Strange. Lame. Cool. I dunno.

I received a phone call a few weeks ago from Bill, the Executive Director of the Alliant Energy Center, the campus of buildings where we put on Canoecopia. He calls once a year or so, has tickets for some event, and asks if I’d like a chunk of them.

This year he had tickets to Tim McGraw and Lady Antebellum.  What he didn’t know is that I would rather pull my fingernails off with a Leatherman and dip the raw bleeding stubs in lemon juice, or a similar liquid with a lower pH.  I am not a fan of country music.

Actually, I think country music is an oxymoron.  It’s even more manufactured than pop music.  Give me Patsy Cline.  Give me George Jones. Give me Elvis before he became a puffy caricature of himself. But you can keep Carrie Underwood and her well-marketed and immaculately displayed Osmondesque teeth.

But I digress.  As usual.  But it’s my blog, and you don’t want to read it, it’s not like you paid for a subscription.  Control W will silence me.  Go ahead.  Do it.

ANYWAY…  I told Bill thank you very much, but I would be a day back from Munich and jet-lagged, and therefore unable to really enjoy the performance (true enough).  But I knew that Monsternationals were upon us, and I had never been to see a monster truck show.

Bill came through in spades.  Box seats.  Let me say that again…box seats.  At a monster truck show.  There were no bottles of buttery chardonnay or doilies in the suite, but still…box seats. At a monster truck event.

I did what came naturally after receiving 4 tickets to a monster truck show.  I called three over-educated, cerebral academic types who would otherwise never attend anything of the sort.  Wonderfully, the reception was a universal “Dude, I’m in.”  So much for stuffy academics.  I had my posse.

The suite was overbooked.  Some Bill’s friends brought along a few others and it got crowded.  So we jumped the wall into the next (empty) suite and hung out there.

I always wondered how a monster truck event could last three hours or so.  I mean, jump jump, crush crush, and we’re done, right?  No sir, we make this last.

First, the national anthem.  Fine.  I love the national anthem. The problem was that it has been pre-recorded.  Just before the land of the free high note, the recording skipped and started over.  They quickly cut it off, and the announcer deadpanned, “Well, we all know how it ends…”  I loved it.

Then came a very long introduction for every truck and driver, down to the displacement, horsepower and fuel mixture of each engine and the history of each driver from birth to present day.

Then out came Porkchop.

This was the most painful part of the whole evening.  Porkchop, the Motorsports Clown. Not only not funny, Porkchop is anti-funny. So not funny, I can’t remember a single chuckle-inducing statement.  Sorry, the kids love the t-shirt slingshot…but that’s it.

That was the first hour.  Or so.

Then the crushing started.  Six trucks, all putting out 1500 horsepower and several pounds of carbon monoxide a second, the trucks crushed four cars.  Over and over. The good news is that at least one of them was a Mercury Sable.

Cool.  Lame.  Cool.  My brain could not decide.  There is a certain purity in the destruction of cars that are already destroyed.  The lameness is linked to the X chromosome.  The coolness is linked to the Y chromosome. Hence the ambivalence.  It also explains why Wife 1.1 was not interested in attending, even if paid to do so.

The t-shirt cannons were cool.  Despite the fact that they were responsible for the death of Maude Flanders, they are still cool.  One shot a t-shirt at the booth next to us and it hit the top of the box, teetered, and fell into the seats below.  A mulleted rugrat was there within seconds to grab it and hold it up triumphantly. The kid in the box next to us was crushed.

On the next round, however, they shot two more shirts in the box next to them, locked up with no one in there.  So I monkeyed over two boxes again and grabbed them. The kid got one (I felt like Mean Joe Green) and kept one for Brent’s kid.

We did find a truck to back as a group.  Snakebite.  It was the glowing eyes and fangs that did it. When Snakebite came out to race, we all made the universal sign of Snakebite:

Remember: these are adults.  That is the power of Snakebite’s venom.  The next day at church we flashed the snakebite gang signal to each other during services.

So that was that.  Fun. Lame. Strange. Cool.  Still trying to figure it out.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover