All previous years during my exile in Texas, by this time of the summer, most everything on the ground is brown. This year green remains the dominant color, as you can see in the picture, looking at a field of grass, today, at Oakland Lake Park.
Saturday started off with sad news when I learned that one of my all time favorite people's dad had died. It had only been discovered around Labor Day that cancer had invaded his liver and pancreas. And now less than 2 weeks later cancer has won yet one more battle in its war against humanity.
In the past few months I've learned of way too many sad things. I call it Facebook Syndrome.
I did not get up til past 7 this morning. It was in the 60s overnight. The water in the pool bordered on being cold. I liked it.
Tootsie Tonasket called me around noon and entertained me while I walked around Oakland Lake Park, including when I took the picture you see above of some giant mushrooms that sprang to life recently in our very damp climate. I don't know if these are edible mushrooms, so I did not eat one.
I'm off to Arlington in a bit, to some event at some new park near the city center of Arlington. I forget the name of the park. Music is involved. Details to follow, with pictures, should the event warrant it.
One of my blogging fodder providers sent me the above picture, along with a couple more this morning. The pictures were sent without explanation. The above photo appears to be a large group of scantily clad females in some sort of protest march following a nice looking convertible car through what appears to be a residential neighborhood. I did not read anything about a protest clogging up traffic anywhere in the local paper, online, this morning.
In the above picture it appears the protesters have moved in doors, with some more scantily clad females joined by what looks to be noisemakers pounding on drums. This looks like a basketball court. I am almost certain it is football season, not basketball season. But, things are done different here in Texas, so maybe they are playing basketball now. For all I know, football is a spring sport here.
It was not raining this morning, so there was no flood of mud to navigate through to get to the pool. So, I put my stocking hat on, for the needed warmth, due to it being in the 60s (BRRRRR) and headed to the cold water soon after the sun broke through the cover of gray to light up the place.
My Lincolnesque state of sad melancholy has not lifted, so I continue to spread doom and gloom to all I come in contact with. I can't help myself. Not that I try all that hard.
I continue to worry about my little sister and her apparent attempts to turn her house into a bad sit-com plot, what with the frequently hospitalized poodles, the ever growing brood of little kids and the chronic cases of, what sounds to me like, food poisoning.
I'm also worried about Alma, the Songbird of the Texas Gulf Coast, due to her diabetes taking a turn for the worse. An ER visit got her some interventions that I hope make her better.
Despite ailing, Alma is such a trooper she is doing a short show, 7 pm Saturday, at the Port Aransas Inn. Alma's percussion partner, Luis Villarreal, is re-joining Alma to give her some rhythm. I'd go if I were in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, I am about 500 miles away.
Yesterday I showed you the view you see here, in a picture taken the same time of the day as it is right now. Today's same view, at the same time, is minus yesterday's return of blue sky. Or was it the day before yesterday that blue returned? Regardless, the gray has returned, today. With a vengeance. Dropping water in heavy doses.
For days, I have been unable to do my usual daily walking/hiking routine due to a variety of vexations, some weather related.
Today I decided, no matter what, I was going to get outside. My therapist, Dr. L.C. insisted upon it.
Due to time restraints I decided to go to Quanah Parker Park. It is a short distance away on Randol Mill Road. A couple miles further is Town Talk, which I also wanted to go to, to get cheese.
About 2 miles in to the walking at Quanah Parker it started to rain. A soft rain, at first. Then a downpour. Buy the time I got back to my vehicle I was a wet mess. Even so, I decided to continue on to Town Talk and get that cheese.
By the time I was in the Town Talk cooler I'd developed an itchy eyes problem, along with sneezing. I made it real quick in Town Talk, got my cheese, got out of there, got back here.
So, that's my Thursday, so far, of this hell I am living in Texas. I wish you could join me.
I've read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I've seen the John Ford movie version several times. A couple days ago I watched The Grapes of Wrath for the first time while both living in an area of America affected by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and during a recession which is the worst America has suffered since the Great Depression.
Times were way tougher in the 1930s. People were left to fend for themselves way more than they are today. And the police could act in bad ways that are much worse than the current day abuses of the Fort Worth Gestapo and other misbehaving police.
In the 1930s there was no Internet, no cable news, no nothing to shine a light on the abuse heaped upon those forced to escape the Dust Bowl. It was an era of foreclosures, much like today. And like today, you could be ordered out of your home with bulldozers soon to follow, ala Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys and the City of Arlington.
I have personally known escapees from the Dust Bowl. The parents of my best BFF, known as Big Ed, in Texas, escaped the Dust Bowl, from Ness City, Kansas in the mid 1930s. Big Ed's mom and dad had 2 kids at the time. Big Ed's dad made a makeshift camper on the back of a pick up truck. One of those old time vehicles, which started the engine using a crank in the front. I was to see that truck, still running, in the 1970's, hauling firewood in a pasture in Washington. It should have been in the Skagit County Museum.
Big Ed's mom and dad made their way west on Route 66, joining thousands of other Kansans, Okies and Texans, seeking work and a life away from the walls of lethal dust and grinding poverty.
Big Ed's mom and dad eventually made it to Yuma, Arizona. There was cotton to be picked. Ed's dad, a real hard working man, picked cotton for one day, declared it the hardest job he'd ever done, quit and headed north, towards Ely, Nevada, where they heard there was work to be found in mining camps.
Big Ed and I have driven through the same areas his mom and dad traveled through on that old truck, including Yuma and Ely. Even today, Ely is a very isolated place, at the east end of the Loneliest Road in America.
They found work at the mining camp, room at a boarding house. Ed's mom worked as the boarding house cook. Ed's mom was not a good cook. But she made really good bread and homemade noodles. I suspect those were her specialities in the boarding house.
Eventually Big Ed's mom and dad got a letter from some Kansas friends who had made it all the way to western Washington, to this valley called Skagit, near this town called Alger. They told Big Ed's mom and dad that there was logging work and land for sale, cheap.
So, the family loaded up their makeshift RV, again, and headed north, by what road, I do not know. I do know there are some high mountain passes to cross between Nevada and Washington and that the roads were not quite what they are today.
Eventually the family made it to the Promised Land. A job logging for Weyerhauser was found. Land was bought, from Weyerhauser. The makeshift RV was taken off the pickup and became the first part of what became the house Big Ed and his twin, Wally, grew up in.
The Dust Bowl and the Great Depression trauma continued to affect Big Ed's mom and dad decades later. They were very frugal. Indoor plumbing was not introduced until the 1960s. In the 1970s I told my mom that Big Ed's mom had this cool thing with big rollers to wash clothes with. My mom was appalled. Mom decided she needed a new washer and dryer. Big Ed's brother-in-law, Keith, Big Ed and I brought my mom's old washer up to Ed's mom's place. Ed's mom was not happy at first, but she soon learned to like the modern appliances. When those wore out, she bought new ones.
Years later I remember visiting Big Ed's mom and being fascinated by her tales of life in Kansas in the Roaring 20s. She was a flapper! Big Ed had no idea his mom had such a scandalous past. He'd always known her as an extremely pious, Christian mom. Not a bob-haired, short-skirted Charleston dancer.
And now, all these years later, Big Ed finds himself back in the Dust Bowl zone, during yet one more Great Depression, trying to figure out if he needs to fashion a makeshift home on the back of a pickup in order to escape this place and seek his fortune elsewhere. What an ironic conundrum.
Excellent YouTube video below about The Grapes of Wrath. And how it mirrors our current troubled times....
Yesterday the view you see in the picture had returned to blue sky. Today it has returned to what you see in today's picture. It appears to be building to something. I see a lightning strike in my future. Hopefully not a direct hit to my head. Though at this point in time, that might come as relief.
I'd not realized I'd not blogged today til I got an email from my therapist, Dr. L.C., who asked, "Are you okay?" She asked the same thing last night when she saw I was up late, she seemed to be concerned that I might not be conscious whilst email, and was instead sleepwalking and emailing.
This morning I lost an hour or 3 fixing a weird link woe that I discovered when this bit.ly thing I use to shorten URLs for Twitter came up with a No URL Found Error. I was trying to make a link to the webpage I'd made about the Riverwind Casino, up by Norman in Oklahoma. But somehow the pathline of that URL was wrong, with the folder that held the Riverwind Casino files named "Riverwind Casino." But the pathline in the URL changed to "riverwind casino," with no capitalized first initial, hence the No URL Found Error.
I soon found the error was repeated on every page with that link, except the main index page and the sitemap.txt file that gets sent to Google. So, ironically, the webpage was indexed correctly, it was just mucked up on my website. How this occured, I have no idea. It is very perplexing.
You'd think such a thing would be easy to fix. You would be wrong.
Then this morning I learned that one of my favorite people's dad has cancer bad. I was already feeling melancholy. Then somehow my little sister got me remembering the day she was born. More melancholy. Not a sad melancholy, more a melancholy of realizing happy days, long ago, that never will be again.
I'd been being melancholy since 2 nights ago when I watched Grapes of Wrath. I'd watched Grapes of Wrath before, but not when America was going through the worst economic crisis since the era of Grapes of Wrath.
Maybe I'll muster enough non-melancholy energy to blog about the Grapes of Wrath. I have a personal connection to that era that I find interesting.
The sun has been missing for so long I'd slipped into a Seasonally Affected Disorder Depression from the Tropical Depression that had been stuck over head since last Friday.
Suddenly, this afternoon, the gray lifted and the place got all bright again. The return of the sun does not seem to be heating up the place too much. Right now it is only 78 out there. So, I'm keeping the windows open. For now.
I did not go swimming early this morning. I didn't feel like it.
I did venture out into the gray gloom about noon to find Village Creek Natural Historic Area closed due to a flooding Village Creek. I did not check out the flooding Village Creek. That would have required a couple mile detour just to see some extra water, the likes of which I have seen before.
I checked out San Manuel, Arizona today. Interesting town.
Internet World can be such a strange place. As long as I've been connected via this means to the rest of the world I've gotten odd questions that come at me for no apparent reason that I can understand.
Like someone in Singapore named Wee Cheng asking me a lovelorn type question about her ex-boyfriend, Teck Seng, coming in from London, wanting to rekindle their dead relationship. I told Wee to go for it. Eventually Wee and Teck got married and reproduced. I got invited to the wedding. Wee Cheng quit speaking to me because George Bush had invaded one country too many for Wee's taste.
The weirdest question I ever got was a lady in the UK seeking medical advice about something to do with her uterus. I guess this was what I deserved for calling myself Dr. Durango and having a website called Dialing Doctor Durango.
But, Dialing Doctor Durango was obviously not serious and I obviously was not a real doctor. This was the period of time when I realized you can not go wrong overestimating how stupid the vast mass of humanity actually is. I have since slightly mitigated that view.
However, this week it happened again. An odd email, I mean. Once more it was from the UK. Some guy named David had been at my Eyes on Texas website. Somehow the fact that this website, in large part, has to do with Texas must have meant, to David, that I must sell horse products.
Below is David's email...
Good Day,
I Am David James and I will like to know if you do sell Any of the following products:
Saddles
Horse Float
Load Float
Horse Walker
If you do then, I will like to know some of the sizes and price range of those that you have in stock at the moment? As soon as you reply me with those information I will get back you to with the quantity that will like to order so that we can proceed from there.
For the payment, I will like to know if you so take major credit card as method of payment?
Thank you and do not forget to include your Name and Phone number when getting back to me.
David.
Okay now. Well, I've pretty much given up replying to these type questions, politely explaining I have no horse stuff for sale. The majority of these type questions are in reference to the webpage I made about going to the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup. I have probably had 2 dozen inquiries over the years, asking for stuff like rattlesnake skin, venom and rattles. As recently as last week I got asked how much my rattlesnake skins cost. And oddly enough, this question also came from the UK. I think, maybe Darwinian selection had the top notch Brit brains moving to the colonies, leaving the UK with a big brain drain that evidenced itself in the subsequent generations.
Of course, I am going on very flimsy evidence to be making such a harsh conclusion.
It has been days since the sky in my zone of Texas has been blue. Day after day has me having my first SAD bout in a long time. I succumb to Seasonally Affected Disorder very quickly.
During yesterday's downpour I had to do something aerobic to counter my growing SADness. So, I went to Sam's Club and loaded up a cart with heavy stuff and proceeded to careen all the aisles, dodging legitimate customers.
Monday is another cloudy day, real cloudy, but so far no rain. So, I went to Oakland Park to walk around Oakland Lake Park which surrounds Lake Fosdic. There is no Lake Fosdic Park.
Due to the heavy rain, Fosdic Falls was falling a little water. All the litter had been swept away and the lake returned to a natural, non-green color.
The Trinity River is running a little high today. It was running over the dam/bridge by Gateway Park.
Growing up in the northwest I was used to seeing protests and protest marches and demonstrations. I remember being up there the week of the 2004 presidential elections. In Tacoma you'd see groups of people holding signs at key intersections. Bush signs on one corner, Kerry signs on the other.
I remember going up to Mount Vernon the day before the election, getting off I-5 at the exit that goes by the Skagit County Courthouse. There were a lot of demonstrators, including the one you see in the picture.
About a year after I moved to Texas I was up in Washington, in Seattle, and there was a huge protest march. I don't remember what it was about, but the wall of people went all the way from Westlake Center to the Seattle Center. Which means nothing to someone unfamiliar with Seattle, but that's a lot of people. The Fort Worth equivalent would be a wall of people walking, filling Main Street all the way from the Convention Center to the Stockyards.
I remember when I saw that Seattle protest march, remarking that I wonder why there are no protest marches in Texas, where there seems to be a lot that might raise some group's ire. Several years after that I was quite impressed with the huge demonstrations, here, in support of our Hispanic population.
On Saturday, 9/12, under a heavy rain, there was a rally/protest march/demonstration in downtown Fort Worth. Reports vary as to how many attended. Many reports seemed to downplay the event, to the consternation of those who experienced it first hand. As so often happens when you have eye witness experience, the media version will be at variance to some degree. That is always annoying.
Well, as happens so often these days, the Fort Worth 9/12 event was caught on video. The video seems to validate those who claim the media downplayed the number of people marching in downtown Forth Worth on Saturday. It looked totally peaceful. I saw no Fort Worth Gestapo. I thought they'd likely be out in force with their whacking sticks and tasers.
Below is a YouTube video of Saturday's 9/12 marchers. For those of you not familiar with Fort Worth, that parking lot they are marching around is known as Sundance Square. I think. I've never actually been totally sure what Sundance Square is...
All previous years during my exile in Texas, by this time of the summer, most everything on the ground is brown. This year green remains the dominant color, as you can see in the picture, looking at a field of grass, today, at Oakland Lake Park.
