by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
— co-author Lucid Dreams
Discuss this Video at the Prometheus Rising Table Inside the Diner
Long term Diners are aware of my history in the Trucking industry, which spanned 7 years from 1997 to 2004. If you haven’t been around here dining on Collapse until recently, you can find a decent part of the history in the Over the Road series I wrote in the early days of the Diner’s existence.
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Trucking remains a great interest of mine, for numerous reasons. On a personal level, the experience transformed me into a more Solitary Man, more at peace being alone than in the company of others. I learned to live with just the bare essentials for living inside the industrial civilization, with no fixed abode, living inside my Freightliner for 7 years. On a social level, I learned first hand the importance of Trucking to the lives we live today. I witnessed first hand the collapse of Freight in the aftermath of 9-11, along with the vast increase of military presence on the roads, with numerous military convoys and roadblocks set up on the Eisenhower Interstate. I drove every last mile of that road system, coast to coast and north to south and learned the differences and similarities between each of the areas of the country. As I have become ever more Collapse Aware in the years since I left Trucking, all of these lessons have become even more important, and the experience is worth retelling.
Today in 2019, another younger Diner Lucid Dreams (LD) has fired up the Diesel Engine of a Freightliner to earn his living pulling flatbed, hauling the steel rebar and wire, wood framing and bulk goods that are the lifeblood of industrial civilization infrastructure. After a period of Walkabout (our Diner term for members who disappear for extended periods of time), LD dropped in to the Diner Forum to let us know he had made yet another transition, this time to move from being a Company Driver to an Owner-Operator of his own truck. We spoke on Skype after that, and came up with the idea of doing a Trucking Show on YouTube, live from the road with the real experience of a Trucker driving the endless miles of asphalt at the End of the Age of Oil. LD is quite aware of the oncoming Collapse of Industrial Civilization, along with the impact that burning so much Diesel has on the environment and the climate. As with about everyone who lives inside this society knows though, you can’t live in it without MONEY, and Trucking is one of the few places a midlife Homo Sap can move into and make a decent living. It’s a tough job, and most people aren’t suited for it or able to adapt to it. The danger always lurks out there also when you drive so many miles every day, even when hopefully it doesn’t happen to you, the death toll on the highways of the FSoA is extraordinary and always visible. In 2016 there were over 35,000 deaths on the roads of the FSoA, far more than die even from the ever increasing number of mass shootings or suicides.
Like me, LD also was a blogger, running his own blog Epihany Now on Blogspot considering many of the same topics we discuss on the Diner. These days he doesn’t have a whole lot of time to write, nor much inclination to do that either. He still has plenty to say though, and one thing he can do (always! lol) is TALK. It’s one thing you can do while driving your 11 hours behind the wheel of a Big Rig, as long as you have a Hands-Free set-up on your phone. For myself, I have these days morphed from a Blogger writing mainly text-based material into a Vlogger & Podcaster working through the mediums of Video and Audio. Many reasons for this, not the least of which is that a significant portion if not the majority of the population simply doesn’t read anything longer than a 280 character Tweet anymore. The Clown-in-Chief even directs Goobermint Policy with these bite-sized turds every morning from the comfort of the Thone in the White House or the lavatory of Air Force One. With Video & Audio you have a somewhat larger chance of reaching the willfully illiterate of the current society, who are NOT just the Millenials, these folks span all age ranges. With Headphones plugged in and eyes glued to the microscopic OLED screen of an Iphone, they spend every waking minute as sponges absorbing the non-stop bullshit that comes across the 4G network. Hopefully, we provide something a little more edifying and maybe we can wake a few more lost souls from the ranks of the Doomed to those who Can Be Saved.
With that effort in mind, we have begun Prometheus Rising, a new feature offering of Diner TV and the Diner Newz Service, which currently offers the Cooking Zone culinary show, the Collapse Morning Wake-Up Call current events Newzcast and the Collapse Cafe talking heads discussion and debate show. Needless to say, this gives yours truly a shit load of video and audio editing to do these days. lol. All of the shows have somewhat different formats and technical challenges to overcome, Prometheus Rising probably the greatest of these since it is happening from the Open Road and ya don’t always get perfect 4G connections capable of large bandwidth transfers all the time ya know. The truck is of course moving from cell tower to cell tower as it travels down the long Black Ribbon of asphalt and concrete that ties together our industrial civilization. So it is a work in progress, and we hope you will stick with us as we go through our growing pains. I’m sure in the commentary we will get the usual complaints about crappy video or audio, I’m working on it! lol. All our offerings can be accessed either from the Diner Blog or from Diner YouTube, Diner Souncloud or on our social media channels on Facebook and Reddit.
While the technical challenges and the primary topic of each show is different, the underlying theme of all is the ongoing Collapse of Industrial Civilization, the fundamental topic of the Doomstead Diner since we launched it in February of 2012. Each of them speaks to a specific topic area, in the case of Prometheus Rising this is the importance and dependence industrial civiliation has on Fossil Fuels for the transportation of all the goods and services we currently still enjoy in 1st World countries, at least if you are not one of the many who has already fallen off the economic cliff or had a climate disaster rip your life from you in a heartbeat, as has just occured to many who suffered the most recent Strafing Run of Mother Nature, the massive Tornado outbreak across the breadbasket of the USA in Tornado Alley.
This first episode of Prometheus Rising comes in pretty long at 40 min in length, and I suspect many of you won’t watch the whole thing. Many things we talk about in this episode are really of specific interest only to truckers, wannabee truckers or ex-truckers. Future episodes will be a good deal shorter, with the typical average length of our other shows, around 15-20 minutes. Nice bite sized chunks you can watch or listen to while sitting in traffic or gardening in anticipation of SHTF Day coming to your neighborhood. The topics will also range far & wide, beyond the normal scope of strictly trucker chat. The topics of collapse are bound to be the subject of much of our discussion while LD puts the Pedal to the Metal and runs the rubber down the road, and I sit in my studio on the Last Great Frontier of Alaska smokin’ cancerettes and drinking Stoli and Fruit Juice. lol.
If you don’t grasp the reason for the Prometheus Rising title for the show, it comes from Greek Mythology and the story of Prometheus:
In Greek mythology, Prometheus (/prəˈmiËθiËÉ™s/; Greek: ΠρομηθεÏς, pronounced [promÉ›ËtÊ°éu̯s], possibly meaning “forethought”)[1] is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of man from clay, and who defies the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humanity, an act that enabled progress and civilisation. Prometheus is known for his intelligence and as a champion of mankind[2] and also seen as the author of the human arts and sciences generally. He is sometimes presented as the father of Deucalion, the hero of the Greek flood story.
The punishment of Prometheus as a consequence of the theft is a major theme of his mythology, and is a popular subject of both ancient and modern art. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, sentenced the Titan to eternal torment for his transgression. The immortal Prometheus was bound to a rock, where each day an eagle, the emblem of Zeus, was sent to feed on his liver, which would then grow back overnight to be eaten again the next day. (In ancient Greece, the liver was often thought to be the seat of human emotions.)[3] Prometheus is freed at last by the hero Heracles (Hercules).
Editor’s note: The most serious technical problems occurred in the first 19 minutes of this program. If they are too distracting for you, advance the program to that point and enjoy the rest of it.
For those who prefer audio only:
This appeared on the Doomstead Diner 05 June 2019.
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