Category Archives: Life and Other Existential Problems

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.

Be/wilder (With/standing)

Cooking, Creative non-fiction, Inspiration, Life and Other Existential Problems, Month in Review, Recommendations, Writing

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.

The B and Noble Men

Creative non-fiction, Life and Other Existential Problems, Parenting, Reading,
Title card with The B and Noble Men at the top, three cartoon lemons looking unhappy, and a small dragon.

The two men stood in the one spot conspicuously free of shelves. Open, unsacred, lifeless space, as far from books as it is possible to be in a bookstore. A no-man’s land of sorts, but there they stood in this patch of space meant for rearranging thoughts or deciding where to go next. At first glance, they seemed to be there to grab something quickly and leave, or perhaps to wait. In each other’s presence, a momentary reprieve from feeling out of place.

We, my daughter and I, were there to rearrange our thoughts, to mend our worn edges. Words might carry us someplace softer where we could escape into neatly bound pages where someone else’s problems — smaller or larger, didn’t matter — offered strange, familiar solace. The bookstore smelled of coffee and, in that section we were trying to pass through, cologne.

They were aggressively unremarkable, those men. Able to demand attention without effort, to compress the air around them into a self-satisfied density. Loud. Confident. Convinced. The kind of people who view their success as an inevitability, etched into marble, affixed in permanence rather than scribbled on the side of a red Solo cup.

Perhaps that was the cologne talking.

They stood in that bookless space, wearing athleisure wear of curated ease, possibly worn for the exertion of “watching the kids” for a bit.

Forgive me, sometimes I read too much into things. It was a bookstore, after all.

They were comfortable and loud, their presence as much volume as it was space, somehow sprawling across this nearly empty bookstore so close to closing. They were careless as they dismantled a woman one of them had encountered — socially, professionally, who knows? Didn’t matter.

“She had too much plastic surgery,” First Guy said. “Her face looked tight. Fake.” He sculpted the air with exaggerated movements. “She looked like a lemon,” he added, pleased with himself. “Which is fitting.”

Other Guy laughed. “Yeah. I totally get it.”

Encouraged, First Guy fumbled for more analogies, more ways to articulate how deeply unacceptable this woman was, what with her face and everything else about her. He pulled his features into grotesque imitations of whatever displeased him about her, which seemed to be quite a bit.

My face never keeps its mouth shut and must have betrayed me. It always does. A flicker of something, too small to name but enough to catch their attention. Disapproval, maybe. Or disgust. Some merciless and mirthless conveyance of this again?

I warranted enough attention for them to shift their bodies and pause their conversation, their gaze heavy.

What did they see? Stitches, scars, gravity, broken things, healed places of a full human?

Nah. Definitely another lemon. Or maybe a yuzu or a blood orange. I haven’t had work done on my body unless you count the pieces of bone, flesh, and pain-points removed, so they were left only the sour.

We considered each other. I’d guess they were thinking I was intruding without smiling. They would probably not guess I’d had another day of fighting tiny, bothersome dragons.

Their interest faded. Their laughter resumed, quieter now. Slick. Greasy.

I walked away to catch up with my daughter.

She stood in the Young Adult section trailing her fingers over the spines of books. She held herself carefully, her shoulders drawn inward in the way she does when she’s trying not to let disappointment show. Her fingers lingered on one book, then another. She’d had a hard day, the kind with sharp teeth and scales. The kind a mom can’t fix, except by standing between her and the world long enough to let her breathe.

We searched for books — anything, really — that offered comfort, distraction, or, failing that, instructions for building a trebuchet from empty bags of Nerds Gummy Clusters.

She didn’t notice the men. She didn’t register their voices lofting over the shelves. If she did, it was part of the din of the day.

I’d said nothing to them. Me. Lady Speak Your Mind.

Of course I didn’t. Because it wasn’t my place. Because the parking lot was dark. Because I’m not their mother. Because risk analysis. Because this is the way of things.

Strategy? Failure? Quiet calculus of motherhood?

If my daughter weren’t there. If it were daylight. If I were ferocious, less aware of what happens when certain men decide you’ve embarrassed them. Maybe I would have said something.

Probably not. But maybe.

But if I did, it would’ve been presented as a possible joke. Lemon Face clearly owes you an apology. How dare she. Big smile. Plausible deniability. Pointless.

But I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.

When we left, they were one shelf away from the self-help section. The Universe, perhaps also running on empty, only offered dad jokes.

We, my daughter and I, left without books and went home, a place where tiny, bothersome dragons give us passage and say, “We’ll catch you tomorrow.”