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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.

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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.