Big Rigs, Whales & Gravity by Fred Vogel

I’m smarter than most people I know. You know, those people who say stupid things about things they know nothing about. At least when I open my mouth I have something smart to say. At least that’s what the stupid people tell me. And they should know since they’ve never said a smart thing their entire life. I think about lots of things. Like the semi-trucks I see here in Oregon rolling down the highway towing three trailers behind them. How the hell? I mean, it’s tough enough driving a car these days with the way traffic is and all the crazy people in a rush to go nowhere fast. I don’t have a clue as to how tough it must be to drive a semi-truck, but I can’t imagine how tough it must be to tow three trailers on the back of your cab and somehow make it from point A to point B in one piece. I give those truckers all the credit in the world. I don’t care if they piss in a bottle or stare down from their cab to get a beaver or titty shot, they deserve our utmost respect. Heck, I respect anybody who does something I can’t do. I think about whales. By that I mean how big the ocean must be to be able to accommodate all those creatures. Think about it. A whale is bigger than my apartment. Maybe twice the size. I’m not sure where the name whale comes from, but I think it’s pretty accurate. Something called a whale has to be really, really big. I’ve never seen a whale in person as I recall, but I’ve seen plenty on television. I would never swim in the ocean for fear of being swallowed whole by one of them. I can’t even imagine how much food they eat. I think I eat a lot but I only weigh around a hundred-sixty. I know for a fact whales weigh more than that. Much more. One day all the other fish in the ocean are gonna be gone, having been consumed by all those hungry whales. I try to not think about gravity. It scares the living daylights out of me. I don’t understand it. Most things I don’t understand scare me. Like what if gravity just flat out stopped one day? What if it decided it did not want to gravitate anymore? What then? Would we all fall off the earth and end up in outer space? Would all the whales fall out of the ocean and also end up in outer space? Would they eat us humans? You see why I don’t like to think about gravity too much. I think about all the people who are stupider than me and I worry about them. They don’t have what it takes to exist in a world like ours but, somehow, they do. They are the true survivors. Just like you and me, the smart ones.

Fred Vogel‘s stories have appeared in Literally Stories, Crack the Spine, Subtle Fiction, Literary Orphans, Straylight, and elsewhere. He lives in Oregon.