Trucker Wonders of the Seven Galaxies
“Breaker breaker.”
………“Breaker breaker.”
………………..“Breaker breaker.”
…………. “Breaker breaker.”
……………………….“Breaker breaker.”
……..“Breaker breaker.”
…“Breaker breaker.”
.
“Why do all the alien truckers love to say ‘Breaker breaker’…?”
“It all has to to with being a hotshot cowboy.”
“But none of them even have cows on their planets.”
“None of them are cowboys, either. Look. If you could wear boots and spurs and a wide-brimmed cowboy hat pulled down low over your hot and dusty eyes, holstering two fully-loaded, repeating Colt 45’s with pearl handles, and drive off into the sunset with a pretty girl in your eighteen wheeler saying “Breaker breaker” the whole time, then… well, let’s just say that if you had any imagination, you’d be going ‘Breaker breaker’, too…”
“Has anyone capitalized on this craze yet?”
“Not that I know of…”
“Then I smell a business opportunity.”
“No, that’s cowboy rabbit stew that you smell…”
“What?! Not you, too…”
“Breaker breaker.”
“So… what… exactly does that mean?”
“Does it matter?”
“Probably not… it has taken on a whole new meaning by itself. But, what did it originally mean?”
“You mean literally, and not as it is symbolically today?”
“Yes.”
“It signaled an important message, one that was important enough to ‘break’ into current light chatter over the truckers’ citizen’s band airwaves.”
“Kind of like, ‘Now hear this’… or ‘Attention, I have an important message’…?”
“Yes.”
“So why didn’t they just use a preexisting phrase?”
“Because real he-men did not use proper English, they had their own he-man terms and phrases.”
“You mean that if they used standard English as taught by a school marm, they would have been teased by the other he-men?”
“Yes; and there is nothing more miserable than a teased he-man.”
“Breaker breaker.”
“Now you’ve got the picture.”
“So you have all these alien space truckers going around who do not want to be teased?”
“Basically.”
“So it is like a security blanket.”
“Yes, but don’t go around informing the he-men. They tend to have very big hands…”
“And very small brains?”
“Stop! Their brains are normal. It is rather a personal, and cultural, choice to put big hands before big brains, mainly because it is common to pretend that you have a big brain, while big hands cannot be faked. At all.”
“So big hands represent being real?”
“Yes, and the ability to do the work that big brains alone cannot do.”
“Like grunt work?”
“Yes.”
“Like being a cosmic wonder trucker of the Seven Galaxies?”
“Precisely.”
“But you use big words.”
“Yes, and my hands are dwarfed by bona fide big he-men cosmic wonder truckers.”
“Who ply the Seven Galaxies?”
“Who ply the Seven Galaxies.”
“That’s a lot of big hands to feed.”
“So say the cosmic diners.”
“And that is a lot of teasing to avert… Do you have any stories about these modern cosmic wonder truckers?”
“Yes, but you would have to pay me a dime for every story.”
“Why?”
“It is proper cosmic wonder trucker protocol.”
“Like a tradition?”
“More like a secret handshake.”
“So, what is a ‘dime’…?”
“Something cosmic wonder truckers are proud of.”
“You mean they go around the Seven Galaxies gathering cosmic wonder trucker stories just to accumulate dimes?”
“Even better — if they were the actual hero of another’s story, they receive a silver dollar if they were present while the story was told.”
“Silver dollars… now that sounds like real cowboy stuff.”
“Indeed it is. Right up there with spurs, whiskey, and chewing tobacco.”
“…and cosmic wonder trucker stories.”
“Yup.”
“Is ‘yup’ a cowboy word?”
“Yup.”
“Does that make you a cowboy?”
“No, I’m just feeling like one…”
“Yup.”
“What?”
“Me too…”
Demon dynasties, armored kill zones,
The last ramparts of ice ring planets;
A genesis — of robo-eco
razored-cratered moon jungles
where factions vanish
Into pulsing hearts of lifelong loves
seeking refuge where colossal worlds collide…
So they truck through seven wonders,
romance commerce warriors,
awakened to an ancient drive
for adventures of the ether-born…
