The Pickup Truck Driver

The usual unimaginative critic of The Pickup Truck Driver is a stereotype unto himself – that is, he employs the boring cliché that those who sit high in a Ford F-150 are compensating for their small penises, and, worse, he delivers this rote statement with an air of triumphant originality. But this tedious assertion makes no sense when one considers that there are too many PTDs wreaking havoc on the land to not cover the full spectrum of penile length and girth, especially when one takes into account that not a few of this species are women – unless the joke is that a lady PTD has a penis so diminutive as to be nonexistent and so must require the compensatory ownership of a Ford Super Duty Truck F-350. Nay, the actual common trait among Pickup Truck Drivers is an unearned sense of entitlement and the unquenchable urge to be a Dickhead, regardless of the size of their actual Dick, Head and Shaft.

The primary complaint against the PTD is how he will ride up so close to your ass as to risk passing onto you all his sexually transmitted diseases – and if done at night, then made worse by how he will activate his high-beams and thereby direct a veritable maximum-security-prison-flood-light into the interior of your Nissan Altima. This of course is a totally dickhead move, the definition of which is to expend extra time and energy, with little or no reason, to torture a complete stranger.  Yet the exact same PTD who will push the gas to such an obnoxious extent as to push the Altima off the road and into a ditch (this has happened) will also, if in front of the Altima, slow down to the crawling speed of 15 -miles-per-hour on a state highway for the sole purpose of keeping the driver behind him from getting his pregnant wife to the hospital for an emergency C-section. In other words, the only thought that inhabits the reptilian brain of the PTD is how he can ruin the lives of fellow motorists – i.e., how he can raise his Dickheadedness to the level of Joseph Stalin starving 7 million Ukrainians to death because they wanted, like Greta Garbo, to be left alone.

Studies have shown that the same guy who employs his Pickup Truck as a Weapon of Mass Irritation was, before his purchase of a Toyota Tundra, a mere level-one Dickhead who, at a supermarket, manifested his self-absorption by leaving his shopping cart in a prime parking spot, with the cart-collection area only ten feet away. But then comes the day when he climbs into the Tundra, which, to an enlightened person, would seem no more remarkable than pulling a rake out of the backyard shed, but, to this solipsistic, unaccomplished dunce, has the transformative effect of what happens to a mild-mannered reporter who gets bitten by a radioactive spider. In an instant, this Nobody feels imbued with comic book-like superpowers that now catapult him right past levels two, three and four on the Dickhead Scale — past the guy who, at a health club, leaves four hundred pounds of metal plates on a barbell that must then be put away by a 53-year-old, 110-pound lady professor at the local college if she is to do her three sets of light squats – and past the guy who  blasts  Goth Rock music at 4:00 AM in an apartment building filled with families of sleeping children. Yes, this simpleton will now take his Pickup Truck out into the road and, within an hour, he will morph into a Level-Five Dickhead when he parks his behemoth vehicle right in front of the door of a convenience store (so he can buy two packs of Marlboros which will enable him to extend his asshole repertoire to blowing smoke in the faces of asthma sufferers) rather than walk twenty feet from an assigned spot.

You see, Royalty is not beholden by the rules of a civil society, hence why the PTD feels no qualms about knowing full well that patrons to the convenience store will have to twist themselves into an advanced yoga position just to get around his carbon-monoxide-spewing tank so they can buy a bag of pretzels. It is a historical fact that Royalty will eventually produce inbred dummies, hence why this Prince of the Pickup will force his shiny new, expensive aircraft carrier on wheels into a tight parking spot close to the entrance of a mall and then get go into a self-righteous tizzy when the car next to him scrapes his precious identity-solidifier. Dumb people are myopic people who are in turn people who cannot fathom the existence of other people also sharing space in this vale of tears, and so the rest of us responsible adults must accommodate the PTD’s gross and childish need for attention.

Another indication of how this man is not the brightest headlight in a sea of high headlights meant to blind other motorists is how he can only drive ten MPH when he is carting a passenger. This is because he must turn to the passenger when in-articulating another life lesson about how “you win some, you lose some,” or how he “can’t wait for Friday,” or how “life’s a bitch and then you marry one,” or how “life is like a box of used engine gaskets.” He is too ignorant of the laws of sound mechanics to understand that he can look forward at the road and still be heard by the person sitting three feet to the side of him. This is why driving behind this yo-yo is like BEING a yo-yo, since he will slow down when he turns to torture his captive audience with his home-spun drivel and then speed back up when taking a breath and returning his focus to the task at hand. In sum, he cannot walk and chew gum at the same time, though, in reality, he cannot walk at all as evidenced by how he parks an inch away from the aforementioned convenience store entrance.

A simple test will prove true the hypothesis that the Pickup Truck Driver is motivated by nothing more than an unimaginative need to gain cheap ascendancy over his superiors who choose to increase their own self-esteem by more honorable methods like earning a PhD in Neuroscience or training for a Triathlon.  The test is to ask why the PTD drives a pickup instead of an SUV, much less a sensible auto? In most cases, the PTD does not haul lumber, nor collect junk on trash day to be sold for scrap, nor have a job that requires metal pipes. In fact, that bed behind the cap is usually empty so that it would make more sense to just convert it to a tiny house or an office space for a real estate agent, or, better, to just saw it off and use it as a stage for a teenage garage band. The PTD will respond to this argument that he needs the expansive bed of his truck for his tools, yet, if you open his tool chest, all you will find is a few roach-clips and a screwdriver with a broken off tip. Okay, then, he needs the space for his fishing gear, which is tantamount to claiming that you need Yankee Stadium to store your push-lawnmower.

What he will not say is the truth: I need all this empty space to match my empty mind, a mind that equates projecting my vast emptiness into the more productive and meaningful space of my fellow citizens – i.e., I am a total Dickhead, period.

(Check out my website: http://www.authorjamesfjohnson.com)

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