I like the artifacts of sub-cultures, by sub-cultures and for sub-cultures.

I another one of my many, many transits across the 401, this time from Kingston to Toronto, I can across this wonderful booklet:

Over The Road, June 2011 issue. A magazine for and by truckers. It is…fantastic. It’s a little secret window in to the trucker world, and the world of semi-amateur self-publishing that is adorable and beautiful like an HBO Drama. “The Best is the Least We Can Do”. Is this referring to the magazine? Owner-operators as a whole? Genius.

There are editorials:

“It’s Time That I Made Time for That”. The content-less-ness of that sentence is ingenious. The style is so consistently bland it makes me giddy. I’ve transcribed it here, where the bolding is mine:

In preparing for this month’s editorial for Over the Road Magazine I decided to do some homework, so I cataloged every month’s writings by date and subject matter that I have written to date.

I love how this conjures up this image of an old trucker sitting at his desk, various trucking-related trophies on that wall, and photos of him after difficult trucking runs (Coquihalla Feb ’86, nearly died twice!)

Time flies and I hoped to discover some pattern of thought I might have followed over the past number of years from my many articles.

Again, the image of the trucker-writer. Perhaps, pausing with a notebook at a rest-stop, in a fluorescent Tim Horton’s around 401 marker 500, pausing and bringing out his notebook with meticulous handwriting, bringing his pen-tip to his tongue to lick it and start the ink flow. Tired large families in all-night moving vans shuffle past him.

[next column]…Day to run to Texas and return from out of the valley with 44,000 pounds of citrus hoping to make it home before New Year’s Eve.

This is genuine beautiful shit, and is just as romanticizable as the golden days of seafaring and pirating.

I should also point out that the URL of the “Over The Road” website is http://www.otrdigital.ca. Its basically a auto-forwarded link to a site that hosts the digital magazine. But everything from the URL to the auto-forwarding to the proxy hosting is adorable.

I’ll keep going…

Apparently there are Father’s Day-oriented Truck Shows:

With the events:
Drive a Big Rid
Circle Check Competition (this is really really my favourite)
The “Chosen Child” (god, what the fuck is this?)

I love the cursive-style tagline: “Where Friends Are Made!” I imagine you don’t run in to other truckers very consistently. Not like you work in the same office.

Now, I don’t want to go on too much (I took way more pictures that I needed to, and the booklet is probably going to go on top of my toilet for further reading), so this is the last photo:

“Trucking is a Partnership Between Owner Operators and the Company”. Who gets to pull off article titles like this? The “President”, I guess, as apparently this is his page.

I loved this little window into a specific world I’ll never be a part of.