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Look, we know what you’re thinking: This is by far one of our worst pun-based ideas. But Greg gets real pissy if we don’t let him just go to town roasting something, both literally and figuratively, every thirty to three hundred days or so. And so we present: cool trucks.
Well, well, well. I did not, despite how my last entry in this series ended, drink the lemonade and die. In this column’s absence, uh. Hmm.
A lot has happened since then. Eggs are more expensive, among other things. I should know, my wife and I just paid eight thousand dollars for one single egg, and it’s not even getting delivered for another three months. She’s so shaken by the price of eggs that she keeps throwing up every morning. Look: it’s been over a year since I tried to write a joke, they aren’t all going to be keepers.
As far as the main problems as they are occuring, I think we all know this, but just to restate, it is impossible to continue, and yet we must. To wit, I recently went to a wedding at the end of the world. You gotta respect the audacity of doing a thing like that in times like these, but my main concern was just to not show up wearing something that dieworkwear would clown on. It was fun, but the ceremony referred to marriage as “the ultimate co-op campaign”, which I thought was kind of disrespectful to the actual holder of that title, Halo 2.
My reason to carry on for as long as I can is that I don’t have a choice. I have kids, and they don’t deserve to worry about this shit. I do, but they don’t. They got enough problems. Hell, I let my daughter have a cupcake for breakfast a while back, because she asked for it and my wife wasn’t around to stop me. Honey if you’re finding out about that move just now, uhh, sorry. In my defense her squeaky toddler voice is very cute.
In my daughter’s world, trade wars and insanely stupid executive orders don’t exist. What she cares about, more than anything in the world, is big yellow machines that make loud noises. In this and many other ways, every child can be understood as Broly from Dragonball. They get more powerful and incoherent as they get more riled up, and there is nothing that riles them up more than seeing a big car with extra parts.
Kids love trucks. There’s no sentimentality to it, they just understand at a fundamental level that there is no creation without destruction. When they see a bulldozer knocking down a house, or a road getting steamrollered, they aren’t thinking about carbon emissions or gentrification or how the suburbs are an unsustainable ponzi scheme. They just think – correctly – that it is Cool.
I can’t stress enough how right they are. Big machines kick so much ass. I just tried to dig out a single 8×4 garden bed and broke my ass before I even got half of it done. If the world reverts to subsistence farming I’m 100% gonna die. Wish I’d had a truck to do the work for me.
My Kid’s Favorite Trucks, Ranked
Before you ask, no, she doesn’t know about monster trucks. That is too raw and real to show to a child her age. It would blow her mind, and ruin regular vehicles for her. She’d never be impressed again by even the reddest fire engine or those tractor trailers with like thirty axles. Maybe when she’s four, we can talk about Gravedigger.
Mixer Truck
This one I don’t really understand. She’s never seen one of these rotating, let alone actually dumping anything – we don’t see many of them at all, actually, because not a lot of people need multi-ton deliveries of concrete in our neighborhood. The mixer isn’t her favorite truck phenotype, and she gets mixers and tankers conflated sometimes, but it’s a thing I can point at and get a reaction, and it keeps her from watching too much TV.
Crane
It took me a while to get her to learn what a crane is – I blame Richard Scarry for drawing a million weird ones that aren’t recognizably the same thing – but now she points them out pretty consistently. It’s always fun to watch your kid learn a new skill, and truck phrenology isn’t exactly the most important skill she’s picked up, but it is a skill.
Cranes are tall, which seems to be the only thing she cares about.
Excavator
One of the objectively sickest trucks there is, the excavator (or digger truck) combines tank treads with a scary metal claw. It trundles around making holes in stuff like the fist of an angry god. I can imagine, if I were three feet tall and struggled to dig to the bottom of a sandbox, I would also become obsessed with a bathtub-sized scoop ripping up yards wholesale.
Strong pick, only slightly reduced in ranking because of the Blippi song about them that she made me listen to one hundred times. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but thank god she discovered Frozen, because it let me stop playing Blippi Vs The Machines last fall.
Fork Lift
The easiest money in the world is being a dad out in the world alone with your daughter. You get massive credit from every mom and especially every grandma who sees you out there, for doing the bare minimum. The bar is so low it’s insane. Oh you took your daughter to the potty, instead of letting her crap her pants? Get a load of this guy. Real father of the year, over here.
I was at Home Depot and my kid wanted to watch the guy driving a forklift, and honestly so did I, so I stopped and narrated all the moves for her. The lady standing next to it waving orange flags around actually came over and let my kid have a turn, which I think OSHA might not approve of but I also don’t think OSHA is real anymore. This unearned regard obviously reflects poorly on dads in general but the upside is that my kid got to wave little caution flags and tell the machine she loved it, so I’m calling that a win.
Garbage Truck
A common thing is for me to be driving somewhere, and out of the backseat I just hear “TRASH TRUCK”, which is very cute. The downside to the garbage truck is that, more than once, I’ve been trying to hustle her out the door for school and had to wait while she watches the trash guys throw our stuff in the back, then wave to them. The trash truck giveth and it taketh away, though I guess by its function it’s mostly concerned with taking away.
The other fun garbage truck story I have is that I saw one around here with a Trump 2024 flag pinned to the back of it, which is a signal you can interpret in at least a couple of different ways.
Me
No false modesty here: there is no mode of transport or construction that my kid loves more than her dad. Whether I’m holding her hand to cross the street or carrying her around on my shoulders like Master Blaster, she is firmly, perhaps overly, attached. If I ever doubted this, the way she cries full-on tears because I had the nerve to go into the basement for two minutes would have convinced me.
People tell you having kids is hard, and it sort of is, but it also sort of isn’t. It’s extremely simple, but it’s not easy. I don’t even think it’s a skill issue, it’s more of an endurance thing: all you gotta do is make them a higher priority than yourself but lower than your wife, and project calm at all times. The hard part is that you have to do this every day.
If you don’t want to go to a playground after school, but there’s no real reason not to – the weather is good, no plans for the evening, etc – just do it. Kid wants to play with something loud and your head hurts? Too bad. That’s it, just say yes to things unless you have a good reason not to. Your job is to install guardrails and routines, but not to get hung up on minor things just because you don’t feel like it – yes you have to brush your teeth, and no you aren’t going to run into traffic, but yes I can explain again how clouds work, and no I don’t have a good reason to stop you from wearing the Elsa dress to school again so, fuck it, let’s go. They’re still learning how to be a person, and you just have to be patient while they figure it out. The two things I tell my daughter are “when we fall down, we get back up”, and “accidents happen”. Let them live their life, within reasonable and consistent limits, and celebrate every time they do something cool. If you get sore or tired doing this, that’s normal, and it’s the price you pay. It’ll be worth it.
It’s tough having kids, man. On your knees and back, yeah, but more than anything on your head and heart. I know to a certainty that, eventually, she’s gonna have a bad time and I won’t be able to help. I don’t know what, or when, but I do know that we all get violently blowtorched by something in the world sooner or later, and it’s just a matter of whether it turns you into hardy durable charcoal or one of those shadows melted into concrete from an atomic bomb. Most of the time, you take your lumps and get on with your life – every single person you’ve ever met has dealt with some shit in their day, and most of us turned out varying degrees of fine – but it’s inexorable, and it’s a numbers game: whatever is going to happen is going to happen, and I will have no control over it. Best I can offer is that, for now, before any of that goes down and she doesn’t even understand the concept, if it makes her happy she can drag me all over town to look at heavy construction equipment. God help me when I have two of them to deal with, but nobody ever got in trouble by doubling down. It’s fine, everything’s fine.
Thanks for sticking around, and making this column what it is: a little-read corner of this website that exists solely for me to waste your time and get yelled at. If you have questions or comments, let us know at contact@goonhammer.com, or right here in the comments. Meatwatch is here to help.
