My true love there to be.

I took this picture driving across the country with Steve Stoops a couple years back. Kent Texas, an abandoned school. This was before the cancer surgery. I had a pipe in my side for six weeks and was in horrible pain.

West Texas is always the worst part of any cross country trip, a few folks in my business stay out of the state's way completely.

To be sore, Texas has always been the worst place to hitchhike in the country, you would be sure to spend an extended time in jail if you dared. Saw them once make a motorcycle rider take his bike apart, in the sixties, in a thunderstorm, just to mess with him. Little piece by piece. Six hundred years for a pot seed.
Pollution everywhere you turn.

Fort Stockton, Ozona,  across the Edwards Plateau, dirty towns made special for viewing in black and white or sepia. I remember walking through filthy supermarkets and counting the hours until a way out of town. Where every face you see on the street is terminally wounded. Given up. Or they wouldn't be there. West Texas may not be nowhere but you can sure see it from there.

Lived in Texas as a kid, Cielo Vista, in El Paso. Good as place to be a kid as any, I guess. Baptized in the methodist church and indian guides and you learn to say yes sir and no ma'am and you might get it if you didn't.

El Paso was an interesting place, although not considered an actual part of the state by most Texans, I have found.

I got no complaints. Grew up bilingual, there and the year in Las Cruces. Really got turned on tho the southwest. Don would brink mesquite beans home for us to chew on, crack them open licorice sweet. Luminarias, glass on the old adobe roof, bollilos, sweet hard, crusty mexican rolls the like of which I have ne'er had since. Sopapillas, good shredded beef, something almost impossible to find in this brave new carne asada world of ours. There is something wonderful about slightly crispy shredded beef, if you know where I can find any please let me know.

The family would go over to Juarez to our favorite restaurant Alacazar, where bota bag bearing servers shot red wine across the room to land on the bowl of the soup spoon in your mouth. Wonderful bacon wrapped filet mignon. I do believe I have had a lifetime association with food, the childhood memories are so vivid.

I liked Texas. It was hot, we played our asses off every day, baseball in the dirt, fishing, horned toads, kid shit. This is 63' to '68. Got my first kiss back there. Cotton fields and nut farms. Once you get that dry desert wind in your bones, it never comes out.

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Saw where Texas Governor Rick Perry refused last week to implement Obamacare. His right. In a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, he confirmed that Texas has no intention of implementing a state insurance exchange or expanding Medicaid as part of Obamacare.

“If anyone was in doubt, we in Texas have no intention to implement so-called state exchanges or to expand Medicaid under Obamacare,” Gov. Perry said. “I will not be party to socializing healthcare and bankrupting my state in direct contradiction to our Constitution and our founding principles of limited government.

Interesting that Perry is taking such a noble stand. Because his state has the worst percentage of medically uninsured in the country and he has just made access to health care even harder for them. 6.5 million Texans have no health care. Over twenty five percent of the population with no health insurance. A recent survey by the federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality showed them weak or very weak in 9 out of twelve categories. In comparing 155 areas of inquiry, Texas has the worst score in health care in the country, a 31.61 out of 100 points. Hooray you Lone Stars, you really showed 'em.


Does Governor Perry have any concern for the many poor people in his state who will go untreated because of a lack of access to health care? They will go to emergency rooms where care will be even more expensive. I still remember last year when the woman in Texas killed herself and her kids in the welfare office. Texas underfunded Medicaid by 4 billion last year and another bill is coming due. They also cut $5 billion from education and an additional $3.1 billion from health care. GOP healthcare - repeal and forget about it.


The government offered Texas a way to help sick people and they are going to reject it, along with five other stupid redneck states in the country. States that are a net drain on our national budget. High principled people who find a way to suck off the federal tit in other ways. Texas figures it can maybe execute people a little faster and maybe it will even these health care numbers out. The motto down here is - sucks to lose. 


Rick Perry did find a way to recently spend $25 million fixing up the governor's mansion, a $15 million dollar overrun. Oops. 


"The improved Governor's Mansion will include inch-thick longleaf pine floors, an added wing and a geothermal heating and cooling system that required digging 40 350-foot (107 meter) wells, according to Bloomberg. The cost of the mansion renovations would have paid for 11 million school lunches."


Nice to see they got their priorities right down there. I swear it was a nice place to grow up.