Call Me By Your Monster Truck Name
The Romans had the Coliseum, we have Monster Jam.
A handful of Monday mornings ago, I woke up and my throat felt scratchy boots the throat down. Sore-iana Grande. After a few seconds of becoming sentient, the thought occurred to me that I might have finally caught COVID for the second time in my life. After a few more moments, I thankfully realized that I had slept through the worst of my hangover from the day before, but I was still left to deal with its play cousins, Nausea & Dehydration.
But it was worth it. My leisurely plans the day before were of the highest caliber:
Wake up and clean the house/dissociate.
Oui’d Store/Hot Cookie
Monster Truck Rally
Costco Run
Watch Leave the World Behind starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon - a Netflix film that, while watching, my husband says, “The stars in this movie are collectively too famous for me to suspend reality.” and after watching, “This was so bad, they should all be ashamed.”
No one could compete with this all-star Sunday lineup!!
The highlight was my first-ever experience with Monster Jam, a live monster truck event. Presented as a smooth-brain activity during which I can eat chicken tenders and day drink with my friends, I found myself quite excited about getting tickets to see what else a monster truck rally entailed.
Driving around the stadium to find a parking spot, there were droves of lifted Ford trucks manned by thick necks that connected baseball hats to bodies. There is a bumper sticker on the back of a Mazda - a drawing of a cement mixer and it says, “I like it wet, she likes it hard.”
It quickly became clear that a small, anxious woman with gorgeous face-framing bangs was not the main demographic. I had no idea that in a matter of hours I would walk out of a dust-covered Oracle Stadium spiritually renewed.
To attend a monster truck rally is to love it.
Each truck is a character in itself, usually in an anthropomorphic, mythical way (Megalodon, Monster-Mutt), but then also in the most painfully Neanderthal-noun kind of way (Axe, Terminal Velocity). Each truck is driven by a specific driver each season, but the drivers are pretty interchangeable, tbh. Fame and glory are split disproportionately between the driver and the truck itself, about 20/80, which I would love to unpack at some point. (Men love objects and objectification!!)
To my surprise and anal-retentive delight, there is structure and there are rules at Monster Jam. There are three segments at a rally - a race, a two-wheel trick competition, and a freestyle competition. The last two competitions are subjectively judged by the audience who score performances through a cartoonish rating scale accessed online. I think Dominion should maybe think about rebranding because everyone in attendance had full faith in this questionably functional voting system, including myself.
As soon as the trucks did their introductory laps, with their loud brrrappping and resulting exhaust making itself at home in my lungs - I was hooked. I hooted and hollered watching the implausibly graceful flips, haphazard turns, fiberglass crunching, and skull-crushing tires flying off of axles. I did not realize what lay dormant within my soul, but it turned out to be the wonder of a 7-year-old boy and a humanist realization.
Monster Jam is a most masculine allegory of self-acceptance.
Walking away from this event, consciously or not, one leaves with the below affirmed.
Different is beautiful. Dragonoid had wings and a big horn on the front hood. Monster-Mutt had ears and a tail. Zombie had blue-grey arms outstretched. Grave Digger kind of just looked like a car with a cemetery on it. They were all so stupid and they were all someone’s favorite.
All you gotta do is show up. Megalodon was meant to be a shark but its fiberglass body was already broken before the show even started. You could tell this truck had seen some shit, which earned the respect and encouragement of the crowd.
Go until the wheels come off. During Grave Digger’s freestyle, its tire became askew on its axle and the driver continued, flying over dirt piles and popping wheelies until the timer rang. The aforementioned Megalodon’s driver seemed to be on a mission to strip the frame of the truck of what was left of its shark-shaped fiberglass by smashing into and out of each trick. At Monster Jam, leaving with no front end isn’t embarrassing - it means someone just went absolutely off. Everyone is here for it.
You have to race your own race. A close cousin to “stay in your lane.” During one of the races, a truck in the lead stalls after a turn. The truck that was thought to be the sure loser speeds past and finishes first. The announcer reminds the audience, “You have to race your own race!” Not everyone ahead of you will be successful and if you stop just because you are falling behind you have zero chances of winning.
As a very famous and mentally ill fish once said, just keep swimming.
A side note - There was one aspect that kind of bummed me out which was that, of course, only one woman was competing. When introducing her, the announcer acknowledged that something was going on with her truck’s engine that day. In each competition, she either stalled or couldn’t land a trick and it was so frustrating to watch. She gave us nothing, not for lack of trying, and the little boys didn’t clap when she drove off of the field. Alas, this is the essence of being a woman - we go into the world with half an engine, so to speak, and we still do our damndest to keep up. When we don’t succeed in doing so because other people (men) are bad at their jobs, a bias is confirmed.
Which is why I was the loudest person in my section and spilled a drink on myself. Women can be annoying at sports games, too.
Overall, it was a good time. I purchased a Grave Digger shirt to commemorate this auspicious day, my first-ever monster truck rally. It will certainly not be my last, especially if there are friends and chicken tenders.
My favorite is gravedigger and monster-mutt