And meanwhile, Jim is trapped in an unpleasant subplot cul de sac where the plot development signal is clearly not very strong. He's sitting on a chair in the The Trucker's living room, The Trucker's Wife apologizing, "I only have Lipton." As she turns around to retrieve the tea, a waffle iron sitting on the counter begins to smoke, and she turns to see it and overreacts, "Why does this always happen to me?" Jim stands and walks behind her, rationalizing, "Companies build a certain percentage of their projects to fail. It's called planned obsolescence." Is that true? Is that what ABC does? Their hands touch ever so slightly as Jim reaches toward her to pull an ill-advised knife out away from the iron, knowing the knife will instead be needed cut the extremely contrived sexual tension it's taken six hours for these two characters to manufacture. He tells her that if she set the timer and followed the directions, mucking up breakfast can't be her fault. The Trucker's Wife turns toward him with a no-man-has-ever-had-a-kind-word-for-little-ol'-me graze of the hand, and Jim turns away in vague disgust, noticing as he does a business card on the refrigerator reading, "BRB, Highwater Trucking," and then a web address at the bottom (www.highwatertrucking.com) though, at this point, I'd rather waste the bandwidth on online gaming sites that actually maintain the possibility of paying out real cash. Jim asks what BRB stands for, and we learn that it's his given name. He should probably start going by a symbol as well. May I suggest the symbol derived from the ancient Chinese pictogram of two eyes rolling. He asks if BRB talks much about his work, and we get diminishing returns out of The Trucker's Wife, who wants to sex us up with the dim response, "He don't talk much at all. Except when we're shaking the foundation. Then I can't get him to shut up." If that's what passes for pillow talk in Push, I'm going to ask that the aforementioned pillow is collected, placed in a biohazard bag, and sunk without delay to the bottom of the ocean. Jim wants none of it either, bless his straight-shootin' heart. He begs off, finally staving off the last of her advances with, "You're going to think I'm square. But I think of marriage as a covenant. A sacred trust. And I won't be a party to breaking it. Have a good day." Woo-hoo! Score one for fidelity! And hookers in slow-dance bars, who aren't entirely off his propriety radar, for some reason.













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