had conned me into giving up some companionship in his sleeper cab. Well, when I said no, he said yes, and we had ourselves a bit of a disagreement over that. The thing he didn't know was that I carry my tire thumper on me at all times. I always wear my backpack any time I'm outside of the cab, and poking up out the top is always the butt end of my thumper. Oh, these guys don't know what a tire thumper is. Eh, the bears on the highway would. It's no different than a nightstick or a billy club. About the same length. Usually made a hickory, so they're good and durable. Yours are usually painted black, though. Ours are woodgrained. Anywho, when I said no and he said yes and we couldn't see eye to eye over that, I introduced him to my thumper. Am I a what? You saying that to offend me? Trying to insult me? But it only goes to show how ignorant you are. No, I'm not a lot lizard, but I've known plenty of them, and I'm proud of it. They're wonderful people. People like that. People who have had everything taken from them till the point that they've got nothing left to give but themselves, they understand others. They have empathy and not just false sympathy because whatever you've gone through, chances are they've gone through worse. So they can relate, copy? But you can't, can you? Probably how you feel about truckers, too. Long haulers more so than day trippers is my bet. Because the day trippers, yeah, they're one of used guys. Used guys who have a place and a home and a neighborhood in a community that exists off of rubber and asphalt. But it's like the late Graydon, still missing Jimmy Hoffa, once said, if you're eating it, drinking it, wearing it, driving it, riding it, sitting on it, sleeping, or fucking on it, a trucker brought it to you. People forget he was the head of the Teamsters. Head of the Truckers Union, that is. Most people just figure he's the guts of a bridge abutment these days. He was a good man, even if he's nothing more than the sausage inside a bridge-piling casing nowadays. As for my thumper, it's not a murder weapon. Not by nature, I mean. You can pick one up at any Loves or Flying J or TA or Mom and Pop shop truck stop. It's a tool to check if you got air in your tires. When you got 18 of them, it can take a hot minute to go around with the pressure gauge and check each and every one of them. Especially the ones on the inside. So, you take a thumper and give each tire a nice quick bap. But you gotta know how to listen. Pretty obvious you guys don't know how to listen. as evident by this very conversation. But I'll try and explain it for you. When you bop a full tire, it'll sort of sing back to you. There's a ring. I mean, there's all kinds of resonant noises. There's a smack, a whack, a thud. But if it's good and pressurized and you hit it right, that tire will ring out just like a bell. A low tire, on the other hand, a low tire just thuds. That creeper in the Vegas marshaling yard, when I thumped him, he just went thud. So yeah, I killed him, but it wasn't murder. He had it coming. The other two, on the other hand, well, I told you how my dad abandoned me.