The UnTexan

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.

ALICIA PARLETTE INFO

For those who come here seeking Alicia Parlette, and there are many of you, here is a little something that came in over the virtual transom: Alicia news. It is almost as good as hearing from Alicia herself.

THE TEXANTHROPE

I always wondered why Davy Crockett liked Texas so much. It turns out he left Tennessee on Oct. 31, 1835, swore his allegiance to Texas in January 1836 and died a couple of months later, March 6, 1836.  It turns out he wasn't here long enough to matter. He wasn't in Texas six months before he died (some people might consider that a lucky break) but I'll bet he had plenty of time looking over the Alamo wall at all those Mexicans and first wondering where the hell they all came from (subsequent generations of Texans have had a similar response) and then wondering why he came. Maybe it was the last thing that passed through his mind as the Mexicans were killing him in a language he couldn't understand: "Why in the hell am I here?" The answer: It seemed like a good idea at the time. That happens to lots of people. It happened to us.

After all this time in Austin, my wife and I are just about to arrive in Texas or just about to begin leaving. I would like to think it is a toss-up, but probably not.

I have been battling Texas since our arrival -- for more than seven years. Now it appears Texas is winning. Or perhaps it has won already. Or the toss has been lost. At any rate, I feel tired, defeated and destined to spend the foreseeable future here. My wife and I came to Texas for the best of reasons (my wife's Texas-paid-for ph.d.) and the UnTexan was born out a mostly lighthearted, jesting disregard for a place he knew he would be leaving in a few years (four years at the most). Now we are three years past that and we have stayed for the worst of reasons (job, money, stuff, inertia, exhaustion, depression, fear, failure of imagination, more stuff, more money, more inertia or more fear or more exhaustion or less imagination, whatever) and over those "extra" years the UnTexan's lighthearted jesting has been drained of its lightheartedness. In fact, the UnTexan is well on the way to becoming the Texanthrope. We have stayed too long. We might not be leaving. She wants to stay longer. I am ill-prepared. Things have turned serious.

How does a man begin to survive such a place? Davy Crockett's no help; if he taught us anything it is that Texas will kill you.

First, I must remind myself that I am with my wife, not in Texas. Wife. Texas. Two distinctly different things. Looking at things this way has seen me through so far. And henceforth, I also will count on two documents to see me through to the end: 1) A Passport, which at least offers the illusion that I can leave though it seems more and more likely I never will; and 2) My Last Will and Testament, which will insist that my remains never be buried, spread, entombed or otherwise disposed of on or in Texas soil (unless they are with those of my wife because then I would remain with her, not in Texas). Remember that part of Lonesome Dove where Gus made his old friend Call haul his corpse all the way back to Texas in a buckboard? Now start after they arrived in Texas and run the film backwards and you will see what has to happen with me. I will insist on it. I'm sure it's something Gus would understand. One man's Texas is another man's unTexas. And it will be in writing. Gus understood that too.

My wife, my passport and my will. It's so simple. It's so complicated. It is the best I can do, at least for now. Texas is big; Texas looms large for us. And here we are like weary children on a long journey in a hot car who ask repeatedly and monotonously from the confines of the car's backseat, "Are we there yet? Are we there yet," and receive no answer. Still we can't stop asking. "When will we get there?"

"Have we left yet?"

Will it be soon?

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?

IN THE TOILET

This morning the toilet in our "guest" bathroom clogged. Luckily we don't have any guests. Once it clogged when we did have guests and guest shit creates its own kind of problems. But this house was built in 1959 and sits on a concrete slab. It has developed a few plumbing problems. This morning it was one of those "I've flushed it but it won't go down" problems. No spillage, no leakage, no brown water gurgling up in the bathtub. I went to the garage, grabbed my plunger and my bucket, walked back to the bathroom and took a seat on the edge of the bathtub. I plunged. The water level dropped, but that's it. I plunged again, forcing the water down; when there was room for it, I dumped a bucket of hot water into the toilet. It stayed there. I plunged it down. Dumped in another bucket. Plunged. Finally, there was that satisfying sucking sound of water rushing down the pipes. I flushed. The toilet works again. Then, as I carried my bucket and my plunger back to the garage, I realized unclogging that toilet is likely to be the most satisfying thing I will do today. When I told my wife my sad little epiphany, I expected that little another-epiphany laugh she laughs. Instead, she said, "I was just thinking the same thing." It's not easy to laugh at a thing like that.

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.

TEXAS LONGA, VITA BREVIS: THE WACKO-WACO VERSION

Some film folks wanted to spend $30 million to make a movie about the 1993 shootout between the feds and the followers of David Koresh up in Waco. And they thought the state was going to offer them tax incentives to shoot the movie near the scene of the crime and give it some actual Waco, Texas, verisimilitude. They had even scouted some sites with a member of the state's film commission. Then, much like the actual Branch Davidian debacle, some state official decided to burn the deal down. The tax incentives were jerked away because some guy on the film commission claimed he found "factual inaccuracies" in the script. This would be factual inaccuracies concerning an event about which the facts have never been clear in the first place? Go figure. But a flimsy excuse is still an excuse. The movie people claim it is censorship wrapped up in politics. But the film commission claims that even though what it is doing might seem like censorship, it's not really censorship and blah, blah, blah, and there is no politics involved. It turns out Texans are a sensitive bunch and they made a rule about it: If you want to get a tax break to make a movie in Texas, you can't be planning to show either "Texas or Texans in a negative fashion." That's actually part of the tax incentive deal, an idea introduced a couple of years ago by State Sen. Steve Ogden, who seems like a pretty ordinary Texas Republican guy when he is talking about things like the budget (he's smart about stuff like that) and until he opens his mouth and starts to pray (I heard him pray once at the beginning of one of those big toll road projects) and becomes a henchman for the God of development, roadbuilding, paving and generally fucking with the environment (a God Texans love to invoke), who Ogden claims (like James G. Watt before him -- remember him? The Reagan appointee who wanted to destroy the environment, insulted the Beach Boys and said charmingly of his own staff, "we have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple and we have talent" before being forced to resign) gave man the job of controlling and taming the earth and all the creatures on it (or paving the earth and killing all the creatures on it, or something like that). I guess Ogden's God (obviously a spindoctor deity at heart) must have handed down a similar directive about controlling movie content and keeping Texas and Texans unsullied (keep in mind that Ogden is always screeching about big government and how its rules intrude and hinder the work of ordinary people). Utah is the only other state with such a provision in its tax incentive regulations. Maybe Mormons and Texans both have things they need to hide. But in the effort to make Texans look good in the movies, Ogden and the film commission have simply made Texas look silly -- again -- this time in front of the world at the Cannes Film Festival. But Texas doesn't need some Hollywood types to make it look silly. Gov. Rick ("I'm not really a seccessionist, I just can't stand the thought of THAT WOMAN being governor") Perry takes care of that all by himself. The man can't help showing Texas and Texans in a negative fashion. Maybe Ogden can think up some sort of regulation that would take away Perry's salary for doing and saying dumb stuff. It would save Texas money. It would save Texas face. Somebody might make a movie about it if they received the right incentive.

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A Report from the Stephanie Klein Universe: The queen of hubris and bullshit wrote a bit about the final episode of the television series Lost last week. She really gets into it and apparently likes to bring the full power of her undergraduate education to bear on the topic. In other words, she loves to show off. Which led her no doubt to write the following paragraph:

"FYI: Everything that rises must converse by Flannery O'Connor, the book Jacob is reading as Locke is pushed out the window by his father, 'aims to expose the sinful nature of humanity that often goes unrecognized in the modern secular world.'"

Well. FYI. Not really. Everything that rises in Stephanie's universe must (unfortunately) "converse" even when it would be better to simply shut up. Or maybe things "converse" in the Cliff's Notes version. However, in Flannery O'Connor's version of the world, things that rise must "CONVERGE." It's Everything that Rises Must Converge. And talking about it doesn't help. And just where did that unattributed quote about humanity and sin come from? Surely not from Steph herself.

DRINKING AND DRIVING AND THE KEYS TO PARADISE

Driving home from work, I pass a billboard warning people that a DWI can cost a driver in Texas more than $17,000. Why? I always drove better when I was drinking. We all did in those days back in North Carolina where I come from. We always assumed we drove better after a few beers, or more than a few beers, or a lot of whiskey mixed with a little bit of Coca-Cola. And it must have been true. It wasn't unusual to drink a six-pack before we ever got in the car. Then we drank while we were driving (who didn't) and tossed the cans out into the night. We puked out of car windows and kept on driving and pulled over to piss in the bushes on the side of the road (even if there weren't any bushes) then climbed back in and kept on driving, but no one seemed to notice. I never got a ticket for drunken driving. None of my friends did either. We drove better when we were drinking AND whatever we were drinking made us invisible too. It was paradise. We started driving at 16 and had a couple of years to practice before we started drinking (legally) and driving at 18, and I suppose the practice helped. Of course, a few guys died in wrecks or killed somebody else (usually a friend riding "shotgun" or a girlfriend) but it was never many, just enough to feed our adolescent need for a little death and a lot of drama. I still remember some of their names and I remember the cars some of them died in. Big cars. Chevys, Fords, any number of long-forgotten Chrysler products, one guy in a borrowed MG. I remember going down to the junkyard and seeing what was left of the cars, a little dried blood spattered here, a few strands of hair stuck there, beer cans in the floorboard. One car with a bumper sticker that read, "I'd Rather Be Flying;" we laughed at what seemed to be the irony of that one -- confusing stupidity and irony the way adolescents will sometimes. But we never saw anything at the junkyard that stopped us from drinking and driving. We never even saw anything there that made us give up our churchkeys. It took pop-top cans and twist-off bottle caps to do that.