Today I learned where Mt. Denali isn't.

I don't love, and I can't imagine I'm alone on this, big pickup trucks. Not like, the kind of trucks people use when they work in construction or are contractors or whatever. I mean the pointless, gigantic, luxury nonsense that MAGA people use to try and run over protestors. Legally. Because red states have lost their minds.

Above: Like this. Also, the black and white flag with a blue stripe isn't the flag
and kind of feels contrary to the unity the actual flag is supposed to represent.

Above: some French stereotype,
seen here, judging us.

But this isn't one of my impotent rants about how we may well be plunging into an authoritarian dystopia because the electoral college is an outmoded relic of the eighteenth century that only serves to--sorry, I was spiraling out there. Where was I? Right: trucks. Big, preposterous trucks that only exist because somewhere in our shared national past we mistook mass for desirability. I think it's the same faulty logic that gives us an un realistic and internationally ridiculed sense of portion size. Bigger is, our reasoning goes, necessarily better. And that's why we all have to suck in our guts when we try to get out of our cars next to some Dodge Ram wedged into the compact space next to us.

"S'up brah? What happened, did
the dealership run out of big trucks?"

-a burn I hope to deploy one day

I mention this because I witnessed what I thought may have been a prank or some kind of glitch in the matrix the other day. It was, at first glance, a truck. A big, black GMC pickup like any number of the ones I see every day that fill me with such bitterness at the sheer compensational extravagance, but then it occurred to me as it passed behind another truck that the proportions were all wrong. It was easily fifty percent larger than the already massive pick-up it was passing behind. Like, the windows of the GMC were fully above the roof of the other truck.

It was just comically, unnecessarily, big. Big for the sake of being big. Remember the first time we see Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer when it pulls into orbit above Hoth and it just eclipses the other Star Destroyers? 

It was like that, except instead of being tasked with routing out
the rebel base they were, I don't know, going to Safeway or something.

Pictured: the actual moon, seen here
with Apollo Astronaut Eugene Cernan
for scale. Note how unimpressive it is. 

Sure, it's possible that my instinctual loathing for the mentality that equates size with value, perhaps magnified the scale of the thing. Like how when the moon appears particularly large and impressive so you snap a picture of it only to be underwhelmed by reality of it. But I'm not sure that's it. After all, the truck, which I later learned is called a Sierra Denali is named after a mountain range and a mountain. The manufacturer absolutely wants to emphasize its largeness. And their tenuous grasp of geography as Mt. Denali is in the Alaskan Range and not the Sierras.* Yes, I had to look that up, but it took me like, a second. What's GM's excuse? Look, I know I sound like I'm railing against something that's none of my business. This is America, you can drive whatever you want. And that's true. But I have to ask, why does this person need  to take up so much space? 

What is so lacking in their life that they needed the biggest, most absurd luxury pick-up ninety-thousand dollars can buy? Huh? What's that? Yes. Ninety-thousand dollars. Of money. Ninety-thousand dollars to tell the world that you don't distinguish between self-worth and ownership. Harsh? Yeah, but that truck was like, really dumb.

For some perspective, I saw a cybertruck in the wild the day before
I saw the Denali and it's not the overpriced truck I'm complaining about.

*yeah, I know "sierra" is Spanish for mountain range and not necessarily the Sierras in California, but I don't think GM knows that and the target audience for this thing kind of feels like the "speak 'merican!" crowd anyway, so I stand by what I said. Also, sorry, I'm only getting to get saltier as the election gets closer.