The Pickup Truck Diaries: An Introduction

It’s real.

Welcome to the very first article in “The Pickup Truck Diaries.” The initial introduction to the whole shebang. The dumpster shenanigans. The ten-fold lie that all bad men tell at some point in their lives. Because for every time I have been a good man, there are likely a dozen examples of my being a bad one somewhere along the line.

To say that I’m surprised to be writing this is one hell of an understatement. I mean, I’ve been thinking about writing this series for a very long time. There were just always a lot of reasons or distractions holding me back. Between my day-job, my debut novel soon to launch, my in-progress second novel, getting “Something Wicked” up and running, and a variety of other jobs and responsibilities under both the McRaeWrites and Toothless Entertainment banners… Well, for all my capabilities and double-edged janky-ass x-men powers, I am only a single man.

A very tired, wired, inspired, and yet still singular, man.

And yet as a man, I know we need the voices of minorities more in the twenty-first century. So why throw another white male voice into the mix? Why bother telling my story?

Well… Have you ever heard the expression “don’t judge a book by it’s cover?” With that in mind, I think the tagline for this series should be “don’t judge a logger by his legacy.” Because it’s not just about me, really. It’s about a way of life that is rapidly fading, about a very specific type of upbringing, and the legacy of what those things do when you mash them all together with a few other fun things like neurodiversity and constant feast or famine. See, in “The Pickup Truck Diaries” I’m going to talk about some big themes. And I already have a few mapped out, even! In this series I’m going to use my own life as a series of anecdotes to drive home some pretty big ideas. I plan to cover everything from gentrification, to toxic masculinity, to inclusion and exclusion, to addiction. I’m going to whip it all out and slap it on the table for the whole world to see.

I’m not really into voyeurism, per say. It’s just that some of the biggest obstacles to change in our modern world, well, they’re people with the same upbringing as me, from the same sorts of places. Small, rural, trades dominated towns. If the damned-good show Letterkenny is a satiric parody of my life, then The Pickup Truck Diaries is going to be the darker side, albeit with my infamous brand of witty sarcasm and deadpan dark humor. Mr. Jared Keeso, if you want to know what the British Columbian equivalent of Letterkenny might be, I’m your hired consultant writer!

Now I’m not dumb enough to promise something as crazy as a weekly article. Originally, I was going to write this as a non-fiction book, but got about three thousand words into it and decided it would definitely work better as a series, with each article themed around one central topic or idea.

So I get off scot-free with this one, because it’s just an introduction to the project!

Now I’m not going to get it right all of the time. One of my biggest growths in life was learning to own your mistakes and learn from them as best you can. So I’m going to forgive myself for choosing a picture of a rusted old Dodge instead of a rusted Mazda or Toyota pickup truck like the green one we used to drive around in with my dad as wee kids, with all three of us boys strapped in together along the single front seat.

That’s the inspiration for the name, by the way.

Throughout my life, the one constant was the trucks. Our family always had at least one that my dad would use as a work truck, or a “bush truck” as we called them for the ones that got destroyed by year after year of logging road travel. Even today I drive a truck, despite being the most “yuppie liberal bastard” of the whole family. (Although I’m more of a radical leftist, actually.)

I’ve probably spent over a thousand hours of my life in pickup trucks. Be it sitting and waiting in them, driving around in them, or even at times hanging off the tailgate on the back. Hell, sometimes it was leaning up over the cab in the box as we careened back down the mountain on the rides home, where we would be bribed for our “hard day’s work” on weekends hiking potential timber sales with my dad with a 7-11 slurpee.

Some of these stories are going to be stupid.

Some of these stories are going to be sad.

And some of these stories are going to be very, very real. They might be hard to read, and hell for me to write.

But “that’s life”, as my dead friend Frank Sinatra would say, in my favorite old song of his. And while I’ll make sure not to drop any names in my stories, I’m not going to say anything untrue, at least according to my memories. So an unreliable narrator I just might be. Besides, if somebody was an asshole, well, it means they were an asshole. No use putting lipstick on a pig. And I know tons of pigs masquerading as humans.

To sign off, I want to give huge props to my friend Isobel for kicking me in the ass without even knowing she was kicking me in the ass, because her article series Trans Matters is what made me realize I should stop thinking about this article series and just get off said ass and write it.

Oh, and of course, as I come from a logging family, these will have plenty of logger talk. After all, the word “fuck” is pretty much the single most utilized verb, adjective, and noun by every logger I have ever known.

So while I may be a poet and writer of great eloquence and verbosity, expect a “fuck you” now and again!

Get ready kids, I hope you have your seatbelts on. (The kind that definitely locks too easily when you’re trying to put them on!)

-McRae