And it wasn’t an eighteen-wheeler, but a van with a white guy, midthirties, sitting at the wheel. Same thing last year, a white van, idling on the edges of the neighborhood the day Tina Wells disappeared.

Reacher kept the guy talking all the way through Minnesota, which he figured was his job, like human amphetamine. Anything to keep the guy awake. Anything to avoid the old joke: I want to die peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa. Not screaming in terror like his passengers. The resulting conversation spiralled off in all kinds of different directions. Institutional injustices in the milk business were exposed. Grievances were aired. Then the guy wanted to hear war stories, so Reacher made some up. The big truck stop came along soon enough. The guy had not been exaggerating. There was an acres- wide fuel stop, and a spreading two- storey motel a hundred yards long, and a warehouse- sized family restaurant, blazing with neon outside and fluorescence inside. There were back- to- back eighteen- wheelers wheezing in and out, and all kinds of cars and trucks and panel vans.

poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine’s Day, about

Daniel and the Pelican As I drove home from work one afternoon, the cars ahead of me were swerving to miss something not often seen in the middle of a six-lane highway: a great big pelican. After an eighteen-wheeler nearly ran him over, it was clear the pelican wasn’t planning to move any time soon. And if he didn’t, the remainder of his life could be clocked with an egg timer. I parked my car and slowly approached him. The bird wasn’t the least bit afraid of me, and the drivers who honked their horns and yelled at us as they sped by didn’t impress him either. Stomping my feet, I waved my arms and shouted to get him into the lake next to the road, all the while trying to direct traffic. “C’mon beat it, Big Guy, before you get hurt!” After a brief pause, he cooperatively waddled to the curb and slid down to the water’s edge. Problem solved. Or so I thought. The minute I walked away he was back on the road, resulting in another round of honking, squealing tires and smoking brakes. So I tried again. “Shoo, for crying out loud!” The bird blinked, first one eye then the other, and with a little sigh placated me by returning to the lake. Of course when I started for my car it was instant replay. After two more unsuccessful attempts, I was at my wits’ end. Cell phones were practically non-existent back then, and the nearest pay phone was about a mile away. I wasn’t about to abandon the hapless creature and run for help. He probably wouldn’t be alive when I returned. So there we stood, on the curb, like a couple of folks waiting at a bus stop. While he nonchalantly preened his feathers, I prayed for a miracle. Suddenly a shiny red pickup truck pulled up, and a man hopped out. “Would you like a hand?” I’m seldom at a loss for words, but one look at the very tall newcomer rendered me tongue-tied and unable to do anything but nod. He was the most striking man I’d ever seen--smoky black hair, muscular with tanned skin, and a tender smile flanked by dimples deep enough to drill for oil. His eyes were hypnotic, crystal clear and Caribbean blue. He was almost too beautiful to be real. The embroidered name on his denim work shirt said “Daniel.” “I’m on my way out to the Seabird Sanctuary, and I’d be glad to take him with me. I have a big cage in the back of my truck,” the man offered. Oh my goodness. “Do you volunteer at the Sanctuary?” I croaked, struggling to regain my powers of speech. “Yes, every now and then.” In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect solution to my dilemma. The bird was going to be saved by a knowledgeable expert with movie star looks, who happened to have a pelican-sized cage with him and was on his way to the Seabird Sanctuary.

I could feel Rick’s eyes on me the whole time as I drove. I already knew what he was thinking about, but I hoped that he didn’t try to start any mess in this car, especially while my kids were with me. The weather was terrible outside, making it extremely hard for me to see. “Where you get that cash from that I saw in your purse?” Rick asked me. I cursed myself for leaving the money that Antonia had given me the other day in my purse. When we had gotten to the register so that I could pay for the groceries, I reached into my purse to retrieve my EBT card, and Rick caught a glimpse of the fifty-dollar bill that I had lying in there. “Antonia gave it to me, okay?” I told him, hoping that would be the end of this conversation. “So, you hiding money from me now, Gina? Is that what we’re doing?” he asked me. “Rick, I’m not hiding anything from you because this isn’t yours to begin with! The girls are going on a field trip next week, and it’s to pay for it!” I yelled at him. Right now, the rain had begun to pick up even harder and loud sounds of lightning and thunder were rumbling outside. “I don’t give a fuck about no damn field trip! Give me that money!” Rick yelled, trying to reach over my lap. I slapped his hands away, which caused me to swerve in the next lane and a car to blow the horn at me. “Rick, can you stop, please! You’re scaring my babies!” I yelled at him. It happened so quick. I was so distracted that I ended up running the red light and it was too late to brake because at this point, the eighteen wheeler came crashing into the right side of my little beat up Honda Civic which didn’t stand a chance. All I remember was looking in the rearview mirror and I noticed that neither Allison nor Ciara was in a seatbelt. It took seconds and their little bodies went flying out the front window and the truck had pretty much crushed into Rick and I, leaving everything to turn to black.

Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before. "Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts. "For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.

Having hit on this “theory,” I began to recognize checklists in odd corners everywhere—in the hands of professional football coordinators, say, or on stage sets. Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor. “David Lee Roth had a checklist!” I yelled at the radio.

The lottery ticket-suckers, decorticated by hope and numerology, may as well be victims of Post-Timequake Apathy. You could run them over with an eighteen-wheeler. They wouldn't care.

When I was thirteen, my father was on his way home from visiting a local nursing home when a drunk in an eighteen-wheeler hit him head on. It was then that it became evident to me that there is no God. If he did exist, then why the hell would he let that happen to my father, one of his own, a man wholly devoted to the cause? The answer of course is that there is no God. There’s only this right here, and we’re in control. Good people, bad people, drunks in eighteen-wheelers. It is what we make it, nothing more. Last I heard, the drunk got religious and became a preacher, if you can believe that one.” “I assume your father was killed?

be. It just didn’t make sense. She thought about Haley. The rumble of an eighteen-wheeler grew closer, and she opened her eyes. The rig pulled

Pike said, “Coming your way.” Pike gunned his Jeep out of the Shell station, and turned onto the highway at the first intersection. He lost sight of the van when he slowed for oncoming cars, but slalomed between traffic and quickly caught up. “Eight lengths back. I’m by a yellow eighteen-wheeler.” “Looking.” Pike was still settling into a groove when the van’s right-turn indicator flashed. They had gone less than a mile. “Blinker.” “Shit, I don’t have you.” “Las Palmas. West side.” “I’m looking.” Pike slowed to put distance between himself and the van. A horn blew behind him, then another, but Pike braked even harder, hanging back as the van turned onto a street between large, undeveloped lots. It stopped in plain sight of the highway. Pike left the highway, but turned in the opposite direction, watching the van in his sideview mirror. A hundred yards later he turned into a parking lot surrounding a home furnishings outlet. “They stopped at an empty lot.” “I

Have you been crying?” She glanced away. “I’m sorry. I had one of those days.” He put his thumb and forefinger on her chin and pulled her eyes back to his. “What’s up?” he asked softly. “Need to talk about it?” “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I know you don’t want to—” “It’s okay. What made you cry? Homesick? Lonesome?” She took a deep breath. “It was a year ago today. Snuck up on me, I guess.” “Ah,” he said. He put his big arms around her. “That would make some tears, I guess. I’m sorry, Marcie. I’m sure it still hurts sometimes.” “That’s just it—it doesn’t exactly hurt. It’s just that I feel so useless.” She leaned against him. “Sometimes I feel all alone. I have lots of people in my life and can still feel so alone without Bobby.” She laughed softly. “And God knows, he wasn’t much company.” He tightened his embrace. “I think I understand.” Yeah, she thought, he might. Here was a guy who was around people regularly, yet completely unconnected to them. She pulled away and asked, “Why did you do this?” “I thought I could clean up a little and take you somewhere.” “Wait. You didn’t think I needed you to do this for me, did you? Because of Erin?” He laughed, and she could actually see the emotion on his face, given the absence of wild beard. “Actually, if you’d asked me to, I probably wouldn’t have. You really think you can match me for stubborn? Probably not. I kept the beard because of the scar,” he said, leaning his left cheek toward her. “That, and maybe a bit of attitude of who cares?” She gently fingered the beard apart to reveal a barely noticeable scar. “It’s hardly there at all. Ian, it’s only a thin line. You don’t have to cover it. You’re not disfigured.” She smiled at him. “You’re handsome.” “Memories from the scar, probably. Anyway, tonight is the truckers’ Christmas parade. A bunch of eighteen-wheelers in the area dress up their rigs and parade down the freeway. I see it every year—fantastic. You think you’re up to it? With it being that anniversary?” “Maybe it’s a good idea,” she said. “Getting out, changing the mood.” “We’ll eat out and—” “What’s all this?” she asked, looking at the bags and boxes. “Snow’s forecast. It’s just what you do up here. Be ready. But this time I got some different things, in case you’re sick of stew. And I never do this—but you’re a girl, so I bought some fresh greens. And fresh eggs. Just enough to last a couple of days. No fridge; and they’ll freeze if we leave ’em in the shed.” “Ian, what about the bathroom? What will we do about the bathroom if there’s a heavy snow?” He laughed at her. “No problem. We’ll tromp out there fine—but I’ll shovel a path. And I’ll plow out to the road, but it’s slow going and if the snow keeps coming, it’s going to be even slower.” “Wow. Is it safe to leave tonight? For the parade? Will we get back in?” “We don’t have blizzards, Marcie. Snow falls slow, but steady. Now, I’m thinking bath day. How about you?” She put her hands on her hips and looked up at him with a glare. “All right, be very careful here. I’ve had my bath. And a hair wash. I’m wearing makeup, Ian. Jesus. You wanna try to clean me up?” His eyes grew large for a moment. Then he said. “Bath day for me, I meant. I knew. You look great.” His thumb ran along her cheek under one eye. “Just a couple of tear marks, but you can take care of that. Let me put this stuff away and get my water ready. You have something to read? Or are you looking for the thrill of your life?” “I have something to read,” she said. And, she thought, at the end of the day, they all turn out to be just men. *

We had always known that ours is a small country and that America is very big. But even as a seven-year-old, I was surprised that so many Americans has never noticed us on the map. Perhaps it's like driving a Yugo and realizing that the eighteen-wheeler can's see you.

Syn tightened his seat belt as God drove like a damn lunatic through the city. He was now on the interstate doing over a hundred miles an hour. “If the person’s already dead, what’s the damn rush, Cash?” Day grumbled, obviously not liking God’s driving either. God ignored his passengers and swerved over four lanes, cutting off an eighteen-wheeler and just missing the barrier as he took the exit ramp at seventy. “Got a real heavy foot there, don’t you Lieutenant?” Syn gritted through clenched teeth. God let out a grunt as sharp green eyes caught Syn’s reflection in the rearview mirror. Please just watch the fucking road.

…Jackson muttered to me, ‘Bedlam.’ I was beginning to understand his compulsion to solve puzzles. Every few feet, a new mystery taunted me. An eighteen wheeler lay atop a house. On my right, someone had painstakingly nailed a wedding dress and veil to a front door. A dingy sleeve waved in the wind. To my left, a dead man and young boy were positioned in a front yard, as if they’d been making snow angels in the ash right up to the end. On the side of a dumpster, someone had spray-painted: Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn…Whatever.

I screamed like a fucking girl as a horn blared and Leon swerved an eighteen wheeler, overtaking it on the wrong side of the road before swerving back into lane again.

Probably, it’s like driving the turnpike,” Connie said. “Probably, you get used to it. The way I see it, living in New Jersey is a challenge, what with the toxic waste and the eighteen-wheelers and the armed schizophrenics. I mean, what’s one more lunatic shooting at you?

I remained silent as I waited for an eighteen-wheeler to slowly pass another, or as we referred to it in Wyoming, an elephant race.

but by the time his cock started to soften, his throat felt raw and his slit felt like an eighteen-wheeler had passed through it.

~*~ Beautiful Womanhood ~*~ What is womanhood? Is there any more important question for young women to consider than this? It should be the highest ambition of every young woman to strive toward possessing a heart of true womanhood. Earthly presents no higher object of attainment. To be a woman, in the truest and highest sense of the word, is to be the best thing beneath the skies. To be a woman is something more than to live eighteen or twenty years; something more than to wear flounces, exhibit dry-goods, sport jewelry, catch the gaze of lewd-eyed men; something more than to be a beauty, a wife, or a mother. Put all these qualifications together and they do but little towards making a true woman.

In June 1842 the British fleet entered the Yangtze. The Chinese were ready to receive their enemy, having assembled a considerable fleet of sixteen war junks and seventy merchant men and fishing vessels requisitioned for naval duty. In the forts of Woosung, near the mouth of the river, they had placed 253 heavy artillery pieces. The Chinese also unveiled a secret weapon: paddle-wheelers armed with brass guns, gingals, and matchlocks, and propelled by men inside the hull operating treadles. Nin Chien, governor-general of Nanking, wrote of them: `Skilled artisans have also constructed four water-wheel boats, on which we have mounted guns. They are fast and we have specially assigned Major Liu Ch'ang to command them. If the barbarians should sail into the inland waterways, these vessels can resist them. There is not the slightest worry.`23 The battle of Woosung was swift. The British ships of the line soon silenced the guns of the forts. The Nemesis, towing the eighteen-gun Modeste, led the fleet into the river, firing grape and canister at the Chinese crafts, which fled. The Nemesis and the Phlegethon thereupon chased the fleeing boats, captured one junk and three paddle-wheelers, and set the rest on fire.

put my feet on the floor and stand, pushing myself up from the mattress, but my knees buckle under me and I fall back into a sitting position. I look down at my body, searching for the tread marks left behind by the eighteen-wheeler that must have run over me sometime after I fell asleep.

Eerily, the awakening occurred eighteen years to the day from Samuel Morse’s “What hath God wrought” message. When Confederate general Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson changed the nature of the war by marching to threaten Washington, Lincoln responded by changing the nature of his leadership.