The UnTexan

FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

From a story in the Rio Grande Sun about a convicted 20-year-old hooker who offered cops an hour of oral sex if they wouldn't take her to jail after a traffic stop:

"Last year, Martinez was caught having sex with a man behind Espanola Valley High School, according to a police report. Jesus Franco Luna, 41, of Santa Cruz, told police he had paid Martinez $20 for sex, but Martinez claimed she was getting $50." She went to jail.

And the cops turned down the offer of oral sex. But they were probably confused because she wasn't clear about whether that would be one time for an hour or lots of quickies adding up to an hour - and none of them could do the math. Things like that happen in Espanola all the time.

WHY PORTLAND IS PORTLAND AND AUSTIN ISN'T

Austin will never be Portland no matter how many tattooed geeks, techies and Asian engineers move here. Portland is a smart place to live. It has trains and brains and bike lanes. Austin's not smart enough to overcome its greedy, strip-developing, lethal-injecting, pickup-driving, traffic-jamming Texas heart and none of the Austin cheerleaders and Austin boosters can shovel enough shit to cover that up. It is what it is and it ain't what it ain't.

Which is what makes this little tale so heartwarming:

My neighborhood's community email has been hopping. Folks have been in a tizzy the past few days over a low-flying cop helicopter. Of course, it doesn't take anything more than a couple of black guys fishing in the local pond to get people tizzy-fied and emailing about the imagined horrors of urban crime and dark invaders with evil intentions (someone who saw the guys fishing said she suspected they were selling drugs because one of them kept talking on his cell phone and she called the police even though she had no idea what the guy was talking about; a black neighbor sent out an email saying it seemed like the neighborhood hasn't changed much in the 20-plus years he has been here and that "fishing while black" -- in fact, doing anything while black -- still seemed to be enough of a crime for neighbors to bring the cops down on a man's ass. But many a proud Austinite's lily white breast hides a dark and racist heart; it comes with the territory, just like the pickup driving and lethal injecting and that last little bit of the Old South that J. Frank Dobie couldn't bury with cowboy talk). So, for a couple of days, the angsty emails have been flying and dark and violent urban fantasies growing around that cop chopper that was flying so low.

Well, here's what happened (directly from the email traffic): "OK! So, There were two individuals stealing livestock... one was detained. Then the other was found and both transported to jail. They were stealing goats and the goats were already loaded in the truck. So the police were just in time! And they got the bad guys!! I hope the bad guys have to pay for the hours worth of helicoptor fuel, etc."

And this was almost in the shadow of the highest tech Samsung factory at the edge of town.

Now if I happened to be the police reporter at the local newspaper, I would make a special effort to write about those goat rustlers just to give Austinites a little perspective about the past they cannot escape no matter how much they twitter and tweet. But the newspaper won't do that. The American-Statesman is not in the perspective business, it is in the cheerleader business. The Austin Chronicle is just about as bad, with overlong stories in little-bitty type. And if you give folks a real glimpse of themselves, the whole damned thing might fall apart. Austin is dreaming hipster dreams. It can't afford nightmares about goat rustlers.

LOSING MY RELIGION?

I have a virus. It's not swine flu, but it is something that saps my energy and makes my head and knees hurt. Yesterday I woke up already wanting to go back to bed. I went to the office instead. I did not have to go to my office, didn't particularly want to go, but I needed to go. I needed the comfort of the walls, windows, desk and door because viruses are viruses, but something else has hold of my soul lately and won't let go. Or perhaps it is something that is losing its grip on my soul and is clawing desperately trying not to slip away. Language has always saved me, set me free or at least set things straight for me, but words are harder to come by lately and they sometimes fail me completely. And when the words fail, the sentences break and whole structures creak and then collapse. On the days when I need a box to put the broken pieces of my salvation in, I go downtown to my office, because when words fail me, I need the walls, windows, desk and door. I need a job. I need an architecture I understand.

MARY TRAVERS: I WAS ONLY PASSING THROUGH

I am sitting here listening to music I told myself I outgrew a long time ago. I first came across Peter, Paul and Mary when I was on my way to Bob Dylan but didn't know where I was going. They made a wonderful noise together. What was more important was that they made a meaningful noise together, fitting their voices together around the words in an old harmony I could understand. And that is what I was after - meaningful noise. It was 1962-63 and the times were changing sure enough and I was 17 years old and in need of something to believe in. I could feel it and when I listened to Peter, Paul and Mary - especially Mary - I heard it too. Mary Travers. There was nothing like her at my high school; the girls there were too tidy to be sexy with their Peter Pan collars, virgin pins and Capezio flats. They were thin-lipped southern women in the making. I could already see it in their faces. But Mary Travers was from New York City. Mary Travers had that long blond hair, those bangs, that voice. She made folk music sexy, especially for those of us who were not quite sure what we were listening to or why, and were nowhere near ready to hear Bob Dylan sing his own songs. She was a sexy woman making a meaningful noise. She seemed like everything I wanted in a woman, the kind of woman who would want a man like me. When I met her (backstage after a show though a cousin of a friend of a friend whose other cousin played bass for Peter, Paul and Mary if I remember it correctly) she was - frighteningly - a woman. And I was only a babbling boy in front of her. Not long after that I "outgrew" Peter, Paul and Mary, found Bob Dylan and abandoned prim and thin-lipped girls with Peter Pan collars and virgin pins. Mary Travers died Sept. 16. She helped me get past harmony and get on with my life.

FOODIE FOLLIES

There is organic food, locally grown food, organically grown food, locally grown organic food, grown-in my-own-backyard food, farmers market food, and Whole Foods food. People want chickens without cages and beef without chemicals. They want lambs that have eaten only the sweetest grass and pigs that were allowed to enjoy life in the sunshine before they became ham. Boutique hand-tended organic beers abound. Water is bottled or filtered and guaranteed to be pure. Bread is whole grain. There are restaurants devoted to using only locally grown, organic ingredients. People are hungry for something, but what is it? Adults seek unadulterated lives. They are earnest, gluttonous, insatiable. But do they want to be healthy or do they want to be pure? If it is health they want, it is already too late; they have long-since ingested, imbibed, inhaled or inherited their eventual destruction. If it is purity they are after, they might have better luck eating a Christian, perhaps an organic, purity ring- wearing, locally grown, free-range Christian from the farmers market. But my guess is they will still be hungry, even if they eat everything but the ring.

IT'S WOODSTOCK WEAK

Joni Mitchell said, "By the time we got to Woodstock we were half-a-million strong." I once published a short story in which the main character said of himself, his wife and most of the people they knew, "By the time we got to Woodstock, it was a movie." And face it, it was. That was made clear to me early on, when I attended a rock festival in Georgia and many of my fellow festival goers were already acting out Woodstock - the movie - rather than having their own good time. In a moment of clarity in my smoky haze, I remember watching them play Woodstock (mud wallowing was very popular at the time) and thinking what a sad commentary on the unoriginality of American youth that was, ignoring the fact that I was there among them. It was "Woodstock Lite" and it probably would have seemed more pathetic than it did, but I was too far gone for subtlety and nuance most of the four days I was there. Nowadays I am so overwhelmed by subtlety and nuance that I would like to get on the magic bus and head for the old fog of Woodstock. But it is a place most of us have never been, and, face it, a place we can no longer go.

Woodstock is 40 years old this week. Television will remind us. New CDs of old music are being released. The dead are being hauled out and counted. Everywhere there is talk of the "Woodstock Nation." People speak of it with fondness. But remember how we were never going to end up like our parents? Listen to the nostalgic voices of the Woodstock Nation, 40 years on. Our fathers and mothers talked about World War and the Great Depression just like that. Can you hear it?

PRAISE THE LORD AND F**K THE ARGENTINIAN!

The further adventures of Gov. Mark and Jilted Jenny (along with a woman named Maria, a spiritual adviser, the people of South Carolina and a bunch of snakebit Republicans who wish the God they claim to believe in could raise Strom Thurmond from the dead even if he was a babydaddy for all those years -- because he was decent enough to keep it mostly a secret until he was dead).

What kind of guy asks his wife for permission to go see his mistress (and I bet he had tears in his eyes and said please)? That would be Gov. Mark.

What kind of wife says "No mistress," then claims she believed it when told her he was going hiking in the mountains and was surprised when he WENT TO SEE THE MISTRESS anyway? That would be Jilted Jenny, who is allegedly smarter than that. Repeat after me: A guy who has been following his penis around for several years and calling it love is not interested going on a hike.

Of course, one time she did say yes when Gov. Mark pleaded with her to let him end his affair face to face. She sent him away to New York with a "trusted spiritual adviser" as a chaperone (praise Jesus). The Gov., his Argentinian love and the chaperone went to dinner, went to church and went their separate ways (at least that is how the story goes). But it wasn't really over.

Now news stories claim South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and his wife Jilted Jenny are trying to work things out, but I figure it's pretty hard to go slouching home to Mama with your pants around your ankles and an Argentinian woman dangling from your penis like the last bright and lonely ornament on last year's drooping Christmas tree.

Meanwhile, Gov. Mark says in another interview he believes he can fall back in love with Jilted Jenny, but I wouldn't count on it. This is what the apparently grammatically challenged (watch those verb tenses, big guy) governor said of what he realized as he set out for Argentina: "I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate."

Let's settle back and see what happens next now.

(Don't you just love it when Republican Christian loudmouths get caught with their pants down?)

Here is a primer from The Daily Beast on sin in high places in South Carolina.

A FRIDAY TOAST TO THURSDAY'S DEAD

Here's to Michael's face and Farrah's butt
and to an America that's utt
erly drowning in this freaky stuff -- it's a glut -- but
can't get enough of Michael's face and Farrah's butt.

HOW DO THEY SPELL 'APPALACHIAN' IN SOUTH CAROLINA? 'A-R-G-E-N-T-I-N-A'

It was bad enough when North Carolina politician John Edwards messed around on the famously cancer-stricken Mrs. Edwards. Now South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford decides to leave the wife and kids at home and chase his piece of Argentinian ass all the way to Buenos Aires ON FATHER'S DAY. Sanford is one of those scripture-quoting Republican true believers, a self-described "person of faith" who said he believes in "moral absolutes" (and I'll bet he believes in all of the "Thou shalts" and "Thou shalt nots" in the convenient way most of those wealthy and overbred Low Country South Carolina types do). He set out saying he was taking a hike on the Appalachian Trail, but ended up in Argentina because he said he wanted to "do something exotic." A psychologist I know said lots of muddling middle-aged guys confuse sex with something exotic and never make it to the bottom of figuring out what their real problem is (probably something to do with age, work, their boss, their unresolved and -- suddenly, frighteningly rejuvenated on some deep dark level -- relationship with their mothers. It's not that these guys want to fuck their mothers, but they feel like they want to do something to somebody and it feels like wanting to fuck somebody in the worst sort of way). Who do you fuck when you can't fuck your mother? Somebody strange (as in "get some strange"). Somebody "exotic."  So Sanford's exotic Argentinian was another version of Edwards' exotic video artiste. In both cases the poor bastards confused sex with something exotic and look where it got them. (Bill Clinton doesn't figure into this discussion because he had his own somewhat-puzzling-but-mostly-unexotic-Dixie-fratboy-if-it-moves-fuck-it-Lewinsky-esque interpretation of what it means to "get some strange"). I bet Gov. Sanford could have bought a lot of therapy for what this is going to cost him and he would have ended up in a better place than Buenos Aires. Instead, he did go to Buenos Aires and could only say when he returned, "I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina" and a bunch of other crap. (Do these dumbasses ever think about what they are saying?) Well, cry me a river, but don't expect any tears from anyone else. Then go shove Evita into your dvd player, drop your drawers, do what you apparently do best and shut up about it.

Oh, yeah. Farrah Fawcett finally died.

Can you believe The New York Times actually put this crap on page 1?

ANTHROPOMORPHIC MISANTHROPISM: NO MORE MR. NICE GUY

I have read comic strips my entire life and do not understand people who don't. These days I love the comic strip Pearls Before Swine in particular. I need my Pearls and I need my coffee before I go to work in the morning. I need them even if I am not going to work. They both make me feel better. The strip is full of sweet, kind, smart, and stupid characters. There is an "Angry Bob"; there is even a duck that is prone to excessive violence. But it is "Rat" who is at the center of things, who makes my day with his anthropomorphic misanthropism -- and puts a Rat's distance between me and my own misanthropic and cynical self. These days Rat is busying himself sprinkling schadenfreude on the heads and hopes of others. He once spent time consigning others to a Box O' Stupid People. He also has hit people (he knows they deserve it, that is never an issue) upside the head with various objects. My wife made me one of those and George W. Bush is there to this day. I even keep a collection of Pearls strips on my nightstand to put me in the proper mood before I go to sleep. Comics are good adult company (they are not for children). They make me a better man; at least they make me appear to be a better man. Sometimes people even mistake me for Mr. Nice Guy. Rat doesn't even have to pretend.

Pogo, Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County all have kept me company at one time or another. One of them is living on borrowed time, the rest live on the Internet.