Road Kill

Since being laid off from my job at the Case-New Holland manufacturing plant, three years ago, this month, I've been struggling to find gainful employment.  Over the three years, I've bounced from one menial job to another, never really finding anything that I loved.  I really liked and was even proud when I worked for the city, last summer, but alas, when summer ended, so did the job and any prospects of being hired on a permanent basis, died with the turning of the leaves.

After that, I had a couple more terrible jobs, one working nights replenishing shelves at a local grocer, for minimum wage and only three shifts per week.  The other was full time hours for not much more money, but it was quite unfulfilling.  Pride in my work there, never ever entered the picture.  So when I lost that job, while it was a shock, it was sort of a blessing.  It was an alignment of the stars and the planets.  It was almost as if every bit of shitty bad luck I'd had in the previous three years, was all for helping me secure the new job that I have now.

Initially, when I got let go from the hotel gig, I'd hoped to get a day job, so as to avoid being away at night, but this job has me starting in the wee early mornings.  3am, to be exact, but it doesn't really matter, as my day usually ends in the late morning so I still have the rest of the day to spend with my "boy" (Monkey) or attend movie matinees or go to doctor appointments.  Whatever I want to do, I can and will.

My job is described as a "Line Driver".  Essentially, I work for a new courier company and I run parcels and packages up to the delivery personnel in three distinctive markets.  Prince Albert, Melfort and Humboldt, Saskatchewan.  Each day, I depart at 3am and drive a route that reaches about four hundred and fifty-plus kilometers.  That's about 280 miles for my American readers.  The early morning affords me the luxury of little or no traffic on the highways.  I work alone so I can crank up the tunes and sing as loud as I want.  Or as of Thursday, I (finally) figured out how to download podcasts to my phone and I've listened to podcasts for the last two days.

I really really love this job and my enthusiasm about it seems to have impressed my boss, too, so unless I do something really (REALLY) stupid, I don't see (fingers crossed) ever losing this job.  However, as much as I love it, it does have a drawback.  It's not the hours, nor is it the fact that I'm away from my "boy" for several hours.  It's not even the constant driving.  As I said, I love the job and except for being away from Monkey, everything is fine.  It's just the road kill that I see laying at the roadside every day.

Living where I did growing up, I was used to seeing the odd skunk or badger or (tons) of gophers bite the big one on our highways.  Even travels you'd see the odd deer.  Years ago, I even managed to accidentally hit an owl on the highway as it swooped to grab a recently deceased carcass, just as my vehicle intersected the same point on the highway.  There was a tremendous crushing sound and the little car that I was driving, bounced a couple times.  I was horrified, but continued on my way.  With no other choice, that is what I do nowadays when I drive past the menagerie of different animals sprawled out at the side of the highway, their lives long disappeared from their bodies.

I never realized that there were raccoons in Saskatchewan until last week when I saw six lifeless raccoons along my route.  I've also seen baby deer and I can't help but imagine the sorrow that the mother must be feeling when their young offspring is lost so tragically.  I've also seen a beaver and a couple foxes.  The saddest thing I'd seen, up until today, was a cat that had been hit trying to cross the road.

I only started this job, officially, last Tuesday.  Wednesday, went fine, but Thursday, I hit a poor bird that flew in front of the van I was driving.  If the van hadn't had an antenna, I'm convinced that it would've escaped, unscathed, but because there was an antenna, it was caught and it's neck was snapped.  I know this because it was stuck on the van, forcing me to stop to remove it.  I was beside myself, with grief.  I pulled it off the van and I'm not ashamed to admit that I was borderline in tears.  I've never been an hunter.  I don't enjoy fishing.  And, as much as I enjoy the taste of steak and bacon and meat, in general, I don't ever want to see how it goes from a living entity to my plate.  So seeing this lifeless bird and knowing that I had a hand in it's demise, I was devastated.  I pulled the bird off the van repeatedly saying how sorry I was.  I knelt over it for a moment, admiring it's beauty and the vibrant colours of it's feathers, but mortified that I'd killed it.  After a few minutes of silence, looking at the small bird, I continued on my way.  I was thankful, in part... No.  I was completely thankful that the bird had died instantly.  I don't know what I would've been prepared to do had it been alive.  The next day, however, it happened again.

The next morning, I was driving the big cube van when I hit a duck just south of Prince Albert.  Again, if I would've had the van I'd used the day before, I'm convinced the duck would've made it, however, I had the cube van whose box extended over the cab by, at least, two feet.  This duck looked panicked as I hit it.  I say panicked, because our eyes met just as it hit the windshield.  There was a heavy thud and the roof of the van shook as it bounced over the cab and against the cube.  I never stopped for that one, but saw it in the mirror, bouncing along the road.  I never saw a carcass in the days that followed and have speculated that perhaps it had lived.  That relief was short-lived as I then pictured it with a broken leg, causing it to not being able to swim.  Or a broken wing, which meant no flying south for the winter or escaping predators.

This is the kind of shit that plagues my mind.

The other morning it was quite foggy.  In the misty air, I passed three deer and a moose.  I tried to honk my horn as I passed them, in hopes of scaring them away from the highway that was growing more busy as the sun began to rise in the east.

Three paragraphs ago, I wrote that the saddest thing up until today, was a cat that had been clipped crossing the highway.  The number one saddest thing I've seen now and it'll be hard pressed to find anything more sad and depressing than this.  I saw in the ditch this morning two dogs.  One black and one white and shaggy.  It appeared that the white shaggy dog had been hit and managed to pull itself to safety in the ditch, where it had died, leaving it's companion, the black dog to sit quietly at it's side.  I was speeding past when I noticed the duo, but time seemed to slow right down, feeling like several minutes as I passed by.  I can't get that image out of my mind.  I can't imagine the sorrow that animal must be experiencing having lost it's best friend.

All the sadness that I witness along the highways, makes me all the more thankful to return home, where my cat, Monkey, meets me at the door, greeting me with kitty hugs and kisses.  I say I can't imagine the sorrow that these animals must endure when they lose their mate or offspring, but perhaps I can.  If I lost Monkey, it would destroy me.  Even now, knowing that he will live another ten years or more, I'm horrified to know that one day I'll come home from work and I won't be met at the door with kitty hugs and kisses.  This is a fact of life and it depresses me.

Smoke & Mirrors - Chapter Four: Coping Mechanisms

I did a lot of homework before I bought my truck in 2008.  I wanted bang for my buck.  I wanted to get as much as I possibly could for one price.  Initially, I was going to buy the Honda CRV, crossover, but I read that the vehicle didn't offer much by way of good gas mileage.  Then I considered the Ford Escape Hybrid, but read that if taken on the highway, the fuel consumption was higher than the V6 model.  Then I set my sights on the Honda Ridgeline pick-up truck.  The gas mileage was great.  It was a unibody, it rides great.  It's all the comforts of a car, including a trunk located in the box.  It had a lot of umph!  Get up and go.  I test drove the Ridgeline a number of times, then when the day came to buy, I went into the dealership, knowing exactly what I wanted, and called out "no bullshit".  My research was so precise that when I requested the gold accents on the logo and name placard, I knew the order code.

So what does this have to do with coping with stress, anxiety and depression?  I'll get to that eventually.  My point is this.  I don't do hardly anything without looking into every possible avenue.  I want that umph.  I want the most bang for my buck.  I want to tackle everything efficiently.  And I feel I have.

As stated in Chapter One, I suffer from something that I call "Seasonal Depression".  I've never formally been diagnosed by my physician for depression, but I'm not a f*cking idiot.  If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, there's a 99% chance (+/- 1%) that it's a f*cking duck!  So if for more than ten years I've been gloomy, sad and depressed from Halloween through to just after my mom and sister's birthday's, chances are I suffer from depression.

This year I decided to try something new.  I began listening to online podcasts about a year and a half ago, with a majority of it culminating in the last year.  I listen to a great many different podcasters, of whom include, Adam Corolla, Kevin Smith & Scott Mosier, Ari Shaffir, Joe Rogan, and I especially like Bert Kreischer (though I constantly f*ck up the spelling of his name) and Doug Benson.

In addition to his love of movies, Doug Benson is a notorious pot smoker, and like Joe Rogan, promotes the positive medicinal attributes that marijuana provides.  The more I listened, the more I began to wonder.  I wondered if smoking marijuana would improve my "seasonal depression", so I set forth to do my due diligence.  I researched the f*ck out of the benefits of smoking marijuana and any negatives that it might create.  After all, inhaling smoke is not a naturally occurring phenomena, although the first nations people have been smoking different plants in their rituals for hundreds or even thousands of years, so... Who knows?

Everything I read on the subject reflected nothing but positivity, zero negatives, other than putting on a few pounds.  So I moved forward with this "experiment" and yes.  I'm coming out in this chapter of this blog series, that I smoke pot, but just for the medicinal purposes.  I'm not a daily smoker.  I only use it as needed.  I've not used any in a couple of weeks, and the effects of not using have been tremendous.  I've been sad and depressed for more than a week.  My friend made a remark the other day and it broke my heart.  I was truly hurt.  That's my downfall.  I can seem fine, then one off remark can send me spiraling and it's every ounce of courage to regain my composure.  The remark was in reference to my blogs, my subject matter and though they were enjoyable, they were equally inappropriate.  We've made amends, not that we were squabbling, but it's taken me every shred of confidence and will to dig myself out of this hole I find myself in.  I think this is, in part, due to my not medicating myself.  I have a lot of stress on my shoulders.  Unemployment being one.  Health issues are in the back of my mind.  Loneliness, despite having a cat, is still loneliness.

Since starting this new chapter of smoking pot, I've found it beneficial in overcoming most of my "seasonal depression", the migraines that plague me throughout the colder months have been VERY few and far between, which I relish immensely, and much to my surprise, my asthma has improved, as well.  I usually have to rely on one inhaler a month (roughly) to combat my breathing issues.  During the more frequent usage of marijuana, my asthma was not an issue, hardly.  Maybe a puff every other day.  Put it this way.  I got an inhaler just before Christmas, and I'm still on the same inhaler more than a month later.  In recent weeks, with the decline of smoking, I've had to rely on it a little more, but it's still pretty impressive I think.

So I did my homework and got the best truck for me.  I did my homework and got the best television SmartTV, that I could get.  And I did my research to learn that marijuana in addition to a plethora of other advantages, also quashes my depression.  I don't know why it's illegal.  I really don't.