I had just turned 50 years old when I suddenly found myself in a strange new world, a kind of alternate reality... a Burt Reynolds movie, Smokey and the Bandits.

The kids were heading out on their own. It was the dawn of a new century. And, so, after 20 years in journalism, and then ten years in nursing, I decided that it was time for a change.

Why I decided to become an over-the-road trucker is a metaphysical journey I get at with metaphysical imagery in the opening section of Buddhist Trucker. It involves family and economics and is not central to the story, which is that all-of-a-sudden I came out from behind my desk and bedsides and was behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler, hammered down hauling cargoes of the things people need on the other side of the Great Divide.

Everywhere I went it was like seeing it all for the very first time. Nothing was familiar. Jersey docks. L.A. traffic. The Mohave. Getting water to people after Katrina.

Of course, I had to write about it. I bought a recording device to record my thoughts while passing through endlessly long solitary hours crisscrossing America behind the wheel. I had Sirius/XM satellite radio and CB chatter to keep up with the news — 9/11, the wars, the best way to get around an accident on up ahead.

At night — parked along the backstreets of big city warehouse districts, at truck stops or along exit ramps — at night, in my bunk with my laptop with spellcheck, I would shape and fit my hours of recorded thoughts into tiny grammatical structures. A two-hour rant on my recording device might become a line or two in a poem about the great blue dome protecting Montana, or the truck stop waitress with heavy legs and a pretty face.

That’s how Buddhist Trucker was written.

Figuring the big New York publishing houses could care less, after I retired, I formed my own publishing company and, in 2022, had 100 copies printed -- the first edition of Buddhist Trucker. Getting peoples’ addresses and mailing them out was a real pain in the ass. But now they’re almost all gone.

I tell people who still have one of those 100 first-edition copies to hold on to them. Like a first-edition Poe or Colette, someday they could be worth a lot of money.

Four years later, I figured it was time for a second edition, one that people could get with a few clicks on Amazon. With David Dvorkin over at DLD Books in Denver, we created a new cover out of a picture I took on I-90 crossing the Plains and polished the interior without disturbing the words written by a trucker parked for the night in his truck somewhere out there still on the road.

Last Saturday, while families searched for loved ones beneath the ruins of ancient lands, an Amazon delivery truck driver delivered the first printed copy of the second edition of Buddhist Trucker.

I held it in my hands.

It felt so tiny, so insignificant, a mere 67 pages, like lakes in a storm distilled down into tiny drops.

I slipped the thin wafer of a thing into its new home in a row of bulky tomes on my bookshelf, a sliver in the history of the world

I had rearranged a word or two in the second edition, but the book still ends the same way. It ends when the Buddhist Trucker realizes that love is an offering, and not a pearl he has to find.

Probably peace is the same way.