Junk in the Truck

I would like to say that I keep my sweet ride perfectly clean. I would also like to tell you that I'm perfect but it just ain't so. I'm not worried about it though, because a perfectly clean pickup truck smacks of fakeness. I keep the cab clean, because I am a lady at times, but the box is a whole other story.

The only thing I've hauled recently is a nice black Nauga Hide swivel chair tht my Boy picked out at the Seven Nation Army. (He said it reminded him of the White Stripes song that starts off "I was sittin there, I had a com-for-table chair, and that was all that I needed")

I'm not sure where all the junk in the box came from. I know the maple leaves are from the tree I park the truck under. I know the air filter is, uh, from the engine. (And I think tomorrow I should go to Crap Tire and get a new one, eh?) There's a broken latch from the quarter window that I got fixed last summer. I keep forgetting to throw it out. I have no idea where the three crushed pop cans came from, or how they ended up in my truck. A tailgate party I slept through? In my own driveway? We don't even drink pop. The best one is the empty chip bag. It's been there since late summer, from both laziness and forgetfulness, and it's still there.

The physics involved in keeping light stuff in the back of a truck is interesting. The wind comes off the cab and hits the bed right in front of the tailgate, keeping all the things jammed up against the cab right there to stay. I took the tailgate off of my first truck. I thought I'd get better gas mileage without that wind block. A real smart guy told me lately that that's a myth. There must be something to it though. When my old man hits the gas on his old hot rod truck, he pops the tailgate open if it's not chained tight enough.

One day my kids and I were checkin' out a groovy store called Van & Truck World. Can you believe it, a whole world!! We were really digging it until we came across this boxliner that had a solid fibreglas lid, on struts like a hatchback, and was lined in carpet. We stood there looking at it in bewilderment, until one of my Genius Junior kids said, "But, how do you sweep the dirt out of the box?" I shook my head. "Kids," I said, "if you need this, you should be driving a minivan." ( See Hell Has Frozen Over) So today's lesson is this: The clean stuff goes up front in the cab. The dirt goes back in the box. If I can eat off the truck bed, you have been wasting a lot of money at the gas station on a vehicle you don't really need.