Mixed Blessings

Oklahoma City, OK to Amarillo, TX

HOOONK! HOOONK! HOOONK!

Whoa, what the fuck?!? Where am I? Oouuuuch, my back! My knees. MY NECK. I’m ice cold and sweating like a Sumo wrestler in a Swedish sauna. I crack open my eyes—it feels like I’m inside a kaleidoscope.

Oh that’s right, I’d pulled off the road to sleep the night before. At 6:00AM or so I woke up to the sound of angry truckers on the turnpike to find that all the sweat and breath my body kicked off overnight had fogged my windows so completely as to produce the kind of privacy my sleeping bag could not top. The fog prismed the parking lot sodium arc lamps and made each drizzle dot into a miniature rainbow. I don’t suspect I’ll be sleeping under the stars in this Wal-Mart special sleeping bag like I’d envisioned, by the way: these isolated roadside rest stops seem just stabby enough not to have that cowboy romance I was hoping for.

Pulling my mind into consciousness I slowly pulled my body out of the car. Old Mustangs are surprisingly big for being small muscle-era cars. They are not, however, recreational vehicles. They do not sleep one medium-size adult comfortably much less a family of four. At 6’3” I’ve got a little excess human material to stretch out on the back seat like it was a chaise lounge. I had cleared out the back seat (more effort than it was worth…I’m carrying enough shit for an expedition to the arctic on one of the most traveled roadways in the nation) to nap a bit and wound up with a center hump grinding into my side all night. Fortunately the McDonalds was open so I went inside to caffeinate. I’m a little disappointed at how much coffee I’ve taken in on the trip since I quit drinking coffee this summer for the first time since high school more than anything to sleep better at night…hey, maybe that’s why I’m only getting four or five hours per night. At any rate a cup of coffee rents a little time on the wifi network in some places. Motels feel like a waste if I don’t get a full night sleep. If a bug-infested room goes for $30 while a shower goes for $5 and I’m only getting a few hours of lousy restless sleep anyway then maybe I need to get used to the center hump grinding into my side. Or buy a pillow. If I’m going to save a few bucks here and there, that is.

I go to the bathroom, wash up, warm my belly with coffee and hit the road thinking about my own discomfort compared to people that live out of their car—or worse. Poor people, runaways, hell Irish farmers in the 17th century. Consider just how remarkable the human capacity to adjust, to thrive in or merely tolerate, an unlimited range of life styles and living conditions. City folk don’t live nothing like country folk. The idea of driving 30 miles to town for “provisions” contrasts starkly with the convenience of picking up a little nosh at the corner deli. The difference doesn’t suggest to me a qualitative or value judgment—one is no better than the other—just that different styles suit different preferences, different tastes. “Horses for courses,” my former boss used to say, meaning that some horses do better on muddy tracks so you run a mudder; some take to dusty tracks or grass or whatever. Each horse performs better in the environment that suits it. Now think about the extremes: visiting the South African Soweto I was stunned by the poverty. Shanty towns by the side of the road. Visiting Bentonville, AK I was amazed at how much shanty town territory exists in our own country. I also recall vividly my first trip to Japan, where downtown Osaka with its neon lights and outdoor noodle kiosks and Harajuku wannabees installed a distinct “Bladerunner” image of the entire country in my mind. Everything was so different, differences so heightened, everything alien and unfamiliar.

Stark contrast to what I’m used to. Funny the tendency to compare, to place myself in the setting and imagine what that life is like…only to blurt, “I can’t imagine what that would be like!” disclosing just how limited my imagination must be. Because if I try hard enough I can indeed imagine what it might be like. Not in detail but the broad strokes. In my more accurate moments I might choose to blurt, “This would not make me happy.”

The next few times in Japan I started to adapt and noticed patterns. Mieko (my ex-wife) and I usually went over the New Year season and stayed for a few weeks. The New Years festivals are huge blow outs where everyone goes to the shrine (and I mean *everyone*, these are huge events where you swim through tides of bodies…the whole nation seems to be in one Shinto temple). The first time I see the sideshows and games and novelty market it feels like an irreverent carnival. How sacrilegious! But that’s the point—New Years is not a religious celebration and the Shinto shrines are not Catholic churches (with their bowling alleys and potluck bingo underneath); they are social meeting places. Just like downtown Osaka. Painted in neon and sporting an aggressively modern postwar institutional style, downtown is just like Main Street. It’s a place for people to get together and socialize. Smalltalk and bullshit stories about life’s little dramas, played out on faster scale in silly makeup and knee socks and wild hairdos. But very much the same.

Contrast gives way to adjustment. Hard for me to imagine living in Osaka (or rather “Osaka would not make me happy”), but after the initial contrast I’d learn to adjust. Hard for me to imagine living in the Soweto, but after the initial contrast I’d learn to adjust. Hard for me to imagine living in Bentonville, but after enough potato moonshine I wouldn’t care enough to have to adjust.

Around 6:30AM I pull off the turnpike into Oklahoma City. Not sure what I expected to find but seeing the capital in the distance, approaching quietly it’s almost like a funeral procession. Quiet and still. Well, it’s early and I don’t think the legislature is in session. It flashes through my mind that I’ve been in a capital in every state I’ve passed through, but that’s not right. First of all I’ve long since forgotten my capitals so Chicago could be the capital of Illinois. Give me a few minutes on Wikipedia and it will be. Anyway I hit Saint Paul, MN; Madison, WI; Springfield, IL; now Oklahoma City, OK. I bypassed Jefferson City, MO by about 40 miles and God knows what Kansas’ capital is. Who cares anyway, this is a rebel road trip not Sister Beverly’s civics class. I catch a glimpse of the capital just before sunrise and it’s absolutely gorgeous. Monumental. Recalling the bombing a decade ago I’m left respecting the resilience of the city, of any community that suffers a tragedy, to clean up and continue. To get just the picture I have in mind I navigate the car around the front of the capital mall and get her lined up…just as my lovely old digital camera battery died. Disappointed, I note to myself that I can cherish the memory and get back on the Route in search of a drugstore to get a disposable camera for the next time the perfect shot is impaired by a power failure.

While I don’t feel the need to capture everything I see, a few defining shots would be nice. Even if I don’t inflict them on unsuspecting guests like Uncle Albert’s vacation slides they jog my own memory and help my writing. I note to myself that if picture is worth a thousand words maybe by adding a few photos I can spare you, my undeterred reader, and myself a few hundred adjectives and you’ll only have to untangle two or three lines of awkward wordplay. That’s before I remember I’m barely relating actual events—You’ve being subject mostly to digression and meditation and trip notes as they would appear in my journal. For that I ain’t got a picture to post of inside my head.

Driving away as day breaks I notice a huge new capital-adjacent building that looks like a new museum and it flashes through my mind, “Now how the hell can these Fanokies afford that?!?” which gets me thinking the building seems out of place and that I’ve never thought of Oklahoma City as culturally cosmopolitan. Yet in all fairness that speaks more about my own expectation of the place than it does about Oklahoma City itself. I’m left puzzling about how to incorporate this disconfirming piece of evidence into my understanding of Oklahoma City. If you’ve ever experienced something like this you know the feeling: I thought I had this place or person or situation all figured out (it’s good or it’s bad, I like it or I hate it, whatever) and some subtlety, some new wrinkle disrupts that satisfying state of mental bucketing. Suddenly you’re forced to reconsider…well, not forced since you could always just let it go. In this case bothers me that it caught my attention and got me thinking about my biases and preconceptions. I like to think of myself as the kind of guy who doesn’t have preconceptions, which of course I do. Everyone does. Welcome to the species. Nevertheless in contrast to hip Chicago or New York it seems Oklahoma City has no business having a shiny new museum near its capital.

I start to wonder if paying attention to contrast (making comparisons, noticing the differences) has some kind of survival benefit. Think about it: if we socialize and mate based on the preservation of the species—and on a macro scale we do, regardless of our personal choice of friends and acquaintances—then not being able to detect differences of color, body symmetry, vocal patterns, and so forth would make it hard to form unified and lasting social groups. Clans would not weed out disease (again nothing personal but in the primitive landscape of human development, the strong survive) and insider/outsider distinctions, such as those between competing clans, might not be made. Not that I’m promoting the “good or bad” of this particular focus on our differences; only recognizing the “is” of it, just that it exists. It might be that detecting superficial differences had the survival benefit of indicating internal (genetic or otherwise) divergence from the norm, so to some measure maintaining the population involved detecting and shunning deviance.

Social maintenance (cultural, genetic, or otherwise) as ongoing recognition and repudiation of deviance. Sounds vaguely like what we mean when we describe someone as judgmental.
Note that deviance is also the basis of evolutionary change (or improvement if you happen to approve of the change). I mean if they were still making the same car as Cherry today we’d be without airbags and crumple zones and we’d be consistently getting…let me check…13 MPG highway from passenger cars. So recognizing and repudiating deviance maintains some kind of order. Might it be that recognizing and embracing deviance promotes a development to a new kind of order?

With a fresh disposable camera (actually the reloadable kind you can find at most grocery stores) and a full tank of gas I hit the road. The idea of what makes a place a good place, what makes a city a successful city, sticks with me. But I’m too busy dodging left-lane swerving goddamn Okies to give it much attention. If roadside Burma-Shave signs, billboards, and giant statues don’t capture your interest these fuckers are bound to grab your attention as they make obstacles of themselves with their unpredictable erratic no-signaling road cocksuckery. I’m white-knuckled and jaw clenched as Oklahoma City rush hour starts.

Around 9:00AM I find a Love’s Travel Plaza about a hundred miles out of town and get myself a proper shower. God, it feels amazing to take a long hot shower after sleeping in the car! Stark contrast to the grimy and sweaty feeling sleeping in your clothes gives you. I caught a whiff of myself before getting washed up and I sure needed it.

10:00AM: Trucks in the left lane are bad enough. Dirty nasty off-road trailers kicking up rocks and debris deserve to be run off the road. There, I’ve voiced my opinion…that’ll show ‘em!

On previous trips I think I had a habit of personalizing the differences I noticed. “I can’t believe they live like that! I could never live with ABC and without XYZ.” This of course speaks more about my exposure to differences and my ability to adapt mentally—to imagine lifestyles other than the one I currently live. I mean, that I would not prefer to live a particular way says what about the people who do? That they’re good or bad or…just different? On this trip, by contrast, I have no personal investment in what I see. I’m curious about how people live in Bourbon, MO; I’m not threatened by the difference. I’m interested in the values they might have in, say, Texola, TX; I’m not interested in “fixing” their values, or judging them, or being particularly shocked when I learn that they thump the bible for exercise. Free 72oz Steak in Amarillo, TX…if eaten in one hour. That gets my attention…though not in such a good way.

Around 11:00AM I pull in front of Lucille’s Roadhouse, a landmark in Hydro, OK run by Bill at the Grill, a restaurateur whose been in the business since 1978 and has driven the same Chevy Chevelle SS since 1970—not counting the years from 1980 to 1990 when he sold it to his best friend (yet it stayed under his watchful eye) until he decided to buy it back. Very very nicely customized rod that makes about four miles to the gallon, every drop being performance. Maybe someday he’ll take it to England and sell it for retirement money. Until then he’ll tool to and from work instead of take a pickup like everyone else in town. Bill and I talk a while about cars and Lucille’s (which is a restaurant based on an older building a few miles up the route that I backtrack and visit; it’s an old gas station and convenience store with Lucille and family buried across the road) and Bill’s history running restaurants staffed with cute friendly blond girls. He directs me to Palo Dura Canyon just across the border to the A&M where cute friendly coeds keep themselves busy with athletics and prayer.

Bill makes the insightful remark that American nostalgia is locked in between 1965 to 1975. That’s about when the current generation of soon-to-be retirees was coming of age in their late teens and sits smack in the middle of the Summer of Love. The Beatles crystallized pop music; muscle cars set the bar for automotive styling; television dominated radio and found its edge, and so on. His throwaway observation got me thinking about my own funny nostalgia for the cocktail hip bachelor pad scene. Funny in the sense that it’s not nostalgia for an earlier period in my life but rather for a time from before I was even born. Who feels nostalgia for their parent’s youth?!? Maybe it’s impressions from the recorded history of my youth (the wisdom contained in 30 volumes of Colliers’ Encyclopedias); maybe it’s cynical hipster kitsch. Maybe it’s a combination of both. Well whatever the rest of the country feels I have a real spot in my heart for ‘60s American cool. Probably it’s less to do with nostalgia and more to do with persistent classics of music and culture and design. My 80 MPH survey of the route suggests I’m not alone in my appreciation of certain things past.

On the way to Amarillo I catch a segment of a National Public Radio spot that talks about the relative nature of deviance (how appropriate). A photojournalist was describing a piece he did on gun culture and explained that in some communities you’d be strange if you walk down the street sporting an arm full of tattoos and a pierced eyebrow; in the New York borough in which he lives the strange one is he who has an elk head on his wall and a cabinet full of rifles. The pierced and inked people comprise the self-selected norm. Deviance being relative is what it is—difference from the norm. In China asserting one’s right to free speech is still highly deviant. In the US it’s one’s civic responsibility (any cynical Bush-administration commentary aside). This country was constructed on the premise that a natural state of tension exist between normalized and deviant ideas as embodied in free speech. The insight of the founding fathers was the Hegelian recognition that thesis combines with antithesis based on interests. And what are interests but values, passions, emotional investments of energy? And who is to sort out which interests are best? It turns out our system lets us volley back and forth over issues of “the best way” through laws and the courts to each of our rugged individualistic hearts’ content.

Provided we can afford it.

On the way to Texas I pull into the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum in Clinton, OK in an unassuming strip of buildings that showcases a walk-through with all variety of memorabilia and trinkets and period scenes. The lovely cashier is good enough to show me what buttons to push to get the scenes to talk to you. Something odd about seeing depictions of places and events you’ve been first-hand witness to commemorated in a ceremonial manner. I’d just been to Lucille’s that morning and passed by that white Kansas bridge yesterday. Wouldn’t you know it? The museum featured photos and paintings of both. It’s like seeing yourself in a family portrait: sure we look good, but that’s not the real us. Depictions can iconize and elevate even the most mundane things. Even the snide irony of boring work routines can be elevated when depicted with editorial amusement on “The Office.”

Not far from the Oklahoma Route 66 Museum lives the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, OK. I got the sneaking suspicion they bare-knuckle box to decide who gets the latest motel demo pickings. Like the Oklahoma museum, the National museum walks you through the entire route and adds a short film about the history of mechanical travel in America. As I spent the afternoon admiring mans ability to move man from place to place I was appreciative of shared interest the dozen or so other tourists I ran into (a couple from Minnesota bound for home; a fellow from Arizona bound for South Carolina; a group of Danish travelers led by Leif following the route along with me; and an Arkansas couple just RV-ing to wherever their fancy takes them). I find traveling alone to be boring if I don’t socialize and don’t have a way to pass the time. Flying for work without a work backlog is a perfect example of the “please just shoot me” boredom travel can induce, but on this instance I was pleased not to have someone to entertain and to go without interpersonal drama. I’m saving that for when I pull into a new town. Or when get home.

Passing through Texola I catch the tail end of a radio show on the dial directing the listener to and reminding listeners that homosexuality is a choice. I feel the Bible belt cinching tightly around my neck. We have to remember that being tolerant includes tolerating other people’s intolerance. That is how it works…isn’t it?

Taking Bill up on his advice I make time to just outside Amarillo and take the bypass south to Canyon. I drive quite a bit farther than I expected around town, noticing that the freeway has turned to highway and traffic is getting heavier. I get to Canyon with the late afternoon sun making a chore of west-bound driving and find it deserted. The central square sports that “Back to the Future” feel complete with cobblestone pavers but everything seems closed. I drive by Texas A&M (for the trivia buffs, “A&M” used to mean “Agricultural and Mechanical” but is now strictly historic—or so they would have you believe) and poll a few students who tell me that for bars people drive into Amarillo (the town I just bypassed) or for a real good time head south to Lubbock. Well I’m into the idea of dinner or a drink and not into the idea of trolling the entire state to find it so I pull into Amarillo.

One of the things I relish about the route map I’m using is that it’s divided into segments of about 60 to 80 miles at a stretch. What’s nice about that is you don’t get the impending sense of doom about how much road is ahead of you that a map provides. So taking a side trip to Palo Duro Canyon doesn’t feel like a waste of time; it’s an exploration, a simple diversion. Perfect for me on this particular trip. Now if I were planning an efficient trip then unscheduled stops would be verboten. Note that were I truly planning an efficient trip I wouldn’t be driving a car whose continued existence is strictly contingent on her ability to get her driver laid. Instead I’d fly.

Downtown Amarillo is dead although I find out that there’s usually something doing down on Polk Street after dark. For kicks I walk into a pawn shop on a zigzag along 6th Avenue where the old route winds through the main town drag and am struck by the assortment: one wall sports guns and the opposite wall guitars; one wall sports TVs and the other truck parts. That’s it. That’s the economy of Amarillo in a nutshell.

The rumble pipes on the passing motorcycles set off my car alarm which is sensitive to things like sledgehammer blows and earthquakes so I can see why it the choppers scare her. Having captured the interest of everyone in the pawn shop I stroll over to the only clerk not busy pricing a truck part and ask what there is to do for fun in Amarillo. With neither eyes nor teeth that quite line up, he stares at me for a long three-count before saying, quite sincerely, “In Amarillo?” “Yeah,” I respond. “I’m passing through and I’m looking for what to do. Where do the A&M kids hang out, get a drink or a bite or whatever.”

{Side note: The deeper I go into the south the more a funny rural Minnesota twang surfaces to mirror a drawl. I don’t adopt an affected drawl so much but I am aware enough of my own speech patterns that I try not to call unnecessary attention to my outsider status. It helps to have a musical ear and not identify too strongly with my own way of talking. I’m frequently told, “You don’t sound like you’re from Minnesota!” to which I’m always tempted to reply, “You mean you saw Fargo and you thought that, like, the four Swedish chef characters accurately depicted all three million of us. Here buddy, let me explain to you what we mean by ‘black comedy’…”}

After another three count he starts, “Well, we got karaoke on Thursdays. And next month there’s a biker rally. There’s the 806 that just opened up and some people hang out there.”
“Along the old Route 66,” I confirm to make sure he’s not talking about Lubbock.
“Ayuh, just down thata way.” So I get in the car and keep moving, looking for a Starbucks or a Caribou until I can make the next town.

I pass a cool looking bohemian art venue coffee house and bakery that seems like a real hoot and advertises free wifi so I pull over, take the distributor cap wire out of the car (theft is a crime of opportunity after all) and head in. This is really very cool: a huge open space with pricey art on the walls, out front smoking cigarettes, Amarillo-goth chicks in the back library (seriously, a book library) smoking cigarettes, some cigarettes being smoked, you get the idea. I order a coffee and a few apples since the pastries don’t sound appealing and take a seat to get some typing done. Up and down a few times I get to talking with Jason who I assumed to be the store manager and turns out to be the owner. Just opened the place three weeks ago after ten months of delays. He and I start to compare notes about life in Amarillo and elsewhere (he spent time in Tampa and made his way back home).

After a frustrating round trying to get the wireless to work I give up and sort through some pictures. On my third refill I notice a inked billie-goateed local (assuming by the accent) standing by the counter and we’re talking with Jason about the place. “Yeah,” Jason says, “The police were in here about a week ago because they got a call about pornography and drugs. Some little old lady must have come in and look at the art, and I guess a nude abstract was so risqué it stopped her heart. She must have thrown in the bit about drugs for good measure.” We both laugh and introduce ourselves. I find out that Kyle is a hard-smoking, hard-living aspiring musician and devout Christian. We make our way back to my table and he gives me the skinny on Amarillo.

Amarillo Fun Facts
Best Selling Car: A truck
Best Selling Truck: A big-ass truck
Best Selling Religion: The one true religion of Jesus Christ and the only path to salvation—Baptist
Churches Per Capita: 7
Average Rifle Proficiency Age: 8
Notable Achievements: Teen Pregnancy Capitol of the U.S.
Favorite Pastime: Sin, cover it up, judge others for the same sin; Chapter & verse
Most Popular Destination for Smokers, Drinkers, Tattoo’d Thinkers: Straight to Hell do not pass GO

After a bit of conversation and a few cigarettes Kyle finds some myspace friends inside and we compare more notes about life inside the county.

Cast of Characters

Jason – The Entrepreneur
Kyle – The Musician
Brinn – The Homeschooled Smarty
Sarah – The Outcast Baptist
Heather – The Recent Transplant

me: So what’s there to do in Amarillo?
Kyle: Well, you can drive your pickup up and down the strip or take it mudding down by the flats.
Sarah: Or get drunk. If you’re old enough you can go to a bar. But age ain’t gonna stop anyone.
Brinn: Or have babies. This is the teen pregnancy capital of the world. {Laughter} No, it’s true, there are more teen pregnancies per capita than anywhere in the country.
Heather: And more churches per capita too.
Sarah: And they’ll kick you out at the drop of a hat. So they better not catch you drinking or smoking or having sex.
me: Really, you can’t drink or smoke? That’s odd because my uncle was a Catholic priest and he smoked cigars and drank wine like…well, like a Catholic priest.
Brinn: Yeah, but around here they say Jesus drank unfermented wine.
Kyle: The idea is your body is a temple {rolling up sleeves} so all this ink is gonna send me to hell!

{I think to myself there’s a world of difference between treating your own body as a temple in the spirit of self-discipline and prescribing “thou shall not” as disciplining others.}

Jason: But you all still go to church, right?
Sarah: We go to Moore church. But they’re different. They say Jesus hung around with whores and fisherman…
me: Ewww, fisherman.
Sarah: …the point is they were the poorest people. And he didn’t judge them. He just accepted them and tried to help whoever he could.
Kyle: Like if he were here today he’d be smoking cigarettes and sharing a beer with us. They tell us, “Love God, love your neighbor, do whatever the fuck you want.”
me: Well I mean Texas has a ferociously independent streak. You guys are the only state to reserve the right to secede if you want. If you…wait, when you…go ahead and do that you can do away with that two-term limit thing and put Bush in charge. {Everyone moans.}
Heather: Don’t even get me started! Nobody likes him here!
Brinn: He’s a total embarrassment. The war is a mess. He makes us all look bad.
Kyle: Texas is different. Everyone here has a pickup or a gun. I’m no exception, I drive a truck.
Brinn: I learned to shoot a rifle when I was 9.
me: Rifles kick! Bet you got thrown on your ass a few times.
Brinn: That’s how I learned. I was homeschooled until junior high. We did everything like that.
me: See you ain’t all that different, but in Minnesota for example we’d be horrified at the thought of you all selling pistols to six year olds at the 7-Eleven. Loaded. We have a waiting period and background checks…
Sarah: Not here! You go to a gun show and buy as many as you can carry!
Jason: See, we have some weird old west laws. Like dry counties. And if you go on someone’s property here they have the legal right to shoot you. Some holdover from claim jumper days.
Kyle: Yup, of course they have to be “intentionally committing a crime” like breaking in. So that’s pretty simple: shoot ‘em in the driveway and drag ‘em up to the window. Then they’re breaking in.
me: I guess. In Minnesota if we caught someone breaking in we’d want to give them hot chocolate and pay for their education and provide them with public housing.

{I’m reminded of McGregor’s Theory X that says a person is lazy and wholly responsible for all their lack of drive and faults; and Theory Y that says a person is motivated and the environment is wholly responsible their person’s drives and faults. Internal and external locus of control. Nature and nurture. Texas and Minnesota.}

Kyle: They’re real judgmental around here.
me: I’ve noticed. I listened to a lot of Christian radio here. It’s not whether you’re going to hell, it’s how fast.
Sarah: Yeah, and it’s because we have no choice. We don’t have the option to drink or smoke and try it out. It’s all restricted and at the slightest sin you’re condemned. They basically excommunicated me from my church when one of the ladies saw me smoking.
Brinn: And being homeschooled there were no alternatives. We didn’t look at other religions like, “Oh this is what they think.” Instead it was, “This is wrong so don’t look at it or you go to hell.”
Jason: It’s really restrictive. And it’s easy to think that’s how the world works because you grow up with it. Then you move to Tampa or somewhere and find out, there’s more than one way to live.

{As a reluctant Chicago free-market indoctrinee I find myself having a hard time imagining how satisfaction without freedom and with excessive restriction can come to exist except in virtue of the sheer ignorance of alternatives. Prohibitions limit variety, limit exposure, limit development, limit change. And that’s what they’re going for here—no change, no variety, just a continuation of the way things have always been. Based on the limited recall of the way things have always been, which of course has changed dramatically in just a few decades. Amarillo, Spanish for “Yellow” because it’s a dusty wasteland, was not one of the 12 tribes of Israel nor was it an outpost sanctioned by Christ himself; it’s a modest Texas town with a 120 year history. Hardly a legitimate claim on eternity to be lain.}

Kyle: But they hate that here. Like being gay, I used to hate anyone who was gay and now I figure, I don’t mind if you’re gay it’s just not my thing. Nothing personal but you’re no Heath Ledger.
Brinn: And I hate that! My dad is like that, always saying gays are not even people! I had a gay friend I was hanging out with and when he found out he was gay my dad said this guy was evil and trying to recruit me and poison me. MMMmm, I HATE it.
me: You can see how tense it makes you feel. I mean you hate the hate your dad put out there toward gay people. Can you imagine how he feels about them?
Brinn: Like a jackass.
Sarah: Yeah, her dad is kind of a jackass.
me: He might be. But when people hate other people I don’t think it’s always strictly rational. He probably feels just as worked up and tense about having gay people, you know, exist at all. Look we’re guys, we’re not very emotionally bright. When we encounter something we basically have two choices: fuck or kill it. {Laughter} Now if I’m your dad and I feel some guy is looking at me as something to fuck, that could make me really tense.
Heather: But who would do that? Who would want to have sex with her dad?
Jason: Exactly. That’s the bullshit they add about being gay, that they also WILL be anal-raped by these pervert homos because, in their minds, it’s POSSIBLE.
Brinn: I know. It just makes me so mad!

These kids…no, these smart young adults are in tune with some pretty big social problems that are shaping GenX and Millennials. We don’t have a World War II, a Korean War, a Viet Nam; we aren’t married with two kids (who will define our lives) at 21; we’re more educated, we’re more exposed to variety than at any time in history. A 1974 Collier’s Encyclopedia will bring a snapshot of the world to your door if you’re willing to fight through its pages; the Internet knocks your door down, forcefeeds you RSS streams of hyperliterate protest songs and plants YouTube images of man’s inhumanity to other men in your soul before scrawling a h4xx0r 1337 “plzkthx” in broken typewriter font across your myspace account. You can see and do and be anything with a suitable avatar. We have more disposable income than our parents, on average. The focus is shifting. Fewer of us are asking: how do we struggle to survive and keep our family alive? More of us are asking: what should we do to fill the void once filled by no-option duty and a sense of responsibility? The question is increasingly what should we do, less what should we prevent others from doing?

What should we disallow? If you have the chutzpah to disallow consenting adults from doing whatever their little hearts desire, more power to you. Plug the dyke with your finger and hope for the best. If you feel the urge to be socially accepted by a group that finds your behavior socially unacceptable, more power to you. City hall might fight you back. Rejection and acceptance might just tussle it out. Just for fun.

As the night wears on and the wine comes out the conversation turns to lighter fare (Kyle insightfully notes, “Well, you ain’t supposed to talk about sex, politics, or religion. And we pretty much buried those topics. What’s left…quilting?”). I’m left with a great feeling about The 806. I think Jason has done a service to his community and tell him as much. He bashes at the compliment and we talk a bit more as he closes shop, and as we go our separate ways into the night I tell him that I’ll be back if I pass through Amarillo again.

The problem of exercising control over others has bothered me for some time. Whether through laws or moral proscriptions or religious indoctrination (particularly fire-and-brimstone Evangelical judgmentalism) it seemed a matter of exercising the greater will in some grand Nietzschean cataclysm. After this conversation I have a different thought: what if control is a non intentional, judgment-free, almost mechanical consequence to an action where the actor (knowingly or not) accepts the consequences for their behavior. Complete responsibility. What if the secret to playing the life game is overcoming the fear and terror associated with wickedly fickle and ambiguous rules like “thou shall not drink” and “thou shall not wanna get it on with your married hottie neighbor” and “thou shall not think or do bad things, bad being whatever I judge that I don't much like.”

Ostracism can take a severe social and emotional toll. Being cast out of a group one identifies with can leave us suffering and needing, begging for the acceptance and forgiveness of members of the group. Yet if you find within yourself the capacity to simultaneously accept and ignore the judgments of others you can transcend criticism as punishment. Find within yourself the capacity to be unconditionally loving and yet ferociously independent. If you can find it within you to love other people for their concern and disregard their slings and arrows…well, you’ve found within yourself an amazing little corner of the human heart that many of us will leave forever unexplored. I mean if the congregation I were in chose to hate me to the exclusion of love and accept me because I developed a nicotine addiction in a moment of weakness and boredom and peer pressure, I’d be tempted to tell them, “God bless your vicious holier-than-thou selves, now kiss my ass,” then trade up for a more suitable church. And if that same congregation saw fit to burn me at the stake for being a witch, as long as they’re willing to suffer the wrath of Texas justice I figure: bring it. Not sure what might happen, but somehow I get a feeling they’d find themselves in the fastlane to the mercy seat.

I make it to the edge of town before I call it a night. I want to catch a glimpse of the Cadillac Ranch in the morning.

Next stop: Honey Mustard or Cadillac Ranch?