Category Archives: Creative non-fiction

Strange Geese, Space Force’s Lost and Found, and Good ol’ Whatshisname

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Month in Review, Parenting, Surviving Summer Funtimes, Under 750, Writing, , , ,

…Or I Could’ve Just Taken the Week Off

A few weeks ago, I picked up my daughter from sports practice at a neighboring town’s park, which is very much like our town’s park, except with different geese. This is a public park, which means the public is allowed in. That is the problem with public parks.

I had to intervene when a pack tween twerps cheered on as one kid had another kid in a headlock. The second boy’s face was red, his eyes were streaming, and he was silent, which, if you know children, is a sure sign that something isn’t fun. Oh, hello, Trouble. There you are.

It was an easy read.

My “Hey!” stopped almost all of them.

One prepubescent Cobra Kai decided to test his standing with the gods and said to me, “Bro, this is none of your business.”

“Bro” is apparently a word that activates me like some sort of verbose sleeper agent. You can imagine how things went for all of them after that.

It was over quickly, but the kid in the headlock had enough time to walk away, which was really the main thing here.

No tween twerps were harmed in this interaction.

Joke’s on me, though (when isn’t it?) because little did I know that August was warming up in the corner, waiting to see if it could take my household two falls out of three.

All of that was once a Facebook post I left up for an hour before deleting, presumably to protect national security or because I pressed the wrong button. I tried to find it later (deleted posts, archived posts, etc.) but couldn’t. Alas, it’s gone, filed somewhere in the Cloud, or the shelf in Space Force’s Lost and Found where they store embarrassing mom anecdotes. I recreated it here, with slightly more effort than the 0.2 seconds I give most Facebook posts.

I had planned a proper post this week as I’ve been trying to post weekly, but then everyone in the house got sick. Like really sick, where after a few days you think you’re okay-ish then you lie down and wake up 5 hours later feeling groggy and not much better, if not a little worse.

Then I got sick. Which was technically covered under “everyone,” but I tend to assume “everyone” means “everyone else.” I usually avoid household contagion, possibly because I move through life in the equivalent of John Travolta’s bubble in that film. Except my bubble is made of grumpiness.

Here’s how I’m doing: for 5 minutes just now, I was trying to remember that actor’s name. Couldn’t retrieve “John Travolta” but pulled up “Vinnie Babarino” like a coin from behind your ear. I had to Google “Who played Vinnie Barbarino?” to complete a joke that, in retrospect, did not warrant the effort.

Everything’s fine.

Now we’re digging out, staggering toward the end of summer with what feels like 100% potential energy, in the physics sense, like we’re all little balls in a slingshot (Google Search: “What is that v-shaped thing made with sticks you pull back and shoot a ball out of?”)

Big Moves are on my to-do list, meaning working on building community and also giving myself ample space and big chunks of time to work on my novel.

I am mildly loath to get back to it all — the hustle and/or the bustle — because “big chunks of time to work on my writing” is an idea the universe finds particularly hilarious.

Also, can one be mildly loath? MAYBE. You know who could probably pull off being “mildly loath?” John Travolta, but only in his role in Pulp Fiction (Google Search: “What was that movie where the dude who played Vinnie Barbarino played a gangster” — which, incidentally, first pulled up Gotti, and that dude was not mildly anything.)

*EXTREME CARRIE BRADSHAW VOICEOVER* And just like that, this August was much like that tween headlock situation: too hot, too loud, the geese are unfamiliar, somebody’s turning red, and the only thing you can do is yell ‘Hey!’ and hope everyone walks away in one piece with a modicum of dignity.

Bro.

Hopefully, a new piece next week.

Anyway, please accept this in lieu of structural integrity this week:

Please Enjoy This Holiday Card

Creative non-fiction, For the love of a dog, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, , , , , , ,

Mid-year missive? Seasonal Dispatch? Or proof that I don’t understand how “months” work?

It is not December. It is June. Consider me six months late, or six months early, or maybe precisely on time for the inaugural June 25th Holiday Card I shall send from now until my inevitable end in a Kohl’s changing room (probably). Happy Global Beatles Day, International Day of the Seafarer, and Goat Cheese Day, however you celebrate.

Let’s pretend, against better judgment, that this is a normal holiday letter chock-full of unreasonably upbeat retellings of events that barely qualify as events.

Dearly Beloved,

We are gathered here today to bid a fond farewell to the first half of the year, which has slipped behind a paywall with all the grace of a dropped sandwich.

The 2025 bar was low, but with the grit of the truly uninspired, we limboed beneath it with room to spare. We are 170-something days into the year, depending on your level of faith in February. It’s a (preter)natural time to reflect with the bitter clarity that only hindsight and a poorly fitted bra can provide.

Rest was forecast. Rest was promised. Rest is allegedly in transit and estimated to arrive in the next 3–5 business years. I lie awake at 3:47 AM each day to get a jump on accomplishing absolutely nothing.

On the home front, there was no spring cleaning because spring in the Midwest lasts as long as a sneeze. I did move a stack of unread New Yorkers from one side of the coffee table to the other in a solemn act of seasonal repositioning. 

Told it was “unkillable,” I bought a pothos. It died. I replaced it with a stack of books, which now loiters atop another stack of books.

I also have an orchid, which they say is “difficult,” that chose to bloom for reasons I can only ascribe to malice. It is my favorite houseplant.

Unfortunately, the state of the actual world is ongoing. Politics remains a choose-your-own-nightmare. The word “unprecedented” has formally requested paid time off. Discourse is louder. Stakes are higher. Comic Sans is hanging on. The economy is allegedly resilient. This is code for “no one knows what’s going on, but we’re refreshing stock apps and trying not to accidentally buy crypto.”

Still, we persist if only out of momentum.

There are good things, though.

Vintage Hanes ad with a suspiciously cheerful family in matching pajamas clutching apples for reasons unknown. The father looks particularly smug. Ad’s caption reads: “Good news for the night shift!”

No, not that. 

My children. I have several of them. They are excellent, frequently taller than I am, and united in their disbelief that I once was cool. I will not list their achievements here — this is not a press release from the Office of Glorious Offspring. They are welcome to write their own holiday cards and/or cease-and-desist letters.

The dog continues to be the least civilized member of this household, as evidenced by his projectile shedding. He has barked at the dishwasher, a cloud, the concept of 2:30 p.m., and a bag of rice. He has rolled in unknowable substances and barfed in defiance of God and flooring. We adore him, this one-pooch anarchist collective.

N.B.: “Least civilized” is doing some heavy lifting here. The rest of us aren’t exactly wearing top hats.

I maintain an ironclad inability to stay awake during any show after 8:30 pm. I started a prestige drama that promised to change my life. It did not. Rather, people mooned about in sweaters, looking wealthy and having big feelings. I fell asleep and woke up believing I was in a West Elm catalog and that someone was mad at me.

Thus far in 2025, I have pursued no new hobbies, firmly adhering to my belief in the sanctity of not doing things other than cleaning up dog barf and marveling at my orchid.

Yet I look ahead, which these days feels like the biggest act of hope:

  • I will keep showing up, albeit dressed like I’m in Act Two of an experimental play.
  • I will continue purchasing lemons with unjustified confidence that I will use them.
  • I will only answer the doorbell if it’s pizza or the good parts of the 1970s.

Like many of you, I am tired, slightly out of focus, and occasionally funny according to random people who comment on my dumb social media jokes.

We’ve made it to midyear. That’s not nothing.

Season’s greetings. Enjoy some goat cheese and the following:

What Dangles From Your Trailer Hitch

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, , , , ,

Value/Display/Ignore

Writers are tasked with noticing. Most of the time, it’s harmless: overthinking a text or assigning poetic meaning to a crack in the sidewalk. Normal stuff.

But sometimes you are forced to stare at something so aggressively stupid that your writer brain —  wired for metaphor and incapable of mercy  —  whispers, “This means something.”

And unfortunately, it might.

An image of a shimmery pink disco ball against a black backdrop. The text reads “What Dangles From Your Trailer Hitch by Jackie Pick”

Impact at the Intersection

Every great civilization eventually signals the exact moment it gives up. See: bread and circuses, phrenology, Gérard Depardieu.

I encountered what may be our surrender point at a red light.

While stopped, I was running through my usual litany of big thoughts (Did I turn off the stove? Did I accidentally Reply All? Will humanity survive the inevitable collapse of late-stage capitalism masked by hyper-niche consumer trends?) when my attention landed on the truck in front of me.

No. Truck implies a mere conveyance. This was an iron colossus. One perhaps called The Dominator. Or The Torque Reckoning. Or The Doom Hauler.

Being a lusty all-American vehicle large enough to have its own microclimate should have sufficed.

Yet dangling from the hitch by paracord was a set of Truck Nuts.

If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar, Truck Nuts (or Truck Nutz) are decorative testicles, usually made from plastic or rubber, that people attach to the back of their automobiles.

The vehicular huevos festooning the back of the  —  oh, let’s say, GMC Rumble Thumper  —  bobbed with needless enthusiasm as the engine idled.

Part of my shock was geographic. There aren’t many Truck Nuts enthusiasts in my area. Car décor usually tops out at 5K decals or proud nods to children’s honor roll status.

These ornamental knackers weren’t even high-quality plastic, just the brittle material of cheap children’s toys that cracks on impact or warps in the sun. No subtlety, no artistry, just bright blue unapologetic vulgarity.

I stared. I didn’t want to, but like Medusa, these marbles demanded eye contact.

Two questions came to mind:

1. Who is driving this be-nutted behemoth?

2. Just…why?

The Driver: Breaking the Hypothesis in Real Time

Naturally, I started profiling the driver. Cargo shorts despite wind chill. Thinks taxes are theft, turn signals are for betas, and protein powder is a personality. Refers to women as “females,” has more Tapout shirts than sense, and once tried to fight a locker in high school.

The light turned green, I accelerated, pulled up next to the…let’s go with Chevy Thunder Tusk… and looked.

Stone-faced. Sunglasses. Holding large iced coffee.

A woman.

A woman who, I could tell with just a glance, has strong opinions about butter boards, and somehow manages to be unbothered and deeply furious at the same time.

She zoomed ahead of me as if to say, “Yes, I know. And no, I won’t explain.”

The Windows 95 error sound pinged in my head.

Where Capitalism and Low-Hanging Metaphors Collide

The more troubling question was why.

Clearly, there’s demand. Like it or not, an entire Truck Nut industrial complex exists, operating, presumably, within the legal parameters of commerce.

A factory.

Machines.

An entire logistics chain ensuring that no motor vehicles in America need remain ball-free.

Actual adults waking up in the morning, pouring coffee into World’s Best Dad mugs, and heading to a job where they debate aerodynamic integrity of plastic scrota.

There was undoubtedly a prototype. Wind tunnel tests. Torque calculations. PowerPoints on market scalability. Some guy insisting, “We’re revolutionizing the industry.”

Enormous vats of melted plastic poured into molds, cooled, popped free, and sent to a quality control specialist probably named Earl, who gives each a light tug to ensure structural integrity.

Shrink-wrapped pallets of these faux family jewels are distributed to gas stations, online marketplaces, and that one hardware store where someone’s grilling hot dogs in the parking lot.

A marketing team works on branding. Tough Nuts for Tough Trucks! Don’t Be a Ball-less Hitch! Freedom isn’t Free (And These Are Only $24.99)!

Perhaps even a network of aftermarket enthusiasts who have rousing online chats about proper ball-to-bumper ratios

All leading to the driver of the Ford Fee-Fi-Fo-Fummer in front of me (or her partner) slapping down actual money. Then, kneeling behind their truck, they tied these orbs of virility into place, wincing not even once.

I remind you we once wrote the Constitution, built Chicago (twice!), and sent humans to the moon.

I remind myself that I used to write about civic responsibility, democracy, and motherhood.

And yet, here we are.

The Philosophical Collapse

Still, was there meaning in these petrochemical gonads?

Irony? Prank? Postmodern critique of gender norms? Radical rejection of patriarchal tropes through appropriation of male genitalia?

Or worse  —  was it apathy, the apex predator of meaning?

The social contract as envisioned by Rousseau was not designed for this. Democracy, human rights, collective dignity? Yes. Plastic testicles on the back of a Toyota Titan Howler? Absolutely not.

Hobbes believed life without government was “nasty, brutish, and short.” I generally agree, but still argue that life with government has somehow produced a scenario where I’m stuck in traffic behind a Jeep Inferno Stallion, eyeball-to-clangers.

I cannot point to the exact section of the social contract that discourages such a thing, but I assume it’s located in the part about not making public spaces unbearable for everyone else. Or maybe tucked into an addendum called “This Should Really Go Without Saying.”

But if the driver in front of me didn’t care about the affixed Truck Nuts on her Honda Oblivion Rover, then the entire framework of cultural semiotics disintegrates. They mean nothing.

And if they aren’t anything, nothing is. Everything just sways pointlessly.

Metaphysics, but Make It Dumb

Perhaps material offers meaning.

There is something grotesquely poetic about the fact that the fake gonads are plastic.

Plastic is eternal.

Glaciers will melt, cities will sink, and centuries from now when the Great Plains are waterfront property, an archaeologist  —  probably also named Earl  —  will stumble upon slightly cracked, sun-bleached Truck Nuts. He’ll scan them for meaning and ask, “What god did these people worship?”

It’s not an unreasonable question. What else could it be other than an object of reverence? Is this who we are now? Cheap, crass, oscillating as if to measure the time we have left before the entire country embraces hollow spectacle under the hazy guise of, “I’m just asking questions.”

Or maybe we worship the in-your-face part.

Conclusion: Swing Inevitability?

The woman in the truck didn’t notice my deep dive into culture and philosophy like I was some one-person Department of Cultural Anthropology. She zipped off with the patriarchal baubles wobbling behind her.

I sat there, eating her proverbial dust, realizing two things:

  1. You cannot parody a culture that’s already doing it for you
  2. At some point Truck Nuts will come factory-installed. Standard.

And only Earl will understand the horror.