Category: Creative non-fiction

Please Enjoy This Holiday Card

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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

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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.

Be/wilder (With/standing)

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January Month In Review

SHORT STUFF

  • I am keeping a list of the Top Ten Days of 2025. So far, January has failed. The only (weak) contender is January 26th, when we ate decent nachos. A tasty moment in an otherwise indifferent stretch of time.
  • “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky. What is the “something more”? Patience? Instinct? Juice? Is it juice? I don’t like juice.
  • Sleep is a flirt. I am a willing fool. I chase, I lose, I am tired. Who else belongs to the 4 AM Club?
  • December’s cozy hibernation exited stage left when January hit like a brick, and suddenly I’m expected to make responsible choices again. Terrible system. Do not recommend.
  • Seth Godin says slow down. I am listening. But also I am not. But also, I should be. This may be why I am in the 4 AM club.
  • My January 2025 had a soundtrack. It is, as my kids would never let me say, “a bop.” 

LONG STUFF

I cried at the dentist.

Not because of the scraping. Not even because of my idiotic need to be LITTLE MISS FUN PATIENT. (Let’s be clear, I am fun because I am hilarious.)

It wasn’t pain. It wasn’t fear.

Perhaps it was inevitable.

The night before, I forgot to season my vegetables (not a euphemism), which is not like me. I know how to cook and how to make things better. But I didn’t. And so we ate them, joyless.

When the body runs on fumes, you stop doing the things that make life taste like something.

Maybe it was inevitable because I haven’t listened to much music lately. This is also not like me. Normally, music is everywhere in my life. A soundtrack, a story, a signal. But now? Silence. Or just enough ambient music to fill the spaces, to keep the walls from pressing in.

Music is its own kind of story. And I cannot absorb another story right now. Certainly not while eating sad vegetables. Not while being Little Miss Fun Patient. Not while *everything else.*

Anyway, remember how I cried at the dentist because I just told you I did a few paragraphs back?

It happened when the next song came on. My dentist tries to calibrate the playlist to the patient — something generational, something soothing, something that says, “Pay no attention to the tiny metal hook scraping your bones.” Do I need Megadeth blaring while I’m power-washed in the mouth like a neglected patio? MAYBE. But probably not.

In the lonely space between cleaning and exam, a song came on.

And I cried.

Okay, yeah, it was “Chariots of Fire.” On the cornball scale of tear triggers this, ranks up there with a screensaver or a commercial about butter substitutes. Or “Bubbles” by the Free Design.

There are plenty of respectable reasons to cry, including being at the dentist, practically flipped upside down in the chair, mouth agape, and drowning in the indignity of it all.

Perhaps, though, it was not that.

The world these days is very “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”

On the other side of the mountain is Mount Doom.

After that, Mount Crumpit

And then the tiny sledding hill in my backyard where my kids, without fail, would somehow manage to steer directly into a tree even though the closet tree was about 20 yards away.

Climb one mountain, find another waiting. That’s how it works. So you throw the grappling hook and reach down to pull others up. (Am I a seasoned mountain climber? No. Do I like looking at mountains on Toblerone wrappers? Yes. Same energy.)

I also cried because my heart is with New Orleans, California, Las Vegas, and every neighbor who feels alone and helpless. My heart is not enough and tears unhelpful after a point, so we choose and we do. Because we see what we can see.

“Look for the helpers,” Mr. Rogers said.

Try to be one.

My background and expertise are scattered —  writing, education, social policy, the arts. A hodgepodge, but a purposeful one. A toolkit.

The goal now: Help fully. Help precisely.

Say “yes” carefully, but say it generously. 

Everyone’s capacity is stretched thin. I’m no exception, but am seeking and finding good community. Lord love a duck for that. (It is not a duck community, though perhaps it should be.)

Still posting my dumb little jokes (Are we connected on Bluesky?). Still writing the blog, working on the book, and seeking joy as we withstand and work.

A photo of Mel Brooks with his quote “Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.”

We can choose to be wild through actions and care, through public voice, through fiercely defending our peace, through a combination of those.

Also have some nachos if you like them. They help.

(Despite it all,) Here are some splashes of marvelous from January 2025

One of the stories in mass circulation today is a very old one, but it’s taken on a new vigor: women in general are out of control and feminism in particular is to blame… men are no longer in control, mothers are not what they used to be, and it’s the fault of Germaine Greer, Cosmopolitan, and headline stars.

  • An excerpt from Rumi’s “Where Everything is Music” Because sometimes you need Rumi.

Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

  • Sometimes my 70-pound screw-loose pitbull mix gets the zoomies. It is short-lived because he has zero stamina and the spatial awareness of a potato. But he tries. He is all heart and demolition. I will try to film it.
  • Need a corny cry break?

Until next time, here’s a combo I ask you to consider: books, pen, paper, us.