For many years, I was a Freight Dog.  Freight Dogs are the reason your overnight packages arrive and your trophies from your latest safari in Tanzania arrive in  a week. We haul freight.  No flight attendants to bring us coffee in the cockpit.  No pretty ladies smiling at us as they exit the aircraft at the trip's conclusion.  There is one great thing about it, though.  Boxes don't bitch.

You rarely ever see us.  Maybe you'll notice a pilot in an unfamiliar uniform walking through an airport terminal building, carrying a flight bag and maybe dragging a suitcase.

The reason is that while you are asleep, we are awake.  We can be found up there in the night sky at 35,000 feet or therabouts, in DC-8's, 757's, 767's, 747's, or MD-80's along the North Atlantic Tracks, or skirting the Aleutians on routes to and from Asia, or cruising the airways above your country that you are totally unaware of;  highways in the sky. We travel those highways every night, heading into the sunrise at over 500 miles per hour, and you never know we're there.

We work long hours.  We'll fly a 747 from Johannesburg to Amsterdam, using two flight crews and stopping midpoint at somewhere like Lagos for fuel and a crew change.

We are usually sleep-deprived.  Often, we are so tired that when we awake in some strange hotel room, we might have to look at the notepad by the bed to recall what hotel we are sleeping in.

I spent much of my flying career doing this and finally burned out.

The heavy targeting began a year after I hung it up and has continued ever since.

I guess the point of all this rambling is that I am usually awake all night and sleep for much of the day. I am nocturnal. This doesn't stop the hammering they're giving me, though.  I just awoke about 1800 hrs Eastern Daylight time in the states with my head feeling as if it would explode.

They're slowly killing me.  They simply don't have the balls to shoot me, although in a previous entry I mentioned the obvious set up they created using the sweat hog/useful idiot who lives across the street.

Most are psychopaths, employed by other, more powerful and wealthy psychopaths.  They simply don't have the ability to empathize.  But some are not. And, according to what I have read, many end their lives in some psychiatric hospital, delusional, babbling, and tormented by what they have done.  So maybe there is some justice, after all.

So I'm awake now for the next night of isolation, but I do not mind it, as most of my old flying buddies are dead.  Night flying on long routes is one of the most isolated professions one may engage in.  I loved it.

We're really dropping.  It's that time in our lives to say goodbye forever and also to reflect on what wonderful lives we led and what great experiences we had on those routes all over this beautiful world.

Nothing these psychopaths can do, stealing little mementos of my past, hammering me electronically, or the usual stalking and attempts to betray me, can change the wonderful experiences I underwent and the remarkable people I worked with during my career.  It has been an incredible trip.