Bill White Juggernaut Gathers Statewide Momentum

We believe we espied our first outside-the-Loop Bill White for [Office That Hasn't Been Vacated Yet and May Never Be] bumpersticker on Saturday as we were motoring up State Highway 71 near the Austin airport. The bearer of the sticker was a dark blue Scion that unfortunately made a quick juke to the right at the Lockhart exit, leaving us unable to get the license plate. We were, however, able to read the other sticker on the auto's back door: "Jesus was a liberal." Or, maybe, "Jesus is a liberal."*

*Again, we feel compelled to add that we only report the news.

Absolutely the Worst Effin' Street in the Whole Damn Town

Perhaps not "absolutely." These designations, after all, are local--we're sure that every quadrant of town, perhaps every hectare of town, has its own worst street (we, for instance, don't regularly ply the byways of northeast Houston and therefore can't wield a very broad brush). This just happens to be the street we drove down about 20 minutes ago, and we're still steamin' (although normally a happy-go-lucky, live-and-let-live kind of fellow). It's South Braeswood, between Buffalo Speedway and Stella Link, and it's one f'ed-upped mess and has been for years, if not decades: seamed and rutted, potholed, bifurcated--hell, trifurcated--and it always makes us feel as if we've returned to the spine-jarring days of the Model T when we inch our way down it ('course road conditions do keep most traffic well under speed limit). It's like you're driving in Belize--rural Belize.

So the city council agrees to fund the silly-ass Houston Arts Alliance with $11 million. (We're sure this was from some dedicated fund that could only be spent on dubious " art" and the administration thereof and not road repairs, right?) We haven't been paying much attention to the mayor's race, but we know the kind of candidate who will appeal to us (and our wide, deep sphere of influence) will be one who says ixnay to the baubles and trinkets and promises a strict concentration on bread-and-butter neighborhood issues. (Yes, we know, promises are one thing ...)

The Road Does Not Go on Forever, Nor Does the Party Never End

The congenial Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen,* in a Q&A [not available in its entirety] in the June edition of Texas Highways,** unapologetically describing growing up in southwest Houston, back when gas was cheap and cars were big, the “domestic oil industry” was not an oxymoron and “Sharpstown” was not synonymous with graffiti, ill-maintained apartments and crappy schools*** but rather was considered a nice place to raise the kids:

We [Keen and his sister] grew up during what I call the bright, shining age of Houston, in the late ’50s and ’6os, when the space program was beginning and the oil business was rocking. Anybody who was involved in oil was just the coolest person on the block [his father was a petroleum engineer]. I remember “Go Texan Day” in Houston, which was the first day of the rodeo and the day the Salt Grass Trail Ride would end up in town. I used to keep a picture in my wallet of me when I was about threee, wearing one of those little felt cowboy hats and holding my parents’ hands as we walked down the rodeo to Go Texan Day …

*Who manages to elude critical enshrinement as a Texas legend or sumpin’ ‘cause he’s an Aggie and a nice guy and apparently has no serious substance abuse problems and has yet to be stabbed to death outside of a nightclub, although never say never ’cause there’s still time to work on the last two.

**A publication of the Texas Department of Transportation, the one whose lush color photography always makes everybody and every place in Texas look 2 to 3 times better than he/she/it does in person.

*** Sharpstown, of course, has been getting a worse-than-desaerved rap lately, especially after the killing of police officer Henry Canales, which actually happened on the far edge of Sharpstown, or where S-town bleeds into the Gulfton area, but in fact most of the single-family-home subdivisions in the area are nicely maintained and offer affordable housing for working/middle-class families who can somehow navigate the less-than-stellar public schools. We thought it interesting that Channel 11 could do this report after Canales’ murder on “the decline of Sharpstown”—a two-decade-old story that—without once employing the term “illegal immigration.” Such is the nature of coming to grips with “problems” in Houston.

"Pimp" Was Here (And the Words of the Prophets are Written ...

on the bamboo at the Japanese Garden, Hermann Park, Houston, TX 77030)

Side Benefits

After far too long we caught up last week with our old pal Belacqua, with whom we’ve been friends since 5th grade, or thereabouts, and who many years ago was a part-time running podnuh of ours, back when we both had hair and a reasonable amount of youthful vitality. He’s also, as you may not know, one of Our Town’s most astute commentators on culture and commerce, especially after a beer or two. As he and I and the wives gorged ourselves at that venerable Indian restaurant in Rice Village, we spoke of many things: the artistry of The Wire, the pomposity (perhaps justified) of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the late-life pleasures of puttering in our respective suburban yards (just like our dads did!) and in general of the narrowing horizon as we maneuver through middle of our sixth decade of life on earth.

Belacqua reported that the Houston-born-and-reared IT corporation for which he’s happily toiled for a decade now has more employees in India than it does here in the county seat of Harris, and that many of his remaining colleagues in the locality also hail from the Subcontinent. The outsourcing has allowed the company, which sold its headquarters and now rents back space from the new owner, to close off some of its formerly occupied cubicle space. For Belacqua, that has meant a shift to telecommuting, which most workdays spares him from making the long commute up 45 and on to the Beltway and back down again in the afternoon. A half-empty sort, Belacqua did not sound sanguine about his future prospects—perhaps explaining his professed desire to get in on the ground floor of SuperSexy Donuts®*—but his wife says he shouldn’t complain, and we agree. In his mid-50s, he’s finally achieved the real American Dream: He’s getting paid, and he doesn’t have to wear any pants to work.

*SuperSexy Donuts is a soon-to-be-registered trademark of Slampo’s Place Inc. All rights reserved.

Nostalgia Trip

The Saturday editions of Houston's leading daily newspaper took a slow ride down Memory Lane (the one with all the potholes and abandoned strip centers) with a story on the city's record-setting heat wave of June 1980, which apparently was but a lil' poopy-baby scorcher compared to the one that presently brutalizes us. Accompanying the article was a file photo of a construction worker with a sledge hammer splashing his face with water at a downtown construction site. You could tell 1980 was a long, long time ago because the hardhat was
an 18-year-old white kid.

Dead Poets Discuss Michael Jackson

"Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don't have to share it with nobody else.
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the World of Self."
-- Splendid Isolation, 1989, by Warren Zevon (1947-2003), Los Angeles, Calif.

The pure products of America
go crazy

... as if the earth under our feet were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

-- "To Elsie," 1923, by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Rutherford, N.J.