Thoughts In a Truck-Stop Diner

This place is tucked out of the way, across river from the city, most folks don’t even know it’s here, and I suppose that’s a pity. Maybe the truck-stop that it serves is what drives some people away, but their hash-browns are masterworks, so I come here most Saturdays. Attached nearby is a small lounge with massage chairs and a big screen, and nearby showers you pay for, an odd spot, but they must stay clean. Nearby is a convenience store, it’s several times larger than most, snacks, westerns, and toiletries are a few of the things that it boasts. But the diner is why I come, can’t drive a truck to save my hide, I find it a relaxing place, no hint of pretension inside. A third of the clientele are just hungry locals like me, the others are the long-haul guys, slumping wearily in their seats. They’re literally the lifeblood of a nation awash in goods, yet so many look down on them, I don’t understand why they would. The elites who like their gadgets seem to think them a lower class, tet were there not men out driving they’d run out of gadgets real fast. I even heard a professor use them as a cautionary tale, but those guys have traveled further than any professor who rails. Once my very own uncle said that they’re working class, and thus poor, but some pull down sixty thousand, my uncle can’t make that, I’m sure. I was born to that ‘elite’ class, the son of bureaucrats, lawyers, raised to believe that a man should go make a living by his words. And yet I feel comfortable here, I guess they’d say I’ve fallen far, but we could live without lawyers, without these men here, we would starve. Some call suck folk ‘deplorables,’ but why is it a hated thing to do the jobs someone must do if people are to keep existing?