Maybe no Democrats are ready to shoot Ritter but some are mighty disappointed. Yes, we understand Rep. Ritter. You switched party for cheap political gain. Are you planning on running for Tommy Williams state senate seat? Is it crisis of conscience? I’m a little too jaded to believe that.
But I am disappointed in the Democratic Party here in Jefferson County anyway. I have been for some time, especially since the Dems here can’t come up with someone to run against Ted Poe for Congress. Well hell, maybe Ritter will run against Poe, in the Republican Primary. Not that the about-to-be Nederland Republican has a snowball’s chance of beating Ted Poe in the GOP primary.
No great profundities have I, at the ready, all waiting to flow like a mountain spring from noggin to fingers onto keys and into the great Internetosphere.
But this I shall say, and permit me please. For if I do not seek permission it will mean not one whit, but polite is all that I attempt. Say I that the Congress of the United States of America at the moment seem to have lost their collective minds — even more so than usual. If anything gets passed before Christmas with any meaning to the people, for the people and of the people, I shall not eat my hat, not will I be a monkey’s uncle. Likewise will I not be a uncle’s monkey with an eaten hat. However, damned well surprised is what I shall be.
This Congress in all its present glory is what we shall live with for the next two years. DADT? Don’t Ask! Health care? Who the hell cares!And on it goes.
We are peering into the future. Only, it will be worse with the new incoming lot of ignorami. Oh, I can see it now. The death penalty for gays and abortionists. A Constitutional Amendment making God the 51st state of the Union. The Great Wall of the United States. Interment camps for illegal aliens with brown skin.
That is malarky, of course, surely some sensible folks will be around to keep the wide-eyed radicals from blowing up the country. I hope, and don’t call me Shirley.
But who knows what the Tea Party will dream up until they start seeing those big, big dollars slipped into their pockets by nice Mr. Lobbyist. Then shall we have both the sanctimonious and the corrupt all rolled into one little, fat, pasty ball. Whoopee!
Just remember, you voted for them. Not you Mr. Liberal or you Mr. True Yellow Dog Democrat. But you know who you are. When the going gets dreadful, the dreadful get going.
Working a schedule with some rare night “premium” hours did give me a chance to look down on all the city lights that have been installed in downtown Beaumont.
All of the spruce up with the lights and brick sidewalks I guess came with the same money used to tear up Calder Avenue to install new drainage. I have to say Calder looks better. And will look even better than that when it is once again open all the way from I-10 to MLK.
One may find something in common with a Beaumonter (Beaumontite, oh whatever), while declaring how inconvenienced you are by the Calder project. Getting around town these days by automobile is a big crap shoot. “For $500, which street will be closed today?” I am also still waiting to see what our city manager, Kyle Hayes’, downtown lake will look like. It’s not just a lake, it is a grand plan to turn the downtown of our city of 110,000 into a combination of San Antonio and Venice by the tune of $8 million. Good luck finding a gondolier who can sing both “Cielito Lindo” and “Funiculi Funicula.”
Maybe the council will name the lake after Hayes. People around here kind of have a habit of naming big, questionable projects after the ones who instigated them. Take for instance the Carrol A. “Butch” Thomas Educational Support Center out on I-10 toward Houston. So far, the center is really a new football stadium, but the highest paid school administrator in Texas, Dr. Thomas, has grand plans including a luxury hotel and who knows what else.
Hell, how about swinging night spot and a whorehouse? If you are going to dream, dream big.
Strange days indeed. The words are a chorus to a John Lennon song called “Nobody Told Me.” I heard the song a lot in the late 80s and even remember it being one of the songs played by United States psy ops (psychological operations) soldiers who were trying to roust Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega from his sanctuary during “Operation Just Cause” in 1989.
John Lennon reheases "Give Peace a Chance." -- Photo by Roy Kerwood courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
Those were strange days indeed. So was the time around December 8, 1980, when I sat in my recliner in the shotgun shack I rented on “Tobacco Road,” studying for some test in college. I didn’t have a television back then but it seems as if I had Monday Night Football playing through my stereo receiver. Or perhaps I was just listening to the radio. I don’t know. I tend to think I was listening to Monday Night Football while studying, definitely a no-no all the experts say. But nevertheless, I heard the announcement that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his apartment in New York. I think my friend Suzie, who worked as a dee jay back then, called afterwards. I’m not sure. But it was such a loss.
In the world of rock music, one’s taste often comes down to the choice: Beatles or Stones? Definitely the Beatles, back then at least. I had grown up, well at least into my early-to-mid 20s, listening to John, Paul, George and Ringo. Isn’t it funny you hardly ever or even never hear “Paul, John, George and Ringo” or even “George, Ringo, Paul and George?” There is a reason for that. Or you never heard Pope John Paul George and Ringo for that matter.
Sometimes a song takes you to a particular point in the time of your life. It doesn’t have to be a new song. Maybe it was just playing when something memorable took place. Such as when I was getting ready to take a taxi to the Houston airport for Chicago and boot camp. An instrumental version of “Here Comes the Sun” was playing on the TV at the induction station. Or, for another example, a chilly day staring out the port hole at the rough seas somewhere off New Zealand, sometime around Thanksgiving, as I listened to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
I never saw the Beatles. I did see the Stones, or was at least in the Superdome as they performed way, way below from where we sat in the cheap seats. Nonetheless, we got a good look on the gondola TV thing-a-majig.
"Send me dead flowers in the morning ... " The Rolling Stones 2006. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons by Charliecorgan.
Still, it was at some undefinable time later on that I became a Stones person. The words to songs with teeth grabbed me such as “Sympathy for the Devil,” or “Gimme Shelter” or the early 70s, Gram Parsons influenced “Dead Flowers” much more than the often whimsical or outright nonsensical melodies of the Beatles. That isn’t to say the Beatles, and especially Lennon, lacked poignancy in their work.
But you look back, especially at the early hits of the Fab Four, and see their genius for great melody and pop tunes. I’ll play “From Me to You,” released in 1963, and hear a spectacular pop song meeting rock. You might hear it an elevator today or on a Target commercial and if you don’t know the Beatles might say: “What a pretty song. I wonder who does that?”
Really, it isn”t fair to put the Beatles and Stone up against each other. I can often identify with the “World can be a pretty hard place at times, so f**k it,” attitude of Mick, Keith and the mates. But I also need a simple pop piece such as “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or something funny like “Mean Mr. Mustard” to help lead me from the hard edge.
And John Lennon on his own was something else, literally. He was the rock n’ roller, as exemplified in his tribute to late 50s and early 60s rockers on the Phil Spector produced “Rock ‘n’ Roll.” He did justice to songs such as Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me.” Lennon also made some of the most memorable of the protest songs such as “Give Peace a Chance” and “Power to the People” even though the era of anti-war protest was beginning to wane. His song “Imagine” is a wonderful, imaginative song and incredibly naive just as the young need sometime be.
Lennon’s “Double Fantasy” album, released near the time of his death was not a critical smash yet after his murder it seemed the world seemed desperate to grab one last piece of the “John” of “John, Paul, George and Ringo.”
Once again, I started to write just a bit and I end up telling whomever will listen my impression of John Lennon in life and death as well as my inability to simply answer a simple question such as “Beatles or Stones.”
Well, that answer is of course, the Stones. But then the Beatles are in a category all their own, as is John Lennon.
I don’t remember the test I took the day after Lennon was murdered. I do remember working at the fire station the next day. For some reason, I had this strong inclination to go wash our fire engine. You know, Penny Lane? Likes to keep his fire engine clean, it’s a clean machine … ” Well, that’s more McCartney, but you get my drift don’t you?
Today I spent a hour-and-a-half driving to the Houston VA hospital for a shot. Yes, a shot, in my knee that they couldn’t give me for whatever reason at the Beaumont VA Clinic. Fortunately, I went to their “Injection Clinic” which is held on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and although I waited about 45 minutes, it was more because I was early and I was ultimately done with my 1:15 p.m. appointment around 1:25 p.m. Then, back in the >160K-mile-plus Tacoma for another hour-and-a-half drive back to Beaumont. That was four-and-a-half hours that caused me to completely rearrange my week. The final shot next week will also cause me to rearrange that week, plus this week as a VA appointment in Beaumont scheduled for next Tuesday when I get that final shot had to be rescheduled for Friday. Between my part-time job with Uncle Sugar and my seemingly-never-ending medical appointments with the Department of Veterans Affairs I seem to answer my own question as to why I can’t get any of my work accomplished in my profession as a freelance writer. Horse pucky, as my old Navy senior chief Ron Smith used to say.
Driving to and from Beaumont-to-Houston and Houston-to-Beaumont on Interstate 10 has never been a joy. As a matter of fact, for a kid from the East Texas piney woods the journey left me for a long time with the twisted thought that theTexas Coastal Prairiewas nothing but flat, butt-ugly, seemingly never-ending series of rice fields bordered by oil company service shops or crop-dusting hangars. I had to live in the area for awhile to recognize the beauty of the grasslands bordering the western Gulf of Mexico. Indeed there is some beauty in the grasses and the marshlands.
That trip of some 80 miles one way still is not the most exciting. The small towns that seem like no more than exit ramps from the Interstate — Winnie and Anahuac mostly — seem to thrive as stops for travelers either on I-10 or en route to the beach. The bridge over the Trinity River seems like a pretty good climb until you realize everything around you is flat. Nonetheless, the crossing does offer a pretty good vista of the big river where it becomes Trinity Bay. In recent months, the continual construction on I-10 to widen it to three lanes from Houston to Beaumont, seems pretty much done for now save for the Trinity Bridge itself.
The steep, 50-year-old bridge was torn down and drivers are now traveling over a new span until another span 10 feet away can be finished. The two spans will then carry the nearly 50,000 vehicles a day over separate, three-lane, east and west bridges, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. You drive by the workers toiling away on top of the newest span and look down then you realize that is the last thing that those workers should want to do.
A bit more to the West and you get into the Lynchburg and Baytown areas. It seems the marine industry has certainly grown around Lynchburg or whatever they call the area near I-10 with all the barges and tug boats these days. I don’t remember seeing that much activity in years past. What I remember most about the area is you can look to the south most days and get a full view of the 575-footSan Jacinto Monument, which Guinness lists as the tallest monument column in the world. I have never been up in the monument to the observation deck. The monument itself, being Texan, is 15 feet taller than the Washington Monument. I have visited the area and toured the USS Texas, the nearly century-old battleship.
On a clear day ... you can see the San Jacinto Monument from I-10
Preliminary work is underway to“dry-berth” the battle wagon which has long been nestled in the slough where in 1836 Sam Houston and his Texan Army of about 900 men defeated the more than 1,300 Mexican forces of Santa Ana. The victory established the Republic of Texas, which less than 10 years later was admitted as one of the United States of America.
Back to this century though, Baytown just a ways from the bay, surely has grown over the years. I remember it in my younger days as mostly the “Humble” later Exxon and even later ExxonMobil refinery. There was also the first highway tunnel I ever experienced there. It was later scrapped for the magnificent cable-stayed Fred Hartman Bridge over the Houston Ship Channel on Highway 146 between Baytown and LaPorte. Today, Baytown has almost 70,000 people and a good bit of development out to the Interstate.
Just outside Houston to the east, the Anheuser-Busch brewery still stands tall above the prairie even though it seems to have lost some of its luster. I suppose what I most miss is the rotating neon sign perched on top of the brewery. The sign had a logo that morphed into a colorful flying eagle. It was there that I saw, I believe for the only time, the Budweiser Clydesdales. My Dad, Mom and I stopped by there on the way back home. It think it was after my Uncle Ted’s funeral — my Dad’s brother — if I am not mistaken. We got a chance to look at the magnificent horses and my Dad got to drink a complimentary Bud, which I am sure he appreciated.
Of course, the skyline of Houston has grown over the years. Also developed over the years is a second city center in the Southwest Houston near the Galleria Mall, the old Astrodome and now newer Reliant Stadium. Of course, the latter is all close to Hermann Park and the Houston Zoo as well as the world-class Texas Medical Center. The latter place is where I seem to be spending so much time these days as the Michael E. DeBakey Veterans Affairs Hospital — where I have to travel for “specialists” (don’t get me started) — is at one edge of the gigantic medical complex which has some of the world’s best hospitals.
As for the traffic, which is in the headline, I had nary a tie-up or bumper-to-bumper this trip. It’s kind of unusual for a visit to the nation’s fourth-largest city, no matter what time of day. Nor was there any similar problem on I-10 to-from-and-through Jefferson, Chambers and Harris counties. Oh, but “Smokey” was out earning a paycheck today, especially in Chambers County westbound I-10. Within a three mile stretch I encountered two Texas Highway Patrol traffic stops, both appeared to be so-called “drug interdiction” pullovers since troopers were looking through people’s belongings in the trunk of the stopped cars. A third stop within that three miles found a big rig was stopped by a “license and weight” trooper.
Well, that is what I got out of my drive to Houston and back. That and a shot in the left knee. It hurt for a nanosecond and then it was over although my knee hurts this evening, I think it’s from the arthritis. Most of the shots I have had so far in the knee don’t hurt. Neither do the trips to Houston. They just leave me stiff and in need of more gasoline, which seems to be getting more expensive every day.
