I saw my first Tesla Cybertruck in person a couple weeks ago. I'd driven my family into an outer satellite town of D.C., well outside our normal circuits, and there it was, around the corner from us in a parking garage. It looked dumpy and top-heavy and cheap. You could spot its poor assembly at a distance: the weird uneven gaps between panels, the way light angled off the front and rear doors differently because they were misaligned and not even uniformly finished. While I was walking toward it, a whole other person happened by, spotted it, and erupted into giggles.
It was a bright, blazing hot afternoon. I did not touch the Cybertruck, but I did find myself wondering how hot its amazingly shabby-looking stainless steel body panels might be just then, or later on, when its owner took it home. I thought of the stainless steel propane grill my father-in-law used to have, and how just lifting the lid of that grill on a sunny day could blister your fingers. The thought came to me all at once, whole and fully crystallized, that I would like to slap a big ol' slice of bologna onto that Cybertruck.
I did not think about this further, because it's an insane thought to have. But a few days later, driving my kids home from a soccer game on another broiling sunny afternoon, we spotted another Cybertruck headed down our street, less than a mile from our house. It looked like shit. It looked far worse than the one in the relatively dim parking garage. The bright sunlight did those ugly brushed panels no favors: You could pick out, even headed the opposite way at 35 miles per hour, all the very many places where the light glanced off it irregularly, absorbed or refracted unevenly by a zillion oily fingerprints. It looked water-stained. It looked like a toaster for a divorced giant. Once again I found myself consumed by the idea of plopping a nice pink slice of mortadella on that sucker.
Many people are having this impulse! Certainly you yourself are one of them. I am here to tell you that this is quite normal. The fact of the matter is, to see the Cybertruck in person is to want to smack a nice thin rasher of corned beef onto one of its stainless steel body panels. This is natural. What is unnatural is to deny oneself so simple and harmless a delight.
Think of how satisfying this would be. You are walking along, with some cured lunchmeat on your person. You happen across a parked Cybertruck, baking in the summer heat, its owner nowhere to be seen. Hey, you think. I am gonna lay a slice of this soppressata across my open palm, and then I am gonna smack it down perfectly flat onto the hood of this Cybertruck. And then you just do it! Whap! It's on there! Will the lunchmeat sizzle? Will you be immediately hit with the aroma of hot pork? Will some type of animal claim the lunchmeat before the Cybertruck owner finds it?
Or! You are sitting serenely on a roadside bench on a nice hot July afternoon, wondering what you will do with this half a pound of sliced Black Forest ham you recently purchased but are perhaps not hydrated enough to enjoy just now, when along comes a Cybertruck, cruising slowly through this pedestrian-friendly area. You know what, you think to yourself, one thing I have never seen is a slice of ham frisbeeing through the air, smacking onto the driver's side door of a Cybertruck, and sticking there, or perhaps peeling off slowly as the truck drives away.
You will only live one time! You cannot wait for random chance to make your dreams into reality. Possibly that ham came to you—possibly that pig both lived and died so that you could have this chance. How many points should it be worth, if the ham slice slaps onto the truck with no significant wrinkles? How many points for each second it adheres to the steel panel? Imagine the possibilities!
This is the highest calling of the Cybertruck, which otherwise spends all of its time bricking itself, falling apart, and being shuttled back and forth to service centers and factory recalls: that on bright, hot days it will be a place to slap down a cold cut for the sheer joy of doing so. It is not the highest calling of lunchmeat, but then again neither are many sandwich preparations. We must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Imagine the sound of it!
