Monday, January 21, 2008

Truck Commercials: Like A Crock

Televised football with its frequent breaks usually finds the sun of my intellect partially eclipsed by a fast-approaching, truck-commercial induced brain aneurysm. On Sunday, I fear that aneurysm struck as the cognitive equivalent of a global killer. For today I feel compelled to go out and buy a pickup truck.

Not so long ago I believed that I lived in a nation of paved roads. Not anymore. Pickup truck commercials have convinced me that I'll have to drive up and over the Ozarks to get to the grocery store. Probably I'll be hauling something -- a bunch of rocks, or possibly a disabled eighteen-wheeler. Somewhere along the way I'll find myself braking at the maw of a bottomless crevice, that after navigating a gigantic, erector set obstacle course that threatens me with plunging, skyscraper-high steel beams. Carhartt-accessorized men in hardhats will look on. They will cheer me.

But not only men. Admiring women will recognize the strong correlation between the size of my truck and the size of my genetalia. What's more, the wholesome manliness of my vehicle will send my pituitary gland into a compensatory overdrive, flooding my testicles with testosterone-producing hormones. Probably some will gaze at my suddenly splendid physique and impossibly strong chin and mistake me for Fox NFL analyst Howie Long. Of course I will set them straight. Guys capable of slamming shut with authority a door on the bed of a truck hardly require the security of a contrived identity.

It’s pleasant to imagine myself rolling up to my place in a shiny new truck. That rusting Mazda 626 always parked on the street will remind me that some would sacrifice their manhood to the false idol of a superior fuel efficiency. "Poor bastard," I'll mutter, forgetting for the moment, and probably forever, that I drove that car once. And as the sun sets on another star-spangled day, I'll lay my head down pondering a question that has troubled me since the first telecast of this NFL season : am I really getting everything that I need from my cell phone plan?

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