63 Comments
Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"When last we left our zeroes, they were farting around in a parking lot. But today. . . ."

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

High-level meetings at IHOP.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

What's, like, bewildering to me is how these guys have the time to camp out for their days of doin whatever in DC if they're in fact working truckers and not, say, just jerk offs.

As for the grift and resentment, that's pretty much all our GOP rulers give their deplorables.

And how can I put this tastefully? Any, maybe all, misogynistic terms, phrases, whatever apply remarkably well to these butch poseurs. Gotta true me, because I have issues about using the language, etc., to make that case. But I guess we can start with acting like they have any agency when they don't; they just scream and yell -- one maybe can call it hysteria with all the baggage that word has -- and leave it that.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"the “Freedom Convoy” that remains camped out in Hagerstown, Maryland"

I think the 'camping' aspect should be perused a bit more. There's a thing in Effete World called 'glamping' which is a hash of 'glamour camping' wherein one drives to some idyllic countryside glade and walks a few yards from the car to a small hut/cabin/yurt/b&b that is equipped with more kitchen stuff than your average apartment, tho you'll never use anything but the coffeemaker, because everything is catered anyway. And posh sleeping accommodations or forget it...

Anyway, what Junior and the Truckerboys are doing in Hagerstown ain't that, tho if they had any sense, what with the sweet grifty cash that's building in drifts up to the wheel wells, they could be. No, what the tboys are doing I'd call 'cramping'. Camping, ramping up the rhetoric, amping up the testosterone...but still, on vacation, just havin' a little funtime seein' the DC sights like all the high school kids on spring break.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

“It’s a trap!” Lmao. Yeah, it’s absolutely a “trap” when you break a law or local ordinance and the authorities respond accordingly. When the cops pull you over for doing 75 in a 55 mph area, that’s also a “trap.” When you cheat on your taxes and the IRS audits? Another “trap.” I’m surprised right-wingers don’t use the trap excuse more often, tbqhwy.

Public service announcement, guys: get your second delivery of free Covid tests now so you’ll be ready for the next variant. I ordered my second test kit on Tuesday and it arrives today. No lines no waiting. COVIDtests.gov

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

They were promised you only get in trouble if you're black.

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Good point, my favorite is "perjury trap" which means "the government's going to entrap me simply by asking me questions, knowing that I'm incapable of telling the truth."

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I still wanna see those trucks try to make a go of it in town. Soon's they stop to unload or whatever I envision one decent sized forklift (if you've never seen them at a big port, you've a treat in store – the big ones could pick up a fully loaded truck with ease) ambling over, and hey presto, trucks flopped over on their sides, wheels gently spinning, and a few dazed joyriders climbing outta the windows.

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Mar 17, 2022·edited Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I'm taking a day off of work so I can work on my house. I will have to work longer this weekend to make the time up because this time of year I work 7 days a week, I

thought I'd point that out before I launch into a skree about just how fucking chuffed it makes me to hear some conman asshole talk about "Hard workin' Murkins"who always seem to be white, male and somewhat on the doughy side. With really soft hands. Hardest workers I know are named Juan, Diego, Maria and Manuel.

"Hardearnedmoney"always pisses me off too. The asshole using that phrase is always some easy money motherfucker who works no harder than it takes to make the the grift pay off.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I've been off work this entire week with a really bad case of sciatica. My job does not offer sick pay, so I'm losing a week worth of income. And the deductible on my health insurance means I get to pay the doctor visits out of pocket! Is this a great country or what?

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

That was Sunday and Monday--worst pain I have ever felt in my life. The prednisone seems to be working well, though.

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Mar 17, 2022·edited Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

When I get to hurting bad I buy some oxys from the retired lady next door and get my sick ass into work. She gets to buy some good groceries, we're talking real Oreos and not that store brand shit where the filling tastes all grainy, and I don't miss any work.

Better living through chemistry, I mean, ain't that America?

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author

Good to have friends, I tell you what.

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A friend with weed is a friend indeed -A friend with pills can cure your ills!

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I went to the walk-in (or in my case, hobble-in) clinic and got a 'script for prednisone and some muscle relaxants. The pred is working wonders, while the muscle relaxants are just bitter pills that don't actually do anything. So I'm on the mend, at least! Just waiting for the bills to start showing up.

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"bitter pills that don't actually do anything"

The Derelicts I know would double up and chase them with some bourbon. They all seem relaxed AF.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Back when Reagan still had the new-president smell, I'd have been doing exactly that--with or without the sciatic pains. Today, though, I'm not that same thrill-seeking Derelict.

Also, I've had some really bad experiences with these kind of drugs over the last 15 years or so. Now I'm very wary about taking these things.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

the bitterest pill The Jam

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBXng6QFF1k

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It's cheaper and much more convenient to just buy what I need on the street rather than deal with this country's health care system. It's not like I really need a lot of opiates anyway. Never cared that much for the effects unless I was in pain.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I once had hernia surgery and was given a massive prescription for painkillers. I took a couple the first afternoon out of surgery, and woke up hideously constipated the next day. Decided the pain from the procedure was a lot better than the pain from the constipation and never took another one.

Back then was when doctors of every stripe were giving out prescriptions for oxy like they were handing out carnival beads. My dentist gave me 90 days worth for a simple filling! Any wonder we have an opioid addiction crisis?

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Wasn't it remarkable? My current dentist will not prescribe opiates at all. "Take ibuprofen!" (I'm sure it would be different if she did dental surgery, but that's not her focus.)

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

It was a hell of a time. My dentists was giving that stuff out for minor procedures. My primary care physician was ready to write scripts for it with essentially unlimited refills--he once offered me a 30-day X3 prescription after he froze a mole off my arm! And going into surgery for anything guaranteed months worth of pills with basically unlimited refills. A year after the hernia surgery, I had my gall bladder removed and went home with a huge jar of oxy.

Between Mrs. Derelict and myself, we have perhaps 1,000 pills in the freezer, the vast majority of which are so old that they're just binders and excipients now with no active ingredients left.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

That was Perdue’s business model: encourage and enable overprescribing.

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Problem being they lace everything with fentanyl these days so who knows what will happen if you get street drugs. Yea, the whole Opioid progression from when they handed them out like candy through when they quit prescribing them to people who needed them is yet another putrid example of American exceptionalism.

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author

Ugh, sorry, good luck! (Which is also what your job said, I'm sure, for which I am also sorry.)

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

My boss has been supportive, but not in terms of just handing me cash for the lost days. On the other hand, the guy is hugely generous with lots of other things. Mrs. Derelict and I own a light airplane, and my boss is always there with plenty of free parts, free gas, free expertise, and free labor that makes owning this thing affordable. So I can't complain about losing a week's pay when the other benefits far exceed that year-round.

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7 days a week! You have me beat. I complain about having a regular job and this newsletter (which is harder than it looks) but I still get a Sabbath.

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Mar 17, 2022·edited Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

It's the nursery business - there's always 10 or 12 weeks in the spring where, basically, if you're awake you're working. The days aren't usually super long, but you need to show up every day. You never know what kind of trouble those plant will get in to .The rest of the year is decent. I really don't do much between Thanksgiving and Christmas . And July. Fiscal year ends in June so there are a few days of budgetary cover your ass but that's it. I love the business - I'm never bored. Pay is decent. I just don't want to hear from some Trumped up Trucker tell me how hard he works from his two week long (and counting) 24 hour tailgate party in the infield of a dirt track race course in Maryland. Fuck him.

Is that the cover art from Teddy Bear? Bet Clement Greenburg would have a lot to say about that!

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I don’t know how the other subscribers feel, Roy, but I for one would not begrudge you a few weeks’ holiday each year, although this might involve some bookkeeping complications with the by-the-month set.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Maestro, it’s obvious that this thing takes a lot of time on your part. And I’d like to presume *we all* are appreciative.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Can confirm about the hardest workers. I'm a dog walker/house-sitter/ personal care provider, so I'm in the neighborhoods every day, seeing that work. This is a generally wealthy area, so people are able to afford landscaping and remodeling and of course house cleaners, and damn, I have worked throughout my life, often at stupid hard jobs, but never *ever like that*. Digging ditches all day, installing paving stones, pruning shrubs and trees with your arms up, laundry, window cleaning, replacing fences, clearing invasive plants. So much respect.

Fortunately some people I know are good employers. One friend paid their housekeeper for a full year during the height of the pandemic without having her come to work once. (This friend also kept paying for her bi-weekly pedicure that she missed for a year.)

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Mar 17, 2022·edited Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

What always gets me is the guys that lay the pavers and dig the ditches stand a real good chance of getting major hassled buy the cops (who have probably spent the day sitting in an air conditioned car)on their way home for Driving While Brown.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

So hanging around Hagerstown looking for cameras to rant into, punctuated by angry loops of the Beltway, constitutes hard work and good ole American initiative? Nice work if you can get it.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Remember Freedom Truckers: It's the DEMOCRATS who constantly spit upon you and disdain your work. Republicans have nothing but respect for you hard-working salt-of-the-earth Americans. Just ask Neil Gorsuch! He'll explain that it's your duty to freeze to death when your truck breaks down! Or ask any Republican Senator--like Ted Cruz--about how they'd like to repeal all those stupid regulations that keep you from dying on the road.

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Mar 17, 2022·edited Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Maybe they're mad at Jimmy Carter for deregulating the industry and killing off the trucking unions? Yeah, I'm sure that's it.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

You can forgive things your friends do to you that are unacceptable from an enemy. Hating Carter for deregulation would not be emotionally incompatible with not caring that your Republican buddies want to finish that job.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

My guess is that the vast majority of truckers working today have no idea how trucking became a low-wage high-stress job. And even if they did know the full story of deregulation and destruction of the trucking unions, what of it? If your life is a nightmare because of the demands of the boss, what can you do except quit? But if you think your life is a nightmare because of demands placed on you by the government (even imaginary demands!) there's a ready-made, well-funded movement to plug into.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

A very good point, and that movement constitutes an army owned by the people whose freedom—to loot and to exploit and to trash—really _is_ limited by government, even as government helps them do all those. (Large fortunes are nearly impossible without property rights and contract both enforceable by sanctioned violence—noöne gets more from government than the rich.)

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I thought I was reliably informed by a French writer that there are no great fortunes without great crimes

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When these guys piss off some peon who has to drive around the Beltway during rush hour (almost certainly a totally unimportant person), they really think they're sticking it to the Man. That's consistent with their being so easily conned by the right (white) people spouting the right (ignorant, hateful) rhetoric.

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Well, that commuter lives in Washington, which makes him part of the Swamp, and therefore hateful in the eyes of the Elect. Also a good chance he's black!

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Dear Beltway truckers, get a fucking job.

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The end of that ABC article about Ted Cruz hanging out with the Freedum Dorks is priceless: Cruz bloviates about whatever fucking thing he thinks is important and someone in the crowd yells back, "You should run for president." I think that's a pretty good trolling -- you could hear his tiny little heart breaking from all the way over here...

Ted Cruz is so out of touch with every day in America that he thinks you need to plug in an IHOP...

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

He tried scrolling his pancakes, but ended up with blintzes.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"You should run for president" is what EVERYONE should say to Ted Cruz from now on. Right after "You're a fucking asshole."

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Ted Cruz' daughter hates him, much like several other GOP dorks like Gosar

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Consider how extreme, bizarre, and off the deep end you have to be to have your own family come out against you in public, urging people not to vote for you because you're such absolute shit as a person.

Now, consider how, even after hearing such a thing, you can wobble into the voting booth and pull the lever for someone like Gosar because, well, at least he's not a Democrat.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

"At least he's not a Democrat" is a big part of it, but "A real SOB is what I want" is also important. Republican voters see their representatives as the "tough guys who can say no" when the needy come calling. Nice people can't be trusted to do that consistently. If Paul Gosar can stick to his guns when even his own family hates him. you can be confident he'll hold to the conservative line no matter how much criticism he gets.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Is that the daughter who was forced to spend a month on a bus with Carly Fiorina?

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Rightwing theater, from Tea Party cosplayers to rootin’ tootin’ unregulated militias to Truck Nutz, would be sort of entertaining if it wasn’t a distraction from the depredations of fascists like Governor Abbott or Chief Just-us Roberts. Every inch of ink, minute of tv news and scroll of screen time (excepting Roy, of course) about these morons robs sentient Americans of real news about the racist, misogynistic hell Republican politics is condemning us to, not to mention climate change, endless wars and other calamities. Oh well, if the media did stop giving these people air, they’d probably pivot to “Inflation is killing us!” 24/7 (btw gas prices went down yesterday, so maybe the gaspocalypse isn’t going to force hard jerking ‘Murkins to sell their children to raise the money to pay for Disney+).

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Apparently, it's now a right-wing thing to claim the war in Ukraine was dreamed up as a distraction from the trucker convoy. Everything's a distraction from something else, I suppose.

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"Today, long-haul truckers are some of the most closely monitored workers in the world. Cameras and sensors dot their trucks, watching the road, the brakes and even the driver’s eye movements. Once, when his truck’s cabin heater broke, Mr. Knope was forced to sleep in freezing temperatures for several days while traveling across northern Ohio and New York because an automated system made sure his engine was turned off at night. The company told him there was no way to override the system."

Fucking Democrats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/15/opinion/truckers-surveillance.html

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“'None of them will work for these wages,' he added. Studies even show that their pay, when adjusted for inflation, has declined markedly since the 1970s." As with many things blamed on liberalism, the problem is actually capitalism.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

You can cover a lot with "It's just the way things are." Someone - and not necessarily an unintelligent person - could go their whole life thinking nothing more than that. Then the grifters come along and tell you the ONE thing in your life you actually have some power to change is a nonexistent vaccine mandate. Every shitty thing about your life must be accepted without complaint except that one thing. Talk about empowerment!

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

And the decline of the Teamsters. And full capture of the state by Big Bidness. And now anything the state would do for labor would end up being banned from SCOTUS.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

Can anyone provide a translation?

💯❤️🇨🇳💩

The best I can do is "100 hearts the Canadian Northern Railway poop."

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Mar 17, 2022·edited Mar 18, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

In a couple of weeks it could be a slice of Humble Pie: "Thirty Days with Assholes".

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These guys love the "weakling liberals are terrified of Real Men like us" story. Reminds me of the portrayal of liberals in the later Allen Drury "Advise and Consent" series. If you've never read them, the story lines will sound "Q"uite familiar. The last one I read had a Teddy Kennedy character elected President, and the Soviets took him to their War Room and showed the awesome might poised to destroy America. Teddy of course collapsed into a weeping puddle on the floor and unconditionally surrendered.

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Mar 17, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso

I think it was right after I got out of high school that I learned that physical strength and the ability to bear up other guys didn't actually count for much in the real world. That must be frustrating for some guys who never progressed beyond high school, learning that it's actually the nerds who run everything. It's bound to generate conspiratorial thinking about how you're being cheated of what's rightfully yours, somebody's "rigged the game" because the thing you thought would get you success and hot chicks usually just gets you a trip to County. Maybe their answer is to retreat into a fantasy world where all their problems can be solved with a throat punch?

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