I just didn't know no better

This is spring break, and for most of my life those two words, when combined, have formed an ominous verb pair, as in, "now the black bear will spring upon its victim and break her."

I've never had good spring breaks.

This time around, since I'm teaching, I actually do get to observe the break again, but it's been consistant with its historical tendency to disappoint. It's almost over and I've spent most of the break toiling over Pants's banner. The pads of all my fingers are needle-perforated and exacto blade-sliced and coated in scales of super glue.

(I'd like to pause here and comment wryly on the commercially-driven, widely held expectation that spring break is supposed to be a time of wanton, sun-soaked abandon, rife with possibilities of fleeting romance and youthful leisure-- I'm just too damned tired and disaffected to do it.)

Anyway, back to the banner. We had a moment yesterday, the banner and I, where I realized that I'd brought it along as far as I could, and that what it now required (i.e., a backing and a precisely attached border to tie up all the raw edges) was far beyond what my skills could provide-- kind of like when Yoda and Obi Wan realized Luke's training was incomplete, but that the only way he'd learn to be a Jedi was to go out and fight the Dark Side himself. So I caved. I called professionals, an older retired couple who take in sewing and embroidery in their garage workshop a few blocks from my house.

I met with the woman yesterday morning shortly after Pants made his triumphant departure to go replace the back end of our pick-up with only a set of instructions printed off the internet, a box of cryptic looking parts, some dry ice (??), and his bare hands. I waved. "Go enjoy your inevitable success!" And then I called Marge, folded up the banner and some extra material, and bought myself a latte on the way to her house (I figure anything worth doing, including admitting defeat, is worth doing well).

Once there, I laid out my work with mixed feelings of tender pride and embarassment. Most of the good parts come from my mother's work on it weeks prior, but some of the elements I'd completed looked quite nice as well. I just couldn't do any more. Not a thing. It was maybe a tiny, tiny echo of what an overwhelmed mother might feel when dropping her kid off at the orphanage. Please help, do what you can, I'll mess it up if I try anymore...

Marge considered my work, clucking over the part where I'd tacked on a square of fabric instead of ripping out the underlying seams and properly sewing it in. More than once, this exchange:

"Now. What did you do here?"

"Where? Oh, um. That's tape. And I'm not sure what that is."

"Oh, Honey. Well, you just didn't know no better."

I endured her critiques and suggestions and tried to remember the compliments (mostly for my mother's work, so I could report them to her later), but mostly I just enjoyed hot sips of caffeine and wondered when I could write her a check.

The differences in generational skill and priority setting couldn't have been clearer-- Marge is from a different era of woman. She too was a military wife, and we discussed this, but her perspective was that of a mother trying to find good schools for her children while mine has been and still is focussed on finding a job and applying to graduate school.

"Of course, you don't work, do you?" she asked at one point, and for the first time I saw that question for what it must look like to a woman of her era, a woman fully capable of sewing her own and her children's wardrobes without using super glue or staples, feeding a family daily from scratch, and operating a household without a Shark Cordless Sweeper. Working would seem ridiculous, almost self-aggrandizing, on top of that kind of skilled labor.

"I do," I wanted to say, "It's just the unpaid part that I do so poorly."

So, gratefully, reverently, I left the banner in Marge's capable hands and came home where I defiantly hobbled my hands by applying fake nails. I did this with outright glee, because it makes me feel like a frivolous mob wife, clawed like a bird of prey and incapable of dextrous tasks like zipping my own pants.

Since then, I've been engaged in the following:

* hating our lurching, Stone Age Dell laptop-- I've actually drawn a little comic strip on all the creative ways I would destroy it, if I could. I completed the whole thing, with color, while waiting for it to load Google.

* reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

* drawing a comic strip on all the totally inappropriate things I'm going to do when I'm an old woman and can use my possible senility as an excuse (ex.: throw rocks at cars, cuss at cusomer service reps, spike my hair and wear suspenders, make butter sculptures).

I think I might title the drawings, "Oh, Honey. She just don't know no better."

Dad Gum, that's some good public radio

We're mired in one of the thrice-yearly fund drives for the public radio station down here in South of Everywhere, and it's really got my moral compass all torqued up.

My problem is this: I am a devoted, dorked out fan of NPR. Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep of "Morning Edition" are my erudite a.m. commute buddies, and Michelle ("Mee-shell!") Norris and Melissa Block use their soothing, caramel-textured voices to bring me the day's bad news on "All Things Considered" during my afternoon commute. Meeting any one of them, or, my God, Terry Gross, who's been doing "Fresh Air" since I was a kid, would be like anyone else's meeting Jennifer Aniston or Lance Armstrong. Naked. On Christmas.

So it's not that I don't want to support public radio with my generous financial contribution... I just... don't.

I've been listening to public radio since I was a wee little thing, though initially it wasn't by choice. My mom would blast it in the car in the mornings during our crosstown commute to school, and then in the afternoons on the way home. Often it got turned on again on the little kitchen radio while she fixed dinner. In fact, the theme music to "All Things Considered" still doesn't sound right to me without the chattering of a pressure cooker gauge in the background.

By the time I was old enough to figure out what was going on during the pledge drives, the idea would panic me. They need money? Or else what-- they'll die? Go off the air? They need money from US? This was a problem. As a kid, I worried about everything, and always at the top of the list was our family's imminent descent into abject poverty, and I was always sure we were teetering on the brink. I squirmed in guilt and angst during the pledge drives. Part of me wanted to make sure we'd contributed because it was good and because we were supposed to, but another part resented the pressure and pathos being applied to solicit the donations. I can recall a particularly obnoxious pledge drive take-off of Willie Nelson's song "If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time," where the public radio host sang something like "Give Us Your Money, Honey, and We'll Give You Our Time."

Over the years, I've come to appreciate public radio stations in the various places I've lived as reliable sources of un-Fox-ified news, and welcome respites from the rampant commercial pandering that marks everything else I see, hear, and touch. The various local stations have done a great job of promoting cultural events (when there were any to promote) that have added depth to my understanding of wherever I was. NPR programming has also been a merciful constant when we keep relocating.

But, like anyone in a longstanding relationship, I have my complaints. Once I drove from Pensacola to Austin listening to public radio the whole way. I noticed that the further you get from a major city, the more brutal the transition from local programming to national programming.

Biloxi, Mississippi (a brief case study):

As I navigated the town's mini-marts and Quickie Stops looking for a coherent set of directions back to I-10, I got to hear a local reporter deliver a story on the oyster shortage resulting from a recent batch of hurricanes. The interview consisted of a long list of ways one can eat oysters, delivered at a snail's pace drawl from a toothless-sounding old woman ("way-ull... you can have 'em shcalloped, you can have 'em shtewed, you can have 'em shteemed, you can have 'em on a half shell..."). Seriously, nearly two full, unedited minutes of oyster variations. It was like the shrimp scene from Forrest Gump. This brilliant monologue was followed by an exchange with the proprietor of an oyster bar called Shuckers, where the interviewer breathlessly asked him what he would say if he was told he couldn't serve oysters anymore (!).

"Well," he replied slowly, "I guess I'd say that wudn't any good."

End of piece. Then, a brief shuffling of papers, a few metal crunching sounds, a high squeal, and then a late connection into the NPR feed. I tried to imagine what the Biloxi studio must have looked like in those moments, and all I could come up with was a frightened animal bashing its forehead into the array of blinking lights and dials in front of it.

Here in South of Everywhere, the situation isn't quite as bleak. There are even a few local hosts I've come to like. Unfortunately, the one I can't stand runs the station, and is currently running the pledge drive. A former TV news broadcaster quite enamored of his own halting, folksy delivery, he loves to reminder us, "Remember, we are your ONLY source of NPR programming in this area!"

I know it's supposed to make me feel grateful, but instead I hear it as a hostage negotiator might. This cheeseball guy who laughs long and heartily at his own jokes has his arm hooked around the neck of my NPR shows, and instead of a gun, he's wielding a microphone and threatening to talk MORE, share more excruciating cutesy anecdotes from his own life and career, unless I call and give him money.

I could go on at considerable length about what I consider to be the blatant abuses of air time that the South of Everywhere public radio station regularly visits on its listeners. Let it suffice to say that as much as I love NPR programming, I hate with equal fervor at least 85% of the local programming. That, more than anything, is the reason I haven't called in my pledge of support. I can only imagine how it would go-- some poor volunteer would pick up the phone and have to hear my reverse-hostage negotiation:

"I will pledge my generous financial support if, and only if, your cheeseball station manager promises right now to commit hara-kiri on the air. This offer has a time limit: five minutes, and I close the wallet forever."

R.V. People

We went south for Thanksgiving, as in ten-minutes-from-the-border south, to camp on the beach, surf, and fry a turkey-- three things which, in the wrong combination and with too much alcohol involved, could have resulted in sand fleas, cracked ribs, and full-body third-degree burns. Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened and I was physically comfortable the whole time.

To understand how remarkable this is, we need to step back, briefly, to one of my first outings with my husband (then boyfriend) three years ago. We were going to go camping in Oklahoma in late November. (I'd never been camping because technically, spending the night in your car sleeping off 6 Cuba Libres does not count.)

We left Austin at around 4:00 in the afternoon and pulled into our campsite in the Ouachita National Forest at 11:30. It was achingly cold, sleeting, and way too Blair Witch out there for me, so I figured I'd wait out the ensuing reality check in the car with the heater running. In less than fifteen minutes though, my husband managed to conjure fire from freezing, soaked earth, and without the aid of my old standby, half a gallon of gasoline splashed near a lit match. This was an actual campfire, and its golden light enticed me out of the car and into a tent where I shivered vigorously in the fetal position until morning. Once a cold like that gets into your bones, it quickly finds its way into your soul and carves a big frowny face there. I was so actively miserable for the next three days that my bowels shut down in protest.

So this is what I pictured when I heard "camping on the beach this Thanksgiving": bitter cold, slate grey sky, the jock-strap stink of most of the Texas coast, and sand in my molars and underwear for five days as I huddle in the tent with Power Bars and a bottle of whiskey. The group of people we were going with, however, balanced out the horror of this scenario and I packed willingly and even cheerfully, looking forward to some sorely needed non-military-wife female bonding and all around interesting conversation.

I got that, but in addition, I also got this: glass-clear water dotted with schools of tiny silver fish, warm breezes and slow tangerine-tinted sunsets, a bungalow with a hot shower (praise God) and a mini fridge, and glorious, edible food. I even surfed a little, if getting up on my knees on the board and giggling a lot, then paddling back to repeat, count as surfing. It was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that people from the northern states and Canada are evidently willing to live half the year in gas-guzzling port-a-johns with little patches of astro-turf laid out as lawns just to be near it. That's right: we were nestled right in front of a small community of R.V. people.

I have nothing against R.V. people. In fact, if I lived in a place where being "snowed in" were even a remote possibility, or where I had to chip away the block of ice covering my windshield every morning before driving to work, I'd probably consider dropping about a year's salary on a tinier, crappier version of my own house and following the nearest highway south until I hit gulf.

But the lifestyle still puzzles me. Privacy, for instance. R.V. people must hear everything through those aluminum walls-- fights, copulation, oboe practice-- and I would imagine that rumors and gossip must spread like grass fires. Violations of personal space must be big too, not only with the person or people who share an R.V. but also with their neighbors. One man's Tejano music is another's rage-inducing audio-assault, and perhaps not everyone is comfortable seeing Mr. So-and-so's holey underwear hung to dry only inches from their breakfast room window. I know from experience that there's a certain square footage needed in a living space, particularly a kitchen, to keep me from repeatedly elbowing, tripping over, and running smack into my husband, and I'm pretty sure they don't make R.V.s that big.

Probably the biggest thing that puzzles me about R.V. people are R.V. pets. They seemed to serve some vital purpose because nearly every R.V. had one, and sometimes two or three. It seems counter intuitive to me that in order to make living in a tiny aluminum house on wheels better, one must add yet another living being, but after several days of observation I figured it out. Sure, there's the companionship level on which every pet is worth its weight in gold-- they don't argue or tell long-winded stories or ask if you've gained weight, and often all they have to do is come lay their chin on your lap and look up at you to make you feel like a worthwhile human being. But the real value of an R.V. pet is their inability to shit in a human toilet. The routine of seeing to an R.V. pet's daily shitting needs provides structure to the day, exercise for all involved, an excuse to meet other R.V. people and pets, and a brief period of separation for human occupants sharing an R.V. "Guess what I saw when I took Wendell out for a shit this morning?" they can say to each other, "Those people from North Dakota throwing out a whole frozen turkey!"

Our little party made the acquaintance of several delightful R.V. pets and their respective people. One was a tubby yellow lab in the next bungalow over (so not technically an R.V. pet, but close), whose name was something in French that none of us caught. Her people were from Quebec and planned on staying put until April, which did nothing for my desire to someday visit Quebec. They also had a tiny, blue-eyed, white kitten who was set permanently on "vibrate," and who they'd picked up at a gas station somewhere up north. Early on the first morning, my husband and I also met a lady down on the beach who'd brought her giant scarlet macaw, who was huddled up close against her ear, digging his massive gray claws into her shoulder and eyeing the waves with uncertainty. Every morning and every evening, a dapper old man would putter around the perimeter of the park on his scooter with a milk crate strapped to the back, in which a perky-eared, fluffy little fox-like dog rode. My favorite, though, was Sam.

Sam was a stately old golden retriever who showed up with a pack of bikers late on the last evening. He was trim and well groomed, and carried himself with an understated dignity that made up for the wretched musical taste of his people. Throughout the night, we'd see Sam trot back and forth, always quietly focused on some vaguely pleasing errand. The next morning, as we were packing and slowly coming to terms with our various treks back to reality, I caught sight of the beginning of Sam's morning routine. His person was a graying biker with a handlebar mustache and a leather vest who apparently savored his morning back stretches and jumbo mug of propane-brewed coffee. He and Sam surveyed the early morning sky together, and then Sam rolled over on his back and did something I've only seen other golden retrievers do-- he began a vigorous and joyful bicycling motion with his back legs while whipping his head from side to side, making huge writhing dog commas in the prickly grass. Bliss.

And now, all too early, it's over and we're back in the tiny, tiny town. The semester's awkward decrescendo has begun, only to make room for the ensuing blare of Christmas' giant extended commercial, which almost succeeds every year in drowning out the melody of time off work with the family. It feels weird to have totally cheated the season in this far away corner of far-south Texas, bobbing on a glistening waxed board between temperate blue waves, slowly getting sunburned and looking forward to a night outside watching the stars with a beer in hand. Maybe that image alone will be enough to turn me into an R.V. person when I'm finally old enough and tired enough to really need and afford a few months in the sun.

Feathers

Turns out I'm not a hunter.

This is something most people who know me could have probably guessed, but now we have official confirmation. Over the Labor Day weekend, my husband and I went on a dove hunting trip. Despite not having obtained a hunting license, I was fully prepared to enjoy the spectacle of doves spiraling crazily out of the sky for the simple fact that they have regularly spackled my car with shit for past 6 months. They have also hurled their thick, soft bodies directly against the windows of my house at the exact moments when I have been carrying something scalding hot and/or breakable, and each time I have spectacularly dropped whatever it was I was holding.

So when my husband said he wanted to buy a canvas pouch in which to store dead, bleeding doves around his waist, I made a terrible face but I agreed.

The hunt itself was even rather peaceful, given that I sat in a folding chair in the shade of a mesquite tree and read a book through most of it, only glancing up occasionally amid the thunder of shotguns and the intermittent soft thuds of doves landing among the grain stalks. The hard part came at the end of the day, when the clouds drew together and a stiff wind raked across the field as everyone gathered to clean their birds.

My husband handed me one and began to explain how to clean it, first pulling out the soft belly feathers. That was as far as I got. The dove in my hand was still warm, its head gently dangling and flopping over the back of my hand. Its eyelids were translucent gray and closed, and as I took hold of the first layers of feathers, they fell away easily and scattered in the wind in front of me, like rice at a wedding. Laid bare, the dove's breast was a mottled purplish color, thinly concealing the dark muscles and veins beneath. I laid my hand over it and felt the warmth draw away.

I don't know if you've ever found yourself here: standing in front of a blue plastic barrel full of bloody dove entrails, flanked on either side by people knuckle deep in bird, and suddenly realizing, with equal parts shame and tenderness, that you can go no further, you just can't break the skin. My reaction was to stall for time, spreading the dove's wings and manipulating its scaly red toes and acting as though I was pondering the finer points of avian anatomy, when really I was wondering whether I have any right to eat meat at all if I can't clean a dove.

Hunting is honest, and, done right, it's respectful of animal life. There can be a certain elemental reverence in cleaning a carcass, one that honors sacrifice and abhors waste, and as it turns out, this is an honesty I haven't mastered. I relished filet mignon on the night my husband and I got engaged, chicken is the cornerstone of my diet, and I firmly believe that bacon should be classified as an antidepressant, but there was something about that shower of delicate, white feathers blowing away from me, some catching in the grass and the barbed wire, that held me still for a moment, half scared, half sad, and for the first time, fully connected to what it means to kill and eat something.

I'll save you any suspense-- I immediately fell back into my dissembling ways and had a huge turkey sandwich yesterday, but the limits of honesty are on my mind. Just how much am I willing to gloss over in order to maintain my own comfort? The gas devoted to my heinous daily commute certainly comes with a price far greater than what shows at the tank. And as a military wife, I am constantly juggling the shifting, and sometimes conflicting, realities of what I believe, whom I support, and how I show my support. Sometimes though, it's all I can do to hold together all these scattered alliances and keep them from blowing away from me and losing all meaning.

Cotton and Crank

Cotton season has just ended and there's at least an inch of false snow tangled in the broken, desiccated stalks of now bare fields and gathered in drifts along the road's edge. It looks like there's been some kind of stuffed animal massacre, the Antietam of the plush toy world. The visual miscues are unsettling-- snow-like patches on the ground, the wintry haze and diffused light of dust storms (once the fields are cleared, the earth loses its mooring and takes off in big swirling clouds for more exciting places), and the uncertain horizons warbling in the silvery heat of mirage. Going on vision alone, it looks like December, but in reality it's just that the world is so hot everyone's given up tending it.

My geraniums are dead. This is just as well-- in life they looked fake, and in death they've taken on a much more believable and interesting shape. Now they look like the dirt-caked fingers of monkeys reaching out of the pot at nothing. The caladiums are going too, and have moved from thick, white heart shapes veined with green to collapsed, yellowed lace. I'm taking a special pleasure in watching the zinnias meet their apocalyptic end, since they were so aggressive and overbearing in their prime. Plus, I always thought their blossoms looked like the fake flowers on some moth-eaten old lady hat.

I watched a documentary on crank last night, which was interesting, but probably for all the wrong reasons. I have this fascination with documentaries that, whether on purpose or by accident, end up capturing someone else's absolute dog days, and then try to make some sense out of them, scrape together some salvageable truth to justify having filmed the whole thing. The wreckage on the screen was compelling in its simple portrayal of human misery and grief, but the truths I got out of it were uncomfortable: this too is rural America, not just my fields and skies and birds and trains. The other disturbing thing was how simple rock bottom can look-- a woman in her kitchen, the kettle on the stove, the embroidered potholders hanging on hooks, the free calendar from the insurance company tacked next to the fridge, and her husband filling a syringe with bubbly liquid the exact same sunny color as the paint on the walls, and then gently pulling her arm to him and flicking the reddish bruise hidden in the crook of her elbow. They're both crying. This is the Worst.

When I was a little kid, my parents used to shop at the first Whole Foods, which was in a small storefront on Lamar Boulevard in Austin. It opened in 1980 and a year later, there was a huge flood, the Memorial Day Flood of 1981, where all the creeks rose from their beds and came downtown to wash away cars, furniture, trash, people, and all the pianos from Strait Music, two of which were never found. On the north corner of the building, near the bicycle racks, an artist later painted two different high water marks, lovely little white-capped waves with scrolly dates. I remember standing next to them as a kid (one was higher than my head), and imagining water all around me and Austin floating by like too many toys at bath time. I was enchanted. (I was also, of course, thinking of the clear blue ocean water of childhood fantasy, not the fetid soup of actual floods).

It would be nice if there was a way to mark life's worst points with pretty painted watermarks, and hope that after the flood recedes (assuming it does and you don't have to go with it) this public monument would give some meaning to your loss. As a nation, we're fumbling with that-- there's still no 9/11 monument, despite all the elegant concept drawings. We can't seem to get a handle on how to represent it-- two giant beams of light? a reflection pool? a remembrance wall? a tree for each person? Or some silly movie (with Nicholas Cage of all people) trimming and wedging the whole mess into an easy cinematic formula with a touching Coldplay song in the background?

I don't think there's a clean answer, a neat way to tie up our low points for future remembering. When it happens, it's mostly a mess, and I say this from personal experience, having tried repeatedly to write an accurate and readable account of my own personal dog days. The past, I've found, is slippery. It means different things on different days, and there's no such thing as a complete inventory of the things you've lost or gained from living it. I've tried, many times, to make such an inventory, as if my life were one big cargo ship and I'm in charge of documenting the manifest for the safety and stability of the whole ship. But containers don't stay put; boxes don't stay packed. Life, for me at least, has a way of rocking the same types of things loose to rattle around in the hold and bash into other things, until I trudge down there and lash it all down again.

Custom markings

One block south of the town square, there is a small shop over which a faded yellow plastic sign hangs that reads, simply, "Shoe Repair." Inside, a man named Felipe Mejia makes incredible, handmade custom cowboy boots for people all over the state. His counters are stacked with photo albums containing pictures of his finished works-- boots with elaborate threaded scrollwork and punched-out leather designs of ranch brands, prickly pears, broncos, guitars, angels, hawks, roses, barbed wire, lightning bolts, skulls, crosses, hearts, longhorns, and volumes of initials. His boots are short, tall, pointy-toed, square-toed, rounded, high-heeled, flat-heeled, medium-heeled, and made from all types of leather in a rainbow of colors, all stacked in giant fragrant rolls in an unruly heap behind the counter.

This weekend was my husband's second visit to the store and my first. He and Mr. Mejia were striking up a deal on the pair of custom boots my husband has long dreamed of-- boots that will accommodate his "duck feet," which are broad in the front and almost dainty in the heel, and will also somehow solidify my husband's identity as a non-native, but enthusiastic, Texan. They converse easily and quickly in Spanish despite my husband's bashful request for patience as he "practices," and I flip through albums trying not to appear strained as I concentrate on understanding.

Like many things in this town, the boot shop is old. A yellowed notice on the wall announces the October 1985 tax rate change, and much of the ceiling is patched with crumbling cardboard to catch the leaks. Mr. Mejia has been working out of this shop for 25 years, and making boots since he was 9 years old. He's easily in his late sixties now, if not older. Flipping through volumes of lovingly made boots, it's easy for me to see that this man is an artist and a craftsman, an original, and when he's gone, there will likely be no one to replace him.

The inevitability of decline in this town, its slow and constant decay, is no longer novel and poetic to me-- if anything it's grown irritating and tends to make me feel even more isolated. The long list of what's not available here, from organic hippie macaroni and Asian pears to bookstores and Argetinian wine, grows longer by the day, and less funny. But in things like the boot shop, things that are unique to this part of the country and saturated with its history of struggle, migration, and its ties to the cycles of nature, the process of loss and decay seems much sadder. Something will really be missing when we lose this.

My husband has decided on chocolate brown leather, calfskin for its softness instead of the wrinkled, weathered look of bullskin. He's chosen a personalized logo, a symbol of his occupation that he's proud of, and has found the perfect color of leather and stitching for it. Mr. Mejia traced and measured both of his feet onto a long white sheet of paper, six different measurements per foot, and scribbled notes to himself in Spanish in the margins. He's even adding a special tuck in the leather of one heel to accommodate the massive callous my husband has from years of ill-fitting footwear.

Well satisfied, they both turn to me with the question I've been dreading: what type of boots would I like?

I'm stuck here. For all the reasons of beautiful craftsmanship and one-of-a-kindness, I'd like a pair. Plus, we've agreed that moving around so much brings with it the pleasant responsibility of finding one nice thing per posting that really reflects that place, and to invest in it as a way of keeping track of each place and honoring the time we spent there. Boots definitely fit that definition.

My problem is this: being from Austin, I've never quite felt comfortable in flexing my Texan-ness among other Texans. Out of state is another story-- in Florida I caught my accent thickening when I was totally clueless and needed help with something, the implicit message being, "Cut me some slack-- I'm not from around here." Out of sheer homesickness, I even bought a shirt online that says, "Fuck Y'all, I'm from Texas," and wore it to dive bars and drunken Marine parties.

But every time I go back home, the message is clearer-- Austin is different from most of Texas. With every anti-Bush bumpersticker, every cross-dressing hobo, and every vegan diner I pass, I realize that what used to look like normal old city to me is in fact consciously, and even aggressively weird compared to much of the rest of the state. So for me to don something as Texan as cowboy boots is cause for more than a moment's cognitive dissonance-- am I allowed to do this? Does this look pitifully wrong on me?

Added to this is the pressure of personalization. What image symbolizes Me? I've wrestled with this one for years, even back in the comforting bizarro world of Austin, because there everyone has at least one visible tattoo. The utterly blank canvas of my skin has nothing to do with chasteness or notions of future employability-- it simply reflects profound indecision and the inability to identify something important enough to want it carved into my flesh with a vibrating needle. And this is not for lack of looking-- I'd guess that I've weighed ideas for a tattoo at least five times a week since I was 16. It's just that nothing has tipped the scales.

I've even designed tattoos for other people and sat in during the disturbing moments when my drawings were permanently etched into someone else's hide. But when it comes to me? To my translucent Irish skin? Suddenly up comes the image of local police on the evening news, having to identify my lifeless body by a silly tattoo; or of me trying to blend seamlessly into Latin America after having committed some terrible crime and being given away by my tattoo; or being captured by hostile terrorists, stripped naked, and trying to pretend I'm not American, only to be betrayed by a tattoo; and, perhaps the most improbable scenario, me on the red carpet of some gala event, dressed in Prada and bearing a tattoo that long ago lost all its significance to me but remains trapped under my skin until I can pony up the money for lasers.

Why does all of this come up when I'm considering whether or not to get a pair of custom cowboy boots? Because they're expensive, and I know someone will work hard on them. Because this man, who will not be around forever, will spend four months on them, leaving his personal mark on them, for me, and I'd like to think that if he's going to do that, I could do him the courtesy of choosing a design that has some meaning for me.

And why is it so hard to choose something? I know pretty much who I am and what I like in this world, and I like to think that in some ways I'm unique. Perhaps the problem is the editor in me, the overthinker with the big red pen who loves to cross out huge sections of my past with the margin notes, "overwrought," and "muddled-- needs direction." The editor in me always holds back, reminding me that "there's a better way to say that," or "this particular issue will get clearer with some perspective-- best to wait a while and see what develops." Especially now, when I know there are things about myself I'd like to change, and when every eight months forces huge change anyway, committing to any kind of identifying marker, even if it is a special treat, is difficult and anxiety-producing.

What I'd like to know, from anyone who's gotten a tattoo, from "traditional" and "non-traditional" Texans, from anyone who's ever struggled with identity or wondered what the hell they're doing in life, is how do you know when you've hit that sweet spot of finding something purely "you"? And how do you hold on to it?

The A Hole is Now Open

One of my favorite things to do on road trips is photograph ridiculous signage. The hobby has evolved into an elaborate ritual where I pack along a small notebook for writing down names and locations, and, of course, the camera, so that I can shatter virtually any quiet moment with the shout, "Holy shit, pull over!"

Podunk hair and nail salons are usually my bread and butter, since there's an unwritten law that they must derive their names from the most ham-handed puns the gals could cook up after a night of too many cosmopolitans-- "Cuttin' Up" is a popular choice, but I've also stumbled across such gems as "Continental Hairlines," "The Hairport," and "The Mane Event."

The above picture is of an establishment not far from my current hometown, and the only thing I've done to it is remove the phone number beneath the name. Yup, "A Hole" is the honest-to-God name they've filled in on their bank loans and business cards. And just in case you thought maybe these folks were just shooting for that first listing in the phonebook, and that's what the "A" means, they made sure to clarify their real intent by graphically enhancing the "O."

(Incidentally, I nearly clotheslined a cyclist when I leapt from my car in my frenzy to secure proof that someone would name a business after a schoolyard taunt. Sorry, dude.)

Another hobby is going to the annual Art Car Show in Austin, where people openly scorn bluebook values in a quest to turn their vehicles into mobile collage pieces using everything from plastic dinosaurs and Barbie doll heads to welded silverware and shag carpeting. I'm completely in love with the idea of an art car, both for its reckless abandon with found objects and adhesives and for its utter inconvenience on days when the owner is violently ill and just wants to duck into the pharmacy for some Immodium and Advil-- anonymity is impossible when your car is covered in chess pieces and spouts bubbles from the tailpipe.

 

Art Car Shows in Austin have a very pronounced atmosphere of weirdness-- the whole thing takes place on 6th Street with people reeling in and out of the bars to gawk at each car, and usually at least one leathery biker mama shows up in buttless chaps. But coming across an art car nestled in between the minivans and the BMWs in the parking lot of a Houston Linens N' Things is like stumbling across the giant pink vibrator in your grandmother's stocking drawer-- it's a little shocking.

But I maintain that it's a special person who is willing to spend the time, energy, and money turning their jeep into a tiger. I can't imagine the sleepless nights given over to creative musings, doubts, frustrations-- should the headlights be more catlike? Are the glow-in-the-dark tiger heads mounted on either side of the front grill overkill, or the perfect touch? But the true mark of a car artist is the ability to find that one little detail (or two, as the case may be) that really pushes the envelope:

  

Brilliant.

A Plague of Butterflies

*Image courtesy of the New York Times, "In Texas, Conditions Lead to a Rabble of Butterflies" Thursday, July 27, 2006.

I've always thought of butterflies as the hearts with which God dots his i's-- sweet little affectations of the insect world that offset things like the dung beetle and giant bat-eating centipedes. Of course, I've also never witnessed a butterfly migration.

The fetchingly named American Snout is migrating through our town right now. At first there was just a light sprinkling of them, maybe ten in the space of a city block, but now they're coming quite literally by the thousands, in thick, low-rolling clouds.

There's something distinctly unsettling about walking around outside with what feels like a million dead leaves whirling chaotically around you at waist height, in silence, and with no breeze. Driving is even worse-- my windshield is covered in shimmery butterfly gore, and the grill of my radiator is a ghastly congestion of cooked and impaled butterfly bodies. In parking lots around town I've watched grackles wait for the grills of pick-ups to cool so they could perch on the front license plate and peck out a hearty butterfly meal.

Intellectually, I know this is a natural process-- there has been a population explosion of the American Snout down in Latin America somewhere, and now galaxies of them are headed north, as they do every year. There will be a culling of the herd, perhaps half or more, lost to 18-wheelers and predatory birds. But having never before been in the thick of any kind of significant, natural migration, (living in cities tends to preclude that) I feel kind of startled and unnerved finally witnessing one. It's like watching God on a drunken spending spree-- surely he can't afford this kind of promiscuous profusion.

Put another way, it's easy to imagine blinding excess on the part of human populations (we invented the glitzy civilian Hummer and triple E breast implants, after all), but unsettling to see it in nature, even if the numbers do eventually even out.