Category: Orphans

This morning I walked across the street to get my morning coffee for 17 cents but it ended up costing 64 cents. The reason was the clerk was on the phone and I decided not to bother her and tell her I had brought my own cup which would have normally cost $0.17 (US). I had the money though and I like the lady working there and so I just paid the full price. My generosity aside, I looked up at the sign near the counter and saw prices for packs of Marlboro and Camels, or whatever, it wasn’t like the really cheap cigarettes. Nevertheless, the highest price for the smokes were $4.25 a pack. I am just grateful each time I see those signs and the month of October rolls around that in October 2000, I quit smoking, as far as I know, for good.

Although I have had some edgy times over the past two years, I have only had millisecond flashes of wanting to smoke a cigarette and in my dreams I have always resisted them. After smoking for about 27 years, I think that is cig-nificant. Okay, just shoot me for that one.

Hidee Ho! It’s Friday and it seems really strange working a 40 hour week. But that is what I am doing this week on my part-time job. I would like to say I have nothing profound to say, but that would be a lie since I am a walking-talking-shaking nuclear time bomb of profundity. Sez who? Nonetheless, I must finish up with work matters, grab my tin helmet, lunch pail and Thermos then head for home where I know the Mrs. will have me a great, home-cooked meal awaiting but not before she has brought me a couple of my favorite cocktails. If you know me, you know all of the above (except for working 40 hours) is total bulls**t. So who says I can’t have a little fun once in awhile?

Da ta, or data. Have a nice weekend. And if you are a federal employee like me, albeit I am part-time, enjoy your 3-day Columbus Day weekend.

… out of chicken s**t.

My palsy, no matter how slight, doesn’t gel well taking a quick snapshot with my little digital camera. So, part of the photo is blur effect with InfanView but most is my horrible original. Nonetheless, it perhaps gives a view of what the girl saw — if she saw anything — when the paramedics took her to the hospital.

First of all, yes, I’m still living in the damn motel. But at least it isn’t always dull here.

Opinions vary as to how the girl got here and why. But the reason she was carted away appeared to be some kind of OD, or “That would be my guess,” said a paramedic as he was about to take the girl away.

When I first saw her on the stretcher I thought she was one of the little niños who run around the driveway at all hours of the night. I keep worrying some ano estúpido will come barreling around the driveway and hit one of them.

But this was, according to witnesses, a 16-year-old girl. A guy, 30ish or 40ish maybe, in a pickup truck said he picked her up across the street at the store where he, allegedly, said he found out that she lived here at the motel. My neighbors said the girl was “out of it” and one of my Homes told me he called the police because she appeared to be barely breathing. Whether the story of the guy who picked her up actually picked her up at the store across the street and drove her here while she traveled into some sort of semi-to-un-conscious state, remains to be seen. One has to think of human behavior and how someone acts in such a situation. That, and the fact that people both young and old are out on the streets in various parts of this area doing whatever and whomever if you get my drift, and you have reasonable doubt.

But I have little doubt she will be out of the hospital, probably by about sun-up, feeling like she got into a rumble with a sack of s**t and the sack busted.

Live and learn. That is, provided you live at all.

Perhaps the greatest act of the Texas Legislature in recent yearss was the walkout in 2003 of House Democrats who fled to Oklahoma to stop a quorum and Republican-favored redistricting. It was only too bad the Republicans only tried to track down the Dems and did not follow them across the state line. Oklahomans — instead of Texans — could have then had the worst legislature that money can buy.

So am I trying to say the Texas Legislature is for sale? I don’t have to. All you need to do is read this latest report from my friends at Texans for Public Justice. The latest in their “Watch Your Assets” report chronicles how a gusher of political contributions from oil tycoon and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens found their way to state lawmakers. This time, however, the booty isn’t being spread around because of oil. No, the contributions are for water. And who said water and oil don’t mix?

Pickens has for several years now set his sights on mining water from the Olagalla Aquifer — which is a huge underground water source in the Great Plains extending all the way from South Dakota down to the Texas Panhandle — and shipping it some 320 miles via pipeline to Dallas. So what’s wrong with that, you might ask, especially if you live in the D-FW Metroplex? Well, Pickens has taken advantage of recent legislation passed by those he so generously showered with moolah which would allow him and several people who bought land from him and make their living off Pickens to form a water district over the 8-square-mile area Pickens and these people own. The district, according to TPJ, would have the power to raise cheap money using tax-free bonds as well as have land condemned through eminent domain along the pipeline’s right-of-way many miles beyond the water district’s boundaries.

The TPJ report is very illuminating. It spells out just how valuable an asset water has become (and will become) as well as the implications facing millions of Texans who could one day have their home taken away by some small, greedy entity hundreds of miles away. If you are a Texan and don’t think that such an issue matters, just ask some of the people in Arlington, Texas, whose homes were grabbed to make way for a new Dallas Cowboys stadium. And lest we not forget, there were the people whose land was taken so the George W. Bush-run Texas Rangers baseball team would have a new home which is now called the Ballpark in Arlington.

Folks better start paying attention to these things before the sheriff comes dragging you out of your house in the name of progress. That is, if you care about such matters.

Jenna, Jenna, Jenna, you’re so grown up. Why it seems like only a few years ago — back in the days when I was a reporter — you were sticking your tongue out at me and the rest of the media entourage after attending Easter Services at Fort Hood. Oh wait, it was just a few years ago. A little more than three I believe, but I could be wrong. For that matter, it might not have even been at Fort Hood. These things all run together nowadays.

Now, at 25, you have a teaching job, you’re engaged and you are hawking a new book you’ve (at least somewhat, I’d hope) written.

It must be stressed that I bear no ill will toward Jenna, her sister or any of her family including her pin-headed father. Actually, I don’t think Gee Dubya is a pin head. He just acts like one, or so I sort of hope, because even I can’t bear the thought that “ma fella Amercans” could elect (well, at least elect for one-term)a president like George Herbert Walker Texas Ranger Chuck Norris Magillacudy McDougall Sanchez O’Henry Bush. And besides, back to Jenna again, I always kind of felt a kinship with her at least in the respect that she liked to party and raise hell.

Whatever Jenna can get out of life, I advise her to take it and run with it because tomorrow whatever it is might no longer exist. Which is really to say I wish her well on her book. I even find it admirable that if the president’s daughter is going to use her celebrity to sell books at least they are publications with such important topics such as HIV and AIDS.

What does irritate me about Jenna’s new book isn’t Jenna. No, my antipathy stems from however many other struggling writers must feel when yet another celebrity’s book is even considered for publication, much less published.

Now certainly it doesn’t take much to be published these days, especially on what Jenna’s paw calls “The Internets.” But to see your work published somewhere in which its publication both means something and pays more than free copies is much more difficult.

Books which are published ahead of the line of the great unwashed writers by offspring of the rich and famous is nothing new. Just think of some of the names: John F. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy Whatever Her Married Name is Now (who is actually a very good author) are just a couple of people who come to mind. Oh yeah, Paris Hilton. Paris Freaking Hilton. And I should point out that it is not just these celebs who have books published while the rest of us live on ramen noodles that ticketh me off. It is relatively easy to publish your own book these days. It is selling those books which is the trick. It is there where the rich and famous and their kids really jump in front of the line. They get book tours while Homer sells his memoirs of the great Stray Cats concert that never happened at a flea market if he is lucky.

So no Jenna, I don’t hate you because you are beautiful or famous or whatever. I don’t hate you at all. It is just disheartening to once again think of having to work even harder to get something you have written to one day bring some reasonable critical success and/or adequate compensation.

When your daddy isn’t president you have to try just that much harder. So that I will do — right after I take a little nap.