Roads Less Traveled

Texas-AKA flyover country

So I’m fueling up my new truck in east Texas cattle country, and for the first time, briefly, I feel like a real Texan.  After all, this beast has a giant diesel motor just like every other vehicle in the Lone Star state, and it’s so tall that a ladder would be a nice accessory, so now I think I finally fit in, at least from a vehicle standpoint.  I even have a country music station tuned in for good measure.  Then I look down at my feet and see flip flops there, which provide indisputable proof that I am not any kind of Texican at all, but rather just a Jimmy Buffet-style Florida wannabe poser.  Because after all, anybody knows that real Texans wear rattlesnake cowboy boots and belt buckles the size of dinner plates, so who, at the end of the day, am I? 

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I want to tell you, son, what a great country America used to be.  I’m afraid if I don’t tell you soon, you won’t believe me in a few years, because things are declining so fast I can hardly believe myself how far we’ve “progressed”.   So I want to say, just from my ground-level perspective, what it used to be like to grow up and live in this beautiful nation, and I want to say so right now before the mists of time blur my memory, or possibly before it becomes illegal to publish these increasingly uncomfortable truths.  You can laugh about that possibility-right up until the moment it happens. So here’s what it was like in the USA, way back when: Continue reading →

I wonder what it’s like to love an object so much that you spend your entire life studying it and still, even after 60 years, you adore it as much as the day you first laid eyes on it. Is it like that first love you never forgot, even if it was never reciprocated or consummated? Continue reading →