1 - Driving a truck is a hard way to make a living. After 10 or 12 hours of racking up miles, just getting out of the damn truck to buy fuel and use the bathroom is like visiting another planet. You’re strung out from all that noise and vibration and the intensely visual activity of keeping your rig betweenthe lines, and all of a sudden people expect you to do weird stuff like make conversation and pay for things with the right amount of money.

2 - Things have changed a lot since I drove full-time. Just having a cell phone and an iPod in the cab …. (OK, I know I’m dating myself.)

3 - For one brief moment, as I was settling into my groove in my first long interstate-highway leg, I longed for a cigarette, for the first time in a couple of decades.

4 - People who drive four-wheelers, aka cars and SUVs and the like, are idiots. Lots of them, anyway. What makes someone think it is OK to cut off a 40-ton truck so they can make it to their exit and not have to (gasp) drive a couple of miles to the next one? They must think they are watching a movie, that they cannot be injured or killed by doing somthing foolish. Better still are the nimrods who ride 6 feet behind a semi at 70 mph, apparently convinced they are saving gas or something. On this trip I actually saw one such moron get clonked when the semi — responding to another stupid four-wheeler trick in front of him — had to nail his brakes. The road was wet and the idjit was still spinning as I rolled past. I think I heard screaming. Heh.

5 - A lot more truckers are being watched step-by-step via satellite boxes on their rigs, and are being forced to pee in cups on a regular basis. So much for the carefree life of the road. Toss in a cell phone with a whiny boss on the other end, and you might as well be in a cube. On the other hand, those drivers are not being forced to drive 100 hours a week and buy fake motel receipts (long story for the unitiated). Rest assured, however, there are plenty of indy folks out there who are still running on meth in pursuit of a four-figure truck payment every month. I met guys last week I would have sworn were 15 years older than they really were.

6 - I am one lucky son of a bitch. I’ve had the chance to do a lot of really cool things, like driving big rigs and writing for big newspapers and editing books aimed at big causes, and I still have the chance to do even more. I’m not stuck working the graveyard shift at a motel in Miami, Oklahoma or driving to the west coast every week, trying to remember what my kids look like.

And I am no longer stuck in a cube. This week, I am downright grateful I got laid off from my cube gig. Had I not been canned I would have tried to hang in there for at least another year, worried about the economy, and I would not have had the courage to do what I am doing now: considering radically different possibilities. It reminds me of that scene in “The Great Escape” where Jim Garner is going to push a blind Donald Pleasance off a train to avoid the Nazis, and when he tells Donald that he’ll warn him before they jump, Donald responds: “I’d prefer if you just gave me a good firm push.” Hear, Hear.

7 - Being outside is very nice. This seems so basic but as I rolled across the country last week I realized how many hours I had spent in my climate-controlled office, connected by skywalks to the convenience store where I bought sandwiches and the mall where I would wander to kill time during lunch. One day last week I was startled to see a strange brown tinge on the backs of the fingers of my right hand. No amount of scrubbing, not even with Go-Jo hand cleaner graciously offered by a truckstop mechanic, could make it go away. It made for one nervous night in a roadside motel. And then the next day I realized what it was: My fingers were turning brown from the sunlight coming through the windshield.

As God as my witness, I’ll never let them put me in a cube again.