Monster Trucks Quotes

Mommy and Daddy make a lot of noise when they kiss. Mommy talks to God a lot. I talk to God sometimes too. I asked him for a puppy and a new monster truck but I was nice and didn't yell at him like Mommy does. He still hasn't gotten me the puppy though.

Frozen yogurt is tastier than ice cream; nobody is too old for cartoons; bald men are sexy; chocolate is the best medicine; BIG books are better; cats secretly rule the planet; and everything should be available in the color pink, including monster trucks.

There are two ways to pass a hurdle: leaping over or plowing through... There needs to be a monster truck option.

Moving the kids was not a good idea, but I sure wanted to see nuns in monster trucks plowing their way through a blizzard.

People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars.

In my defense, it wasn’t my monster truck. It was my mother’s.

The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot. I

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.

The air space is obviously for the Aerial Transports—ATs, and the roads are for the Ground Vehicles—GVs. However, even among the GVs, strict rules apply for the ones with wheels and tires—they must stay nearest to the earth. A truck with monster tires, like hers, must stay away from the upper-level highways if she wants to avoid stares.

My four-year-old son and I have little in common. Cooper loves cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time. I hate cars, jets, monster trucks, and motorcycles. All the time.

Well, I tell myself, it could be worse. You could have been rescued by some fifty-year-old perv sporting a spare tire the size of a monster truck’s who keeps his dead mother in the attic.

Watching Mom try to act girlie would be entertainment in itself. Our last attempt at a girls' day started with a pedicure and ended with a monster-truck rally. That was five years ago. And so was her last pedicure.

Whiteness is not only threatened when it takes on too many traits of identities of color; it is also threatened when communities of color cease to stay below whiteness, where society’s scripts say they belong. A white family may feel threatened not only when their daughter brings a Black man home for dinner (breaking from what is expected of her as a white person), but also if that Black man makes the same wage as her father (breaking from the expectations of Blackness that whiteness depends on). The same is true for masculinity. Men may feel threatened not only when their sons declare their love of the color pink, but also when their daughters choose monster trucks over dolls.

Standing there at Powell’s grave, telling my nephew about a buried skull, I realize how much of our relationship revolves around body parts and severed heads. Once Owen learned to walk, we started playing a game I call Frankenstein, in which I am Frankenstein’s monster and I chase him around trying to harvest his organs and appendages because my master is building another boy. “Frankenstein needs your spleen,” I yell, aping the voice of an announcer at a monster truck rally. “Give me your spleen!” Which is why the seemingly gross book I gave him for his birthday, a collection of poetry for children called The Blood-Hungry Spleen was actually a sentimental choice, even though my sister tells me it didn’t go over so well when he brought it to preschool.

Every strange thing you see everybody do,” she said, “that’s it. That’s the fear. Every time you look at a person and their behavior is a mystery to you, that’s their fear. All the rage you see in the world. All the arguments and the wars and the guns. All the loud music and the big monster trucks and the expensive, fancy cars, and the political rallies. That’s all the fear that people don’t want to admit they have.

Is there any training that can prepare you for this moment, being face-to-face with a human monster, a man who seems to glide placidly through the everyday world in a baseball cap, smelling of Old Spice while concealing a gallery of horrors beneath his garage, in the back of his truck, inside his mind?

The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank. There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line. It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck. We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know.

One problem was that we were now attracting the same people who used to kick our asses in high school for being different, who called us “faggots” and “queers” for the clothes we wore and the music we listened to. Our fanbase was changing to include macho monster-truck homophobes and meathead jocks whose worlds revolved around beer and football

After sweeping all of Mr. Martinez’s bones into the metal bin, I carried them over to the other side of the crematory and poured them along a long, flat tray. The tray, similar to the kind used on archeological digs, was used to search for various metal items that people had embedded in their bodies during their lifetimes. The metal I was looking for could be anything from knee and hip implants to metal dentures. The metal had to be removed because the final step in the cremation process was placing the bones into the waiting Cremulator. “The Cremulator” sounds like a cartoon villain or the name of a monster truck but is in fact the name of what is essentially a bone blender, roughly the size of a kitchen crockpot.

He never approves of anything I do,” Kusha says from the garage, hiding her frown. She gets all her old cars and tools from places you don’t want your daughters to visit. And Rashad Gaumont certainly doesn’t want her to visit Magic Mama, the not-enough-evolved, middle-aged man from the Old City. “He’s not a citizen! He lives in a bus! So what if he made it himself? So what if he teaches you about machines? Don’t meet him.” “Why?” Kusha used to ask Rashad, and she’d always get the same answer: “The unevolved kind brings chaos and wars.” Kusha didn’t listen. She went again and bought this car, too, from an antique dealer. He almost gave it away, saying it will never run again. It has the old days’ engine, the kind you don’t find in this era. A change of engines and batteries, a new set of all-terrain-tires, some safety trackers, sensors, and, well, a whole list of other things with 300% luck to make it run again through the Junk Land—the land outside the cities where it’s only ruins and rubble. Needs hard work, yes. But Kusha instantly liked the color of its body, the moment she saw it—a sort of green with greyish tint, and a good load of rust.

Once on the road again, she found her center and determination to see this through. Let Perdue come for her. The vicious monster who’d made a living buying and selling people was going to feel her wrath. As the light turned green, she steered right onto Flagler Street. A second after she pulled onto the main road, her heart jumped in her throat. A tow truck barreled down on her as it ran a red light.

We're going to spend our senior year together,' Annabeth explained, 'here in New York. And after graduation-' 'College in New Rome!' Percy bumped his fist like he was blowing a truck horn. 'Four years with no monsters to fight, no battles, no stupid prophecies. Just me and Annabeth, getting our degrees, hanging out at Cafes, enjoying California-' 'And after that . . . ' Annabeth kissed Percy on the cheek. ' Well, Reyna and Frank said we could live in New Rome as long as we like.

Before she could say anything more, Sabella swung around at the sound of Noah’s Harley purring to life behind the garage. God. He was dressed in snug jeans and riding chaps. A snug dark T-shirt covered his upper body, conformed to it. And he was riding her way. “Is there anything sexier than a man in riding chaps riding a Harley?” Kira asked behind her. “It makes a woman simply want to melt.” And Sabella was melting. She watched as he pulled around the side of the garage then took the gravel road that led to the back of the house. The sound of the Harley purred closer, throbbing, building the excitement inside her. “I think it’s time for me to leave,” Kira said with a light laugh. “Don’t bother to see me out.” Sabella didn’t. She listened as the Harley drew into the graveled lot behind the house and moved to the back door. She opened it, stepping out on the back deck as he swung his legs over the cycle and strode toward her. That long-legged lean walk. It made her mouth water. Made her heart throb in her throat as hunger began to race through her. “The spa treated you well,” he announced as he paused at the bottom of the steps and stared back at her. “Feel like messing your hair up and going out this evening? We could have dinner in town. Ride around a little bit.” She hadn’t ridden on a motorcycle since she was a teenager. She glanced at the cycle, then back to Noah. “I’d need to change clothes.” His gaze flickered over her short jeans skirt, her T-shirt. “That would be a damned shame too,” he stated. “I have to say, Ms. Malone, you have some beautiful legs there.” No one had ever been as charming as Nathan. She remembered when they were dating, how he would just show up, out of the blue, driving that monster pickup of his and grinning like a rogue when he picked her up. He’d been the epitome of a bad boy, and he had been all hers. He was still all hers. “Bare legs and motorcycles don’t exactly go together,” she pointed out. He nodded soberly, though his eyes had a wicked glint to them. “This is a fact, beautiful. And pretty legs like that, we wouldn’t want to risk.” She leaned against the porch post and stared back at him. “I have a pickup, you know.” She propped one hand on her hip and stared back at him. “Really?” Was that avarice she saw glinting in his eyes, or for just the slightest second, pure, unadulterated joy at the mention of that damned pickup? He looked around. “I haven’t seen a pickup.” “It’s in the garage,” she told him carelessly. “A big black monster with bench seats. Four-by-four gas-guzzling alpha-male steel and chrome.” He grinned. He was so proud of that damned pickup. “Where did something so little come up with a truck that big?” he teased her then. She shrugged. “It belonged to my husband. Now, it belongs to me.” That last statement had his gaze sharpening. “You drive it?” “All the time,” she lied, tormenting him. “I don’t have to worry about pinging it now that my husband is gone. He didn’t like pings.” Did he swallow tighter? “It’s pinged then?” She snorted. “Not hardly. Do you want to drive the monster or question me about it? Or I could change into jeans and we could ride your cycle. Which is it?” Which was it? Noah stared back at her, barely able to contain his shock that she had kept the pickup. He knew for a fact there were times the payments on the house and garage had gone unpaid—his “death” benefits hadn’t been nearly enough—almost risking her loss of both during those first months of his “death.” Knowing she had held on to that damned truck filled him with more pleasure than he could express. Knowing she was going to let someone who wasn’t her husband drive it filled him with horror. The contradictor feelings clashed inside him, and he promised himself he was going to spank her for this.

I don't always know what to do with texts about demons in the Bible. Especially when demons talk and have names...But I do know that, like myself, many of my parishioners suffer from addictions and compulsions and depression. I do know that sometimes things get ahold of us, making us do things we don't want to or making us think we love things (substances, people, etc.) that are really destructive. So maybe if, in part, that is what a demon is, maybe if it's being taken over by something destructive, then possession is less of an anachronism and more of an epidemic. ...I, like any good middle-class, mainline Protestant, tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at talk of demon possession as superstitious snake-handling nonsense, as though it's the embarrassing spiritual equivalent of a monster truck rally....I was feeling squirmy about people who talk of evil spirits and demons like they are beings in and of themselves, until I remembered that, at one point in my life, my own depression had felt so present, so much like a character in my life, that it actually felt right to go ahead and give her a name. I named my depression Frances

I let the mercenary go. He collapsed on the ground and rolled into a ball, covering his face. His body shook and an unsettling low sound came from him. He was sobbing. I had opened his mind with my magic can opener, scooped out the contents, and displayed them for all to see. It was a deep violation of his person. People were staring at me, their eyes brimming with fear. A couple of them gripped their weapons in alarm. I had horrified the professional soldiers. I looked at my mother. Sadness softened her face, her mouth slack. It hit me. I was the monster on the street. Without me, they would’ve questioned and even tortured this veteran mercenary. They would’ve done it with the understanding that he would resist and he wouldn’t have faulted them for it, because in their place he would’ve done the same. There was a twisted kind of professional courtesy about it all. But me, I didn’t torture. I broke his will without even breathing hard. Each one of them could see themselves in the mercenary’s place. I could make them tell me all their secrets and that was more frightening than Rogan stopping a massive tanker truck at full speed. I’d never felt so alone in my whole life. Rogan stepped between me and them, his eyes full of something. Whatever it was—pride? Admiration? Love?—I held on to it like it was a lifeline. He understood. At some point in his life he had stood just like that, while people stared at him in horror, and he must’ve felt alone, because now he was here, and he was shielding me from their judgment. “You’re amazing,” Connor Rogan said and smiled.

Damn,” Stacia agreed softly.  “Sorry, but it was your own fault for calling him a monster,” she directed at the bouncer. “What?  What’s he doing?” the big bald guy asked. “He got your scent, so now he’s tracking down which car or truck is yours,” I said. “What’s he gonna do when he finds it?” Baldy asked. “Well, he kinda ate the last one,” I said regretfully. “What!”  Bouncer man took off into the parking lot at a dead run, pulling a key fob from his pocket as he went.  Almost immediately, Awasos came running from the side of the parking lot, having circled around. “Did you find it?” I asked him. He woofed once softly. “Did you pee on his radiator?” Another woof. “Good boy! Baked-on wolf pee has a half-life of like a year! Let’s go,” I said, ignoring the incredulous looks from the good ole boys.

The tree house convulsed. A huge hole gulped away the center of the floor and Reggie felt one of his legs flop through. He loosened his grip on Willie’s pants leg and immediately got an eyeful of Willie’s shoe. Reggie reeled away, letting go of Willie to save himself. Willie’s body slid out the doorway and James wrapped his arms around Willie’s thigh, then his calf, now his foot, desperately clawing and clinging, shouting something, maybe, Don’t go, please Willie don’t go! For an instant the world narrowed down: gone were the tree house, the tree, the truck, the noise, the night. The world reduced to two things: James’s hands and Willie’s left foot. And then the tree shook and the truck backed up and Willie wriggled and the truck spun its tires and James screamed and the truck lurched ahead and then Willie dropped like a stone, heavy and silent, and James held only a single, tiny tennis shoe that was once worn by a boy named Willie Van Allen.

Miraculously, thirty minutes later I found Marlboro Man’s brother’s house. As I pulled up, I saw Marlboro Man’s familiar white pickup parked next to a very large, imposing semi. He and his brother were sitting inside the cab. Looking up and smiling, Marlboro Man motioned for me to join them. I waved, getting out of my car and obnoxiously taking my purse with me. To add insult to injury, I pressed the button on my keyless entry to lock my doors and turn on my car alarm, not realizing how out of place the dreadful chirp! chirp! must have sounded amidst all the bucolic silence. As I made my way toward the monster truck to meet my new love’s only brother, I reflected that not only had I never in my life been inside the cab of a semi, but also I wasn’t sure I’d ever been within a hundred feet of one. My armpits were suddenly clammy and moist, my body trembling nervously at the prospect of not only meeting Tim but also climbing into a vehicle nine times the size of my Toyota Camry, which, at the time, was the largest car I’d ever owned. I was nervous. What would I do in there? Marlboro Man opened the passenger door, and I grabbed the large handlebar on the side of the cab, hoisting myself up onto the spiked metal steps of the semi. “Come on in,” he said as he ushered me into the cab. Tim was in the driver’s seat. “Ree, this is my brother, Tim.” Tim was handsome. Rugged. Slightly dusty, as if he’d just finished working. I could see a slight resemblance to Marlboro Man, a familiar twinkle in his eye. Tim extended his hand, leaving the other on the steering wheel of what I would learn was a brand-spanking-new cattle truck, just hours old. “So, how do you like this vehicle?” Tim asked, smiling widely. He looked like a kid in a candy shop. “It’s nice,” I replied, looking around the cab. There were lots of gauges. Lots of controls. I wanted to crawl into the back and see what the sleeping quarters were like, and whether there was a TV. Or a Jacuzzi. “Want to take it for a spin?” Tim asked. I wanted to appear capable, strong, prepared for anything. “Sure!” I responded, shrugging my shoulders. I got ready to take the wheel. Marlboro Man chuckled, and Tim remained in his seat, saying, “Oh, maybe you’d better not. You might break a fingernail.” I looked down at my fresh manicure. It was nice of him to notice. “Plus,” he continued, “I don’t think you’d be able to shift gears.” Was he making fun of me? My armpits were drenched. Thank God I’d work black that night. After ten more minutes of slightly uncomfortable small talk, Marlboro Man saved my by announcing, “Well, I think we’ll head out, Slim.” “Okay, Slim,” Tim replied. “Nice meeting you, Ree.” He flashed his nice, familiar smile. He was definitely cute. He was definitely Marlboro Man’s brother. But he was nothing like the real thing.

In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn’t just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it. That’s bait, they’d say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty. And the trash truck: there wasn’t one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere--on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn’t a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day. One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion siting on the hood of my car, licking his paws--likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher’s wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area. “It’s probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me. I didn’t believe him. “No way--it’s huge,” I cried. “It’s seriously got to be a mountain lion!” “I’ve gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background. I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man’s lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout. My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn’t prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn’t know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn’t want to have to learn now. I didn’t want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I’d never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now? During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.

The testimony is followed by another montage of Team Impact feats of strength. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” an amped up announcer voice a la Monster Truck Rally proclaims, “We are Team Impaaaaact. Standing on faith tonight let’s give it up for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the one, the only, the Risen Warrioooooor!” Are they talking about Jesus? Is he a cage fighter or the Lamb of God? If ever there was a cross-denying tribute to a theology of glory, it would be Team Impact. As is the case with the rest of TBN, the scandal of Jesus’ birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection are ignored entirely in favor of a Jesus-as-Rambo theology; here the Lord just kicks ass and takes names, much like the freakishly muscular Team Impact guys. Taking one’s Christology from a couple of chapters of Revelation (ignoring the central Christ image, that of the Lamb who was slain) rather than the gospels is baffling to me. I recently saw an “inspirational” self-mocking emerging church poster. The word “incarnational” rested below an image of a heavily tattooed guy wearing a crown of thorns made of barbed wire. The caption read “What would Jesus do? I’m pretty sure he’d do stuff I think is cool.” We all wish to make Christ in our own image because the truth of a God who dies is too much. We’ll believe anything but that, and if that anything happens to bring us power and victory and glory then all the better.

Miranda, honey, sit down. I wish you’d eat something.” Peering out the window, Aunt Teeta gave a shudder. “Y’all be sure and take umbrellas. There’s supposed to be a doozy of a storm coming in.” “How much of a doozy?” Etienne asked. “Medium doozy or big doozy?” Aunt Teeta flapped her dishtowel at him. “Monster doozy. Big bad winds, flash-flood rain, and maybe even tornadoes kind of doozy. Miranda, don’t you feel well?” “Just”--Miranda brushed it off--“kind of sick to my stomach, I guess.” “What, darlin’, something keep you awake last night?” Etienne stared at her. Gage stared at her. Aunt Teeta stared at her. Thank God for Gage, who finally seemed to sense her growing distress. Cramming the last bite of sausage into his mouth, he scraped back his chair from the table. “I’ll make sure she eats something later,” he promised Aunt Teeta. “Come on, we better go. We’re gonna be late.” Miranda threw him a grateful look as the three of them trooped out the door. Still, once they reached Etienne’s truck, she couldn’t resist. “You really are cute and precious,” she said, touching a fingertip to one of his dimples. Gage’s face went redder. He grabbed her hand and boosted her into the front seat. “See if I come to your rescue anymore.” “And I have to agree with Roo and Ashley. You’re especially cute when you’re embarrassed.” “Yeah?” Gage’s lips moved against her ear. “Don’t tempt me. I bet you’re especially cute when you’re embarrassed, too.” Miranda stared at him in surprise. Gage gave her an innocent smile, then climbed in beside her. Etienne seemed completely unaware of their little exchange.

Yeah it’s a race thing. Us Negro-Cherokee half-breeds what live up Sycamore Creek ain’t good enough to wax Bilton Stiller’s monster truck.” “Hunh.” Rice hadn’t realized the social dynamics of northwestern Turpin County were so complicated. “You don’t know what that means either, do you?” “I know what a monster truck is.” “It means people like the Stillers need to believe there’s somebody they’re better than. You also didn’t know they was messing with you at the Beer & Eat when they sent you up to my place looking for a bear hound.

When are voters in both political parties going to realize that politics is a two-way street? The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government. Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.

To be brutally honest, the fact Cash can be a massive prick actually turns me on. It’s like watching a monster truck demolish everything in its path. If it’s not running you down, it’s kind of exciting.

Getting It Right" Your ankles make me want to party, want to sit and beg and roll over under a pair of riding boots with your ankles hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather; they make me wish it was my birthday so I could blow out their candles, have them hung over my shoulders like two bags full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines but smaller and lighter and sexier than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge; they make me want to sing, make me want to take them home and feed them pasta, I want to punish them for being bad and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling, it will never happen again, not in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be hurled into the air like a cannonball and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van. Your thighs are two boats burned out of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them under the blue denim of your high-end jeans, could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry. Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas, a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once when I was falling in love with hills. Your ass is a string quartet, the northern lights tucked tightly into bed between a high-count-of-cotton sheets. Your back is the back of a river full of fish; I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word. Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone, a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions. I am navigating the North and South of it. Your armpits are beehives, they make me want to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey, their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark. I am bright yellow for them. I am always thinking about them, resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms of blue and ice with the blood running to make them believe in God. Your shoulders make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse. Each is a separate bowl of rice steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet and a throaty elevator made of light. Your neck is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven. It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth, which opens like the legs of astronauts who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one voting districts of the Milky Way. Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right! Matthew Dickman, The New Yorker: Poems | August 29, 2011 Issue

It used to be easy. We would fight about the dumbest things—who got to be which monster truck when we were playing in my bedroom in the first grade, why he got me out in dodgeball, who was faster at the mile. A quick and simple sorry had always fixed it, sometimes with an awkward shoulder pat-hug if it was really bad. But I don’t know how to fix the real things.

On my way home from work last night, I had the brilliant idea to start working out. I was going to go for early morning runs and start a Pilates routine. I’ve always been in love with my body. I’m one of those love the body you’re in kinda girls, but damn, I’d kill to look like one of those gym girls with the dump truck ass and the toned stomach, but now that the sun is streaming in through my bedroom window, I don’t know how badly I actually want it.

Momentum carried the truck’s rear wheels up and off the ground. From the perspective of Howard’s low-slung sports car, the heaving back end of the truck was the mouth of a monster gaping wide to swallow him.

As we started our long drive back to the zoo, we stopped at what could be called a general store. There was a pub attached to the establishment, and the store itself sold a wide variety of goods, groceries, cooking utensils, swags, clothing, shoes, even toys. As we picked up supplies in the shop, we passed the open doorway to the pub. A few of the patrons recognized Steve from television. We could hear them talking about him. The comments weren’t exactly positive. Steve didn’t look happy. “Let’s just get out of here,” I whispered. “Right-o,” he said. One of the pub patrons was louder than the others. “I’m a crocodile hunter too,” he bragged. “Only I’m the real crocodile hunter. The real one, you hear me, mate?” The braggart made his living at the stuffy trade, he informed his audience. A stuffy is a baby crocodile mounted by a taxidermist to be sold as a souvenir. To preserve their skins, hunters killed stuffys in much the same way that the bear poachers in Oregon stabbed their prey. “We drive screwdrivers right through their eyes,” Mister Stuffy boasted, eyeing Steve through the doorway of the pub. “Right through the bloody eye sockets!” He was feeling his beer. We gathered up our purchases and headed out to the Ute. Okay, I said to myself, we’re going to make it. Just two or three more steps… Steve turned around and headed back toward the pub. I’d never seen him like that before. My husband changed into somebody I didn’t know. His eyes glared, his face flushed, and his lower lip trembled. I followed him to the threshold of the pub. “Why don’t you blokes come outside and tell me all about stuffys in the car park here?” he said. I couldn’t see very well in the darkness of the pub interior, but I knew there were six or eight drinkers with Mister Stuffy. I thought, What is going to happen here? There didn’t seem any possible good outcomes. The pub drinkers stood up and filed out to face Steve. A half dozen against one. Steve chose the biggest one, who Mister Stuffy seemed to be hiding behind. “Bring it on, mate,” Steve said. “Or are you only tough enough to take on baby crocs, you son of a bitch?” Then Steve seemed to grow. I can’t explain it. His fury made him tower over a guy who actually had a few inches of height on him and outweighed him with a whole beer gut’s worth of weight. I couldn’t imagine how he appeared to the pub drinkers, but he was scaring me. They backed down. All six of them. Not one wanted to muck with Steve, who was clearly out of his mind with anger. All the world’s croc farms, all the cruelty and ignorance that made animals suffer the world over, came to a head in the car park of the pub that evening. Steve got into the truck. We drove off, and he didn’t say anything for a long time. “I don’t understand,” I finally said in the darkness of the front seat, as the bush landscape rolled by us. “What were they talking about? Were they killing crocs in the wild? Or were they croc farmers?” I heard a small exhalation from Steve’s side of the truck. I couldn’t see his face in the gloom. I realized he was crying. I was astounded. This was the man I had just seen turn into a furious monster. Five minutes earlier I’d been convinced I was about to see him take on a half-dozen blokes bare-fisted. Now he wept in the darkness. All at once, he sat up straight. With his jaw set, he wiped the tears from his face and composed himself. “I’ve known bastards like that all my life,” he said. “Some people don’t just do evil. Some people are evil.” He had told me before, but that night in the truck it hit home: Steve lived for wildlife and he would die for wildlife. He came by his convictions sincerely, from the bottom of his heart. He was more than just my husband that night. He was my hero.

Jon Stone spoke thirteen languages and was fluent in six, French being one. He spoke it so well the girls thought he was a native Parisian pretending to be an American. This ability to blend with the natives was a valuable tool when Jon plied his trade. Jon eased from the bed. Floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors lined the back of his house, ten-foot-tall, custom-designed monsters so Jon could Zen on the view. Golden lights glittered to the horizon, ruby flashes marked ghetto-bird prowlers, jets descending toward LAX were strung like pearls across a tuxedo black sky. The doors were heavy as trucks, but silent as silk when they slid open. Jon stepped out and went to the pool. Pike was a silhouette cutout, backlit by the city as Jon swaggered close. “What

Now that his children are grown, Cliff misses that special time when they were young with proportionately large eyes filled with wonder (the eye supposedly is the only human body part that remains the same size from birth). Although he longs for grandchildren to gift his life someday, he has the great fortune of a customer base that is forever young and a monster truck that puts smiles on the faces of adults as well as children. What’s not to like about that?

Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no truck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes. A particular stretch of water might have an average wave height of ten metres, but if you were hit by a one-off thirty-metre monster that statistically didn’t exist, the average would be of precious little comfort: you would die.

Windows – They can be single-, double- or even triple-glazed but all windows serves the same purpose – to enable you to sit all day staring hopelessly out at the grey, empty world, wondering how you came to be stuck here with six or seven children and a husband whose idea of a cultural evening is a seat at Monster Trucks on Ice and whose idea of romance is two seats at Monster Trucks on Ice.

Those little brats threw rocks at my truck,” he said. “Then they just stood there with their tongues out, waiting for me to chase them.” “Did you catch ’em?” “No way.” Jack grinned. “Little devils have a crawl hole under the restaurant. You should have heard them giggle.” Mom opened the door and said, “She’s coming.” I glanced at my watch. “No hurry. We can still make second period.” “Mrs. Carter,” Jack said, “the monsters have figured out how to get underneath the restaurant. Maybe you’d better get them out of there before they start disconnecting the plumbing.” “Maybe we could board up the hole,” I said. “With them inside.

by best of luck, I mean I hope that one day you’ll meet someone amazing, text them a thoughtful message, take them to a monster truck rally, and then hopefully at some point, after a bowl of delicious ramen, make love to them in a Jurassic Park–themed love hotel in Tokyo.

Harper became a little distracted watching her. This morning she wore a soft t-shirt he didn’t recognize and a pair of blue jeans he seemed to remember ripping off her a time or two. His anger faded away as he watched her lean body move. There was no wasted motion with her. It was one of the things that had drawn his eye when he first met her. She hadn’t been through the training he had, but she had a natural grace to her that was spellbinding. Cat was competent and controlled in all things, body, mind and spirit. Even at twenty-two when he’d first met her, he knew he’d been none of those things. His body had been maturing faster than his mind. His spirit had never caught up. The most complete his spirit had ever been had been when he was living with her. All of the fucked up shit he’d grown up with had faded away. There were a couple of brief, shining moments he remembered being completely content with everything in his life. Stupid things like watching her cook him a monster dinner after being deployed for months. Real food made with loving hands after living on government supplied freeze-dried crap made by machines. Playing in the snow on a trip up north, Cat pregnant with Dillon at the time. Watching her tinker under the hood of the truck with him, grease streaked on her cheek. Cat had been at the center of all of those. The past year and a half had been hard. Remembering those brilliant moments had kept him moving through his monotonous life. “I miss watching you,” he admitted. She paused long enough to smile at him, hand propped on her hip. “And I miss feeling the weight of your gaze on me.” Arousal

As I wrote in Pastrix I, like any good middle-class mainline Protestant, tend to arrogantly look down my theological nose at talk of demon possession as superstitious snake-handling nonsense, as though it's the spiritual equivalent of a monster truck rally.

The stranger is also way bigger than I am at five-foot-one and 130 pounds, and I silently gulp at the realization that there’s no way I’d be able to fight him off if he were to attack me. I just have to hope he’s not as big of a monster as Dad is. Hope the universe didn’t pull me out of the frying pan just to dump me in the fire.

In 2018 I went back to the mountains to become a wildland firefighter again. I hadn’t been in the field for three years, and since then I’d gotten used to training in nice gyms and living in comfort. Some might call it luxury. I was in a plush hotel room in Vegas when the 416 fire sparked and I got the call. What started as a 2,000-acre grass fire in the San Juan Range of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains was growing into a record breaking, 55,000-acre monster. I hung up and caught a prop plane to Grand Junction, loaded up in a U.S. Forest Service truck, and drove three hours to the outskirts of Durango, Colorado, where I suited up in my green Nomex pants and yellow, long-sleeved button down, my hard hat, field glasses, and gloves, and grabbed my super Pulaski—a wildland fire fighter’s most trusted weapon. I can dig for hours with that thing, and that’s what we do. We don’t spray water. We specialize in containment, and that means digging lines and clearing brush so there’s no fuel in the path of an inferno. We dig and run, run and dig, until every muscle is spent. Then we do it all over again.

ghastly, high-pitched whining sound. This happened whenever it idled. The group of five jumped—obviously startled—and glared at me. Soon their glares morphed into wrinkled squints of befuddlement, their eyes moving over my appearance from my perch. It took them a few minutes, but they recognized me. Everyone in Green Valley, Tennessee knew who I was. Nevertheless, I imagined they were not expecting to see Jessica James, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Sheriff Jeffrey James and sister of Sheriff’s Deputy Jackson James, dressed in a long, white beard sitting behind the wheel of an ancient Ford Super Duty F-350 XL. In my defense, it wasn’t my monster truck. It was my mother’s. I was currently between automobiles, and she’d just upgraded to a newer, bigger, more intimidating model. Something she could

For example, your child needs food, shelter, and attachment. He needs warmth and security. He needs to learn he is capable and can contribute. He does not need a tablet computer, a television in his bedroom, a miniature monster truck to drive,

to death. He stayed here in Dallas for the oil fields...and so Gram wouldn’t go crazy all by her lonesome while I left town to chase my dreams. This big dumb monster truck rally is a new thing for Dallas. This is the second one, apparently, and from what Marty says, there might be one or two more before winter blows in. This will definitely be the only monster truck rally I’ll be subjected to before heading back to D.C. I let out a loud sneeze as Marty laughs over the noise. Dust puffs across the arena, coiling into the air. When one of those trucks drives closer to the stands, it romps over a muddy patch, dangerously close to spraying muck on the bystanders through the meager chainlink fence separating us from the action.

on a seagull poo–like texture when mixed into cold water. Amelia saved my palate and joints by introducing me to the Great Lakes hydrolyzed version (green label), which blends easily and smoothly. Add a tablespoon of beet root powder like BeetElite to stave off any cow-hoof flavor, and it’s a whole new game. Amelia uses BeetElite pre-race and pre-training for its endurance benefits, but I’m much harder-core: I use it to make tart, low-carb gummy bears when fat Tim has carb cravings. RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours. Rolling your foot on top of a golf ball on the floor to increase “hamstring” flexibility. This is infinitely more helpful than a lacrosse ball. Put a towel on the floor underneath the golf ball, lest you shoot your dog’s eye out. Concept2 SkiErg for training when your lower body is injured. After knee surgery, Amelia used this low-impact machine to maintain cardiovascular endurance and prepare for the 2014 World’s Toughest Mudder, which she won 8 weeks post-op. Kelly Starrett (page 122) is also a big fan of this device. Dry needling: I’d never heard of this before meeting Amelia. “[In acupuncture] the goal is not to feel the needle. In dry-needling, you are sticking the needle in the muscle belly and trying to get it to twitch, and the twitch is the release.” It’s used for super-tight, over-contracted muscles, and the needles are not left in. Unless you’re a masochist, don’t have this done on your calves. Sauna for endurance: Amelia has found using a sauna improves her endurance, a concept that has since been confirmed by several other athletes, including cyclist David Zabriskie, seven-time U.S. National Time Trial Championship winner. He considers sauna training a more practical replacement for high-altitude simulation tents. In the 2005 Tour de France, Dave won the Stage 1 time trial, making him the first American to win stages in all three Grand Tours. Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong by seconds, clocking an average speed of 54.676 kilometers per hour (!). I now use a sauna at least four times per week. To figure out the best protocols, I asked

The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics—food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks—are free. An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you obey certain laws.

Monster trucking - big trucks driving over small cars - reproduce on a grand scale the sound a beer can makes when collapsing against one’s forehead. And is there any sound in life more satisfying than that?

it’s one thing to drive a monster of a truck and another to drive like a monster in a truck.

Susan took a sheet of paper and pinned it to the fridge door amongst all the other kids’ pictures: frogs, princesses, unicorns, dragons, and monster trucks. All of which looked as if they’d been done during Picasso’s Off His Face period. The new one was some sort of dinosaur/

[Axl Rose] is not a tall man—I doubt even the heels of his boots (red leather) put him at over five feet ten. He walked toward us with stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness. I feel like all anybody talks about with Axl anymore is his strange new appearance, but it is hard to get past the unusual impression he makes. To me he looks like he's wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truck stop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o'clock in the morning about twelve years ago. He looks increasingly like the albino reggae legend Yellowman. His mane evokes a gathering of strawberry red intricately braided hempen fibers, the sharply twisted ends of which have been punched, individually, a half inch into his scalp. His chest hair is the color of a new penny. With the wasp-man sunglasses and the braids and the goatee, he reminds one of the monster in Predator, or of that monster's wife on its home planet. When he first came onto the scene, he often looked, in photographs, like a beautiful, slender, redheaded 20-year-old girl. I hope the magazine will run a picture of him from about 1988 so the foregoing will seem a slightly less creepy observation and the fundamental spade-called-spade exactitude of it will be laid bare. But if not, I stand by it. Now he has thickened through the middle—muscly thickness, not the lard-ass thickness of some years back. He grabs his package tightly, and his package is huge. Only reporting.

RumbleRoller: Think foam roller meets monster-truck tire. Foam rollers have historically done very little for me, but this torture device had an immediate positive impact on my recovery. (It also helps you sleep if used before bed.) Warning: Start slow. I tried to copy Amelia and did 20-plus minutes my first session. The next day, I felt like I’d been put in a sleeping bag and swung against a tree for a few hours.

Sure, we could have big trucks too. We could have a monster truck pull right on the White House lawn.” “Monster truck.” Joe smiled at the phrase.

man stops cold. His eyes remain wide but deep red blood begins to ooze from the orifice. The truck consumes the yards between them. Fifty…forty…thirty. The monster blares its horn. The

Wanted: Steel toed Bible thumpers to reach a monster truck mad world.

Donley loved the flight deck. It excited him. A rush. He had some misgivings about navy life, but he craved the action on deck. Few things compared to the raw power of an F-14 Tomcat in afterburner. The intense heat. The smell of jet fuel. It felt like a monster truck rally with him in the middle of the action.

Chris is passing in and out of consciousness. When he's awake, he keeps talking about his dad coming to take him to a monster-truck show." I clear my throat. "I hope someday someone finds this tape.