Someday we'll be truckers

They told us all about exceeding the guest's expectations. Over and over they said it. Bullshit, I thought, I came here to get away from repetetive language. All that talk about the weather. Who gives a fuck? I left Nebraska so I'd never have to talk about the weather or that fucking flood again, and so somebody would say something new to me, something I'd never heard before. That's all I wanted, original words.

Ruby gave me original words, the hard to take kind. She had been gang raped the night before I met her and photographed her. She had this sweetness, this naive kindness that just sort of came out of her despite the bruises... she was as a child, and hurting her seemed to be the most devilish thing imaginable, like hurting a child. I wanted to hurt them, burn them, rip out their kidneys while their hearts still beat, pull off their dicks with those chains on the back of trucks you take big stumps out with, and then make them eat it with wasabi.

I wanted to hold her, comfort her and tell her how it would be someday, because:

Someday we'll be truckers. We'll wear cowboy hats, the kind with the big feather bands, and all sorts of clothes that remind us of Cannonball Run. We'll have those birds like on TransAms and they'll be on our clothes, maybe tattoos of them. We'll wink at people as we drive by in our great big loud truck and maybe we'll honk. Maybe. The honking will make us think of that arm-pumping some people like to do when they say "YYYYYYYYeeeeesssssss!" That's why it's good to be a trucker. And the outlaw country. We'll meet Steve Earle and he will know us, just know us, the way kindred spirits do. We'll sing along with Billy Jo Shaver songs, and we'll really believe them. We'll specifically listen to "I'm gonna live forever," but we'll definitely prefer the version made after his son died and his wife left, because we know him in that one, just know him.

Someday we'll live in Annie Dillard novels. We'll frolic by streams and we'll poke things with sticks and we'll know nature like it's a part of us or something. We'll dance and sing and make up adventures and we'll find one of those rocks like in Romancing the Stone and with it buy a boat, a really big boat with sails.

Someday we'll be electricians. We'll have a very satisfactory thing going, what with me never having to do retail or food service again, and you never having to suck anyone's dick again. We'll know something when we know electricity, and I don't know how to explain it, but I figure there are some secrets there, secrets people who are not electricians cannot understand. We'll laugh and play; we'll be fearless, because we'll know electricity like it's a part of us or something. It will be like a big pillow fight party but with a lot of lighting and 10 billion volts.

Someday we'll be magic.