Haylookitsa Truck Nuts

So my divorce-lawyer/accountant/aroma therapist asked me the other day if I could relate Truck nuts to Teaching English in a foreign country using mixed metaphors. I told her, probably not but I'll try to throw a hail three-pointer half-court header into the outfield.

Settlers of Catan is a good teaching tool.

--->

The opposite of truck nuts is the board game Settlers of Catan.

--->

Settlers of Catan is a game where you get to role-play a municipal development specialist. In the brave new twenty-first century, as a species which used to entertain ourselves by watching Gladiators smash each other's faces in with clubs, we now spend our evenings pretending to be Bureaucrats. In many ways this is an improvement. Watching living things kill each other for fun has certain negative connotations.

Settlers of Catan is the same thing as a blunt object against a neanderthal's head. Bear with me, here, this goes somewhere. This goes places.

I guess that means that Settlers of Catan is both a signifier and enacter of a kind of progress. The kind of progress that has yielded complex material processing, manufacturing webs that stretch the globe, and Hong Kong. Board games, video games, and racquetball seem to be aspects of a social facade which is a protector of this progress. This facade, on a personal level, this veneer, is an expression of that civil mask we wear everyday. When you catch your boss staring at your cleavage or your professor says something obnoxious and punches you in the face, this is the defense mechanism that kicks in to keep us in line to those invisible rules that make up the social contract.

These board games are a the expression of this veneer on a sociological level. I think we are ever so slightly oppressed and terrified by these invisible covenants so, in response we thirst to impose our own meta-rules over the bigger game. Rules where the stakes are lower than the social contract and, more importantly, rules which only apply to the on hand participants which end when the game is over.

So why do we desire to pretend to be a bureaucrat? Because people are boring. At least Risk let you pretend to be a megalomaniac fascist and Monopoly let me become Andrew Carnegie. Andrew Carnegie opened a museum that is filled with dinosaur bones and machines and guns just like that game Jurassic Park the board game. The dude went head on with the US government to screw over his workers and then chased the Britons out of England in 490 CE, just like that game Stratego. How many guns and fossils have the Settlers of Catan yielded like that game Operation? None, see? Stupid. Utterly without argument, complete idiocy that game. You know that part of the game where you're winning until John steals pieces off your side and when you try to stop him you drop your cards and then your pants rip and every laughs and then Thailand floods driving up the price of hard-drives and then the stock of Amazon takes a hit because now cloud computing infrastructure isn't as cheap as it once was? Screw that game and screw John. I hate John. Settlers of Catan. PFFT.

I suppose this isn't about what we want to pretend though, I suppose this is about 'the rules'.

<--->

This need to sit in a peaceful circle over some tea and perhaps a glass of wine (or if you're feeling especially rebellious, two glasses) comes from the same need to smash in another person's face with a club and then sell his children. It is the need to impose power over a gigantic system called the universe we can't control that is deadset on killing us at some point. Catan's rules are just another club used to impose a system upon the messy equation that is human action.

Settlers of Catan is a quickly becoming a cultural force. But remember, Catan is still a shitty game. It contains multitudes.

Like TS Eliot talked about in the Four Quartets, the way up is the way down. All cultural forces breed their opposites. In this case, the culture that would elevate Catan already spawned a counter-type to the board game: large horse-sized testicles which hang off the back of a truck.

Truck Nuts.

The pick-up truck is a testament (lol, testa-) (lol, balls) (grow up), to human resourcefulness, ingenuity, and resilience. Each modern truck is a mobile box filled with cutting-edge engineering, manufacturing, infrastructure, and computing wrapped in steel and various polymers. Each one is a tiny Ozymandius running around American roads in an endless circle of prayer to the god of commerce, Mitt Romney. I love Mitt Romney. That smile.

And then we hang fake balls off of them.

Because certain people are contrarian. Because some people want to offend you as a final resistance to the torrent of positive competition and cooperation emanating from Settlers of Catan and the UN. The other begs only to not be destroyed. This is the same resistance of Rosa Parks, John Rabe, and Ted Nugent. It's the dialectic of the weak that Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison talk about. A lot like that, actually. Except, you know, different.

--->

Synthetic man-nuggets can be applied to Academia, ESL, and my life too. Here's how:

Having an English major is like owning a gas sucking Eastern European made SUV with truck nuts with 'deez nuts' written on the side. You feel really bad and useless and poorly engineered until you see someone with a business major driving something just as big and twice as Ukranian and you feel better because 'that guy is a bigger joke than me'. Except then you realize now you are just part of a confederacy of ass holes driving big vehicles contributing to the end of the world via ice, fire, and global warming. The comparison is just a coping mechanism. The truck nuts are some kind of metaphor.

The English department gives you a sense that you are part of an erudite Caucasian elite drawing knowledge from the memetic reservoir filled by Horace, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Faulkner.

Although this is partially true, an English Major is also a way to pay someone to judge your ability to read things the rest of the world deems entertainment.

I heard about Harry Potter for the first time when I was around 11 or 12 in Middle School as I was being prepped to have a Bar Mitzvah, become a man, and be able to attend batman movies in the theater. For the Hanukkah before that, I received a copy of The Chamber of Secrets from my extended family. I started reading it, didn't know what was going on, and then stopped. Turns out that was the second book so it made sense that I was lost in the narrative. Unlike Goosebumps and Boxcar Children, you have to read Harry Potter in serial order. Just like Charles Dickens.

Occasionally, I can convince myself that an English-Literature major is a giant awesome American made truck with a GPS, 4 cup holders, and a big ole grill to murder elk and jumping prairie dogs. Except, this truck has no wheels and no four wheel drive. It's awesome and I love it, and sometimes it gets me a date or two, but it isn't going anywhere. Especially when it snows.

There is no real reason to have a Lit major if you are thinking like a Utilitarian. There is also no reason to have a potpourri in your bathroom either. Anything you can do in a bathroom that you would want to cover up probably has a very pervasive smell. So when you are done doing that anything in the bathroom the room just smells like the combined scent of potpourri and pervasive smell. The potpourri just represents, when you first walk into the bathroom, the hope that it will actually do its job this time. It doesn't. But I would wager my left truck nut that Stewart-Mill had a little bowl of potpourri next to his toothbrush.

Now Febreeze, that shit could make the pope's woods smell like a summer breeze. But aerosols are best left to Engineering majors.

ESL are truck nuts for the disillusioned humanities undergraduate for their giant luxury truck without wheels. Sure, it's a salary job which pays me well and will eventually contribute to my future in a somewhat elliptical way- I just know, in the bottom of my gut somewhere, that it is also a concession to the fact that there is a big wedge between the pure pursuit of James Joyce and a career. It is my undergraduate Alamo.

Even if I do get an academic post somewhere in a community college which makes study and information my trade, I still know that I paid someone a few thousand dollars at one point in my life to talk about fiction, pretend stories, while my friend John is learning how to engineer a cheap bridge that can withstand extreme flooding for poor Taiwanese. And you know what? I'm not entirely fine with this.

But I also think, in many ways, we buy our trucks because of the ability to put truck nutz on them. John will spend his money on a nice TV and a bunch of trips to the bar. There is nothing wrong with this. But it is still an example of the balls wagging the truck. There is compensation here, somewhere, on all levels.

--->

Deez nutz (QED).

!=
(To anyone who is into philosophy, into psychology, in my family, a thinker, or not into mixing metaphors: I am vehemently sorry. It will happen again.)