Living Life Under the Truck Community

There are an endless number of discourse communities to join, but there is one that is one of the largest and most diverse communities. This community is the truck community, it spans across the world with millions of members. The truck community is motivating many throughout their day-to-day life if they are devoted to it. It also creates many hard workers in society, as well as overall great people. Everyone in the community is very accepting of others no matter their background or any aspect of them. This is what makes the community so amazing, the bonds we all make with each other, to the point where we would drop everything to go help another member of the community.

The truck community is not something that’s hard to join, some people don’t even have a truck and are a part of it. There are many ways to join the community, with or without a truck. The first aspect of the community is being active in it, one of the best ways would be going to truck meets meeting with people in the community. There are many people who don’t own a truck that still attend the meets and shows, these people are still apart of the community even though they don’t have a truck. There are also many photographers and coordinators that are a part of the truck community. Along with that are the people that have a truck and are in the community. But just owning a truck doesn’t mean you’re in the community. Being a part of the community is when it benefits from you in some way. Whether that be going to meets, running a social media page, leading or being a part of a truck group. You can also benefit the community in many other ways. For example, you can help with other people’s builds and assist them when the need guidance for a hand. This could be helping with a lift or pulling a motor as they are two or more men jobs. Also, if you work somewhere that could benefit members of the community. Whether you work at a machine shop or parts shop and can hook members of the community up with a deal or cheaper parts. These small things can help people out tremendously as instead of putting all their money into parts, they can set some money aside for new wheels or other modifications. That goes to say that not everyone in the community has some high dollar nicely built truck. Some members have raggedy old, rusted stock trucks and are still in the community.

Building the truck of my dreams to become a part of the truck community was one of my priority goals as a young kid. As soon as I saved up enough money, I bought my first and current truck at fifteen. And ever since then I have worked and saved most of my money to put towards my truck to become more active in the community. The community Is also very competitive, so everyone is constantly trying to keep up with the current builds. It is a constant race of who has the best build, the cleanest truck, the most built motor, biggest wheels, loudest exhaust. There are as well always new trends going around for building trucks in different ways. For example, the most current trend has been “squatting” trucks. This means to lift the front but leave the stock blocks in the rear, which makes the rear sit lower than the front. Some people love it, and some people hate it, but even the people who hated it at first conformed to the trend. By conforming I mean even though they dislike it, they squatted their trucks as there were now awards in shows for “best squat”, also the majority of the community loved it.

The truck community gets their name put in various ways that range from things they do on purpose and not. When someone with a built truck is simply driving around going about their daily lives, so many young kids look at their truck and say to their parents, “mom/dad look at that sweet truck”. Also just sitting in a parking lot can get a truck noticed by a kid and inspire them to be in the community one day. For example, I have sat at many gas stations just pumping gas and a kid comes up to me with his parent wanting to look at it and change the color of the lights. I know this is true as I used to be that kid who admired these trucks and annoyed my parents with every truck I saw. It always got me so excited seeing these trucks and hearing them take off from a stoplight. I used to make my parents roll down the windows just to hear them go. At a very young age I could almost determine what any truck was just by the sound of it. All these things combine made me want to be a part of the truck community when I got older. Also, now with a truck I always dreamed of, I first-hand witness all the kids looking at my truck, along with my little brother who obsesses over it. There are also many other ways to find out about the communities, these include cruises, social media pages, and shutdowns. The truck community has many cruises through different populated areas. Generally, they are around the strip in Myrtle Beach, the strip in Virginia Beach, and around other cities and large towns. The community, or truck groups from the community will all go down to Myrtle Beach and “ride the strip”, which is where they just drive up and down the oceanfront. Another way the community gets out there is through social media pages. There are thousands of truck pages out there on Instagram and Facebook that get hundreds of thousands of likes. These truck pages generally just post trucks, information, pictures, and videos from truck meets.

Generally, truck shows and meets happen most weekdays and some weekends. Truck shows most of the time occur on Saturdays during the season, which is spring to early fall. Most of the time there aren’t many trucks shows in the winter. These truck shows happen all over the nation. For example, a few of the bigger truck meets are Nopi, and the various I-95 shutdowns. Nopi is Myrtle Beach Nationals and is one of the biggest trucks shows to go too. Also, various truck groups host their own truck shows, such as HKZ hosting the I-95 shutdowns. These I-95 shutdowns are where hundreds of trucks all cruise to the same spot generally in Roanoke Rapids for the truck show. HKZ stands for “High Kings”, they host some of the biggest trucks shows in the nation that contain the most trucks and spectators. Although HKZ is centered around Virginia they have some rivals out of state that include, DE, DI, and Stunna Empire, which are mainly centered in the Carolinas. These are all the truck groups that are the biggest on the east coast, and pretty much the nation. These truck groups are a great way to get seen in the community, as well get your truck noticed in the community. Being in their truck groups comes along with some responsibilities. For example, HKZ requires all members to go to the I-95 shutdown meets to make it big. Also, to get into these truck groups your truck basically must be built. There are many types of builds and paths to take to get the right look. Some things that go into having a built truck is clean paint, no dents or rust, generally a lift and wheels and tires, and other visual modifications. When going for a build to get into a truck group you can’t cut corners and expect a truck that can get into a truck group. These builds are the center of attention of the truck community, so they all must look near flawless as they represent the community. These people could be considered the ones with the most discoursal expertise (Swales 547). These truck groups look at your social medias and your truck at truck meets to see if you can get in. But once you’re in the group it means that you continue to post your truck on social media to be noticed as well as making new changes and continue to build and change up the look of your truck.

The community also creates a lot of overall great people, in the workplace and in society. These people in the community are generally very hardworking and motivated. This is because they know money doesn’t grow on trees and they need to work for the nice things they have. Many of these trucks cost a lot of money and take up a lot of time to build. This means you must set aside specific times to work on your truck, while also setting goals for when working to ensure time is not wasted on the build. The more time the truck isn’t finished the more shows and meets you miss. This could mean the difference in getting more awards from shows. Awards from shows are very important in the truck community. These awards are generally saved and put on display at other shows. This gets your truck noticed as if people see more awards in front of a truck, they think it’s a better build or someone high up in a truck group. So overall, not only does the community create hard workers, but it also creates individuals with great time management. Time management is very important in the community as many builds take up a lot of time. If you don’t get certain parts of the build completed on time that could be the difference in going to a truck show or not.

Overall, the truck community is one of the largest and most diverse of the discourse communities. With the endless members all around the world, there is always new and interesting builds to see and learn from. The truck community has many different sectors, like the truck groups. These truck groups are what mainly keep the community going as they divide everyone up to compete but are all together at the end of the day.

Work Cited

Wardle, Elizabeth. Writing about Writing. Bedford Books St. Martin’s, 2020

Staff, EasyBib. “EasyBib®: Free Bibliography Generator – MLA, APA, Chicago Citation Styles.” EasyBib, Chegg, 1 Jan. 2021, https://www.easybib.com/.

HR: Easy bib and writing about writing textbook, Hunter Maul