just the fax

Jack wanted a CB radio. He loved the jargon and the whole trucker culture. As he was only 14 he was forced to wait until his birthday to get one.

He made it known what he wanted his major gift to be and was therefore very disappointed when he unwrapped a used fax machine.

Which tells you everything you need to know about Jack’s home life.

He did his best to try to make the best of it, but despite all the faxes he sent out with ‘breaker breaker’ at the top and ‘good buddy’ at the bottom, he never got a single reply. Although he does get a number of lunch menus sent over every day at noon.

So obviously your heart aches a little for Jack at this point.

That’s only because you don’t know what would have happened if Jack’s parents had given him an actual CB radio for his birthday.

He would have inevitably encountered Brian the Linguist. Given his Home 20 (where he lives, for all you non-truckers) it would have been inevitable.

And why would this have been a bad thing for Jack?

Because Brian talks incessantly about his five ex-wives. If only that was the worst part.

His five ex-wives were named Cathy, Kathi, Kathe, Cathi and Kathy. If only that was the worst part.

He intersperses the various women into different stories without explaining which is which, as if the listener should know and be able to follow the stories seamlessly.

“So Kathi walks in, right when Cathy is telling me how Cathi had been the one who borrowed the van and left weed in the glove compartment.”

And here is why he intersperses his ex-wives into different stories without explaining which is which; (i.e. the long-awaited worst part)

He believes, hence his nickname ‘the Linguist’, that the way he pronounces each makes it perfectly clear which is which. Not only that, but he is eager to teach any unsuspecting victim how to articulate Cathy in a way that makes it completely different than Kathy. Every day he ropes in some poor bastard to listen to a dissertation on how to make the C sound different than the K and the I sound different than the Y, when the truth is that his C and K and I and Y, and especially E, all sound identical. Every damn day he’s on the CB linguisting the living shit out of someone in front of an audience of truckers who despise him. He obviously doesn’t even know what a linguist is.

Is that what you want to inflict on a fictitious teenage boy who apparently already has a difficult home life?!

So the next time you start to feel all sorry for some fictional character, just remember that the he could just as easily be listening to some deranged, self-proclaimed linguist wasting his time on a CB radio. Listening in his wheelchair because he was born with no legs.