The Wrong Truck, The Right Story

I asked for a truck. I got a family.

I was building out a character for The Hills of Connemara — my ongoing folk multimedia project — and Fergus needed a vehicle. Simple enough: a green 1940 Ford pickup, the kind of thing a stubborn, self-sufficient Irish-Nordic distiller would drive while outrunning the local excise man on a foggy country road.

MidJourney had other plans. What came back looked older than 1940 — decades older, if I’m honest. My first instinct was to regenerate and try again.

My second instinct was better: what if it’s supposed to look old?

The truck that shouldn’t exist, but does

Maybe Fergus didn’t buy this truck. Maybe he inherited it from his father, and just… kept it running. No carbon buildup, since it runs on his own poitín instead of petrol. More self-sufficient than anything petrol-powered ever was. A truck that’s outlived its era because the man driving it refuses to let it die.

That one small act of not fighting the mistake turned a vehicle into a piece of family history.

Then it kept going

Once Fergus’s truck had a father behind it, it was hard not to ask: what did his father drive? A few generations back, before trucks existed at all, the answer was obvious — a horse and wagon, same road, same tension, same excise man’s ancestor giving chase.

I generated an image of the grandfather: windswept, dark-haired, riding hard, same weathered “here we go again” look on his face as every version of Fergus that came after him. Same road. Same fight. Different century, different technology underneath him.

Three generations. One road. One recurring, deeply unimpressed expression.

Every generation, same complaint

If this were a country song, this is the part where the truck gets a verse of its own — the kind of song that spends three minutes on how much a man loves his pickup before it even gets to the woman he’s singing to. Fergus’s family has the opposite problem: the truck outlasts everyone’s patience for the chase itself. Three generations of “here we go again,” carried across a horse wagon, an ancient Ford, and whatever finally replaces it.

Even Kreena — the one character old enough to have watched all three generations do this exact bit — has stopped being impressed. Her review of the entire multi-century saga is four words long: “It’s just the same.”

Meanwhile, the actual excise man’s actual car — a 1959 Chevrolet Impala, this generation’s version of the chase vehicle — is already destined for a much less dignified ending than any of Fergus’s family rides: a bog, at a very specific spot on the map, accompanied (fittingly) by banjo music.

Why I’m telling you this on a font foundry’s blog

Because it’s the same lesson I keep relearning at the drawing tablet. A tool “failing” — a font’s swash tail crashing into the next letter, MidJourney handing back the wrong decade of truck — isn’t always a problem to force back into line. Sometimes it’s pointing at something better than what you originally asked for, if you’re willing to follow it instead of fighting it.

I didn’t plan three generations of the same joke. MidJourney got a date wrong, and the rest followed because I let it.