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Recently burned Dallas bar sparks excessive writing

A friend sent me a text message a bit ago wishing me a Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I sent him a text message back returning the greeting. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to whoever sees this.

St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated around the world. Well, the holiday is big in a lot of the former British Empire but I don’t know if Romania or Brazil turn their rivers green like is done along the San Antonio River Walk. Those are two countries of the 15 I see have visited EFD during the past 24 hours.

I was searching for information about St. Patrick’s Day and the Wikipedia took me to Dallas where they have a pretty large St. Patrick’s Day parade on Lower Greenville Avenue. I went one year, not long after the celebration had first been organized in the early 1980s. Exploring the ‘net today I found that one of my favorite places to go when I lived in Dallas (University Park, surrounded by SMU and Dallas, actually) had burned along with three other businesses on Lower Greenville in a four-alarm fire on March 2.

The Lower Greenville Bar and Grill was a neat place to go have a few cool ones on a hot day. One could sit by one of the big windows inside the 75-year-old bar — supposedly the oldest bar in continual existence in Dallas — and people watch in what was fast becoming a trendy area for younger folks in Dallas. Of course, I was a younger folk in those days.

But an electrical short in the attic in one of the three adjacent bars to the GBG sparked the blaze that gutted the place just two weeks before the big St. Paddy’s Day Parade.

I have long since given up going to bars but it does seem that all my old favorite watering holes are gone. The Postman’s Lounge in Gulfport burned while I was overseas in the Navy. I don’t know what happened to Jim’s just up the street but it either was torn down, became something else or was wiped out by Katrina. The Crossroads in Nacogdoches, like the Joni Mitchell song says, was paved and “they put up a parking lot.”

Maybe they’re trying to tell you something. Well, I don’t know. Like I said, I don’t hang at bars and all kinds of businesses, especially bars, will eventually turn over to someone else, go out of business, become a pizza joint or a parking lot, destroyed by hurricanes or are burned down. Sometimes they burn down during a hurricane like some places in Galveston did when Ike hit two years ago. It is just a progression of time, the demise of these places. Some of the people I associate with these places, Waldo, Buddy, Buffalo Bob, Betti are all gone, way too early for me.

Certainly, though, I know from the five years I worked fighting fires that in a flash a structure is here and then it’s gone, and a memory is, who knows how long. I spent much more time at places I’ve named earlier than the GBG. But the place obviously affected me to the point that I have written some 533 words, no probably more now.

Before I forget it, if you do Facebook, there is a page for helping out those affected by the fire on Lower Greenville. If you are from Corn Cob, Iowa, or are in a barroom drinking gin with Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner in Mombasa, Kenya, and you happen to see this then maybe you can help out these good folks. I tended bar a little bit, a very little bit, too and worked for a couple of years cooking burgers so I know how those working at the GBG and the three other places must be hurting right now.

I’m up to 644 words now. Or  more. 649, 651, …

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Doubtful to see Juarez anytime soon

Time was when I would visit El Paso a trip across the Rio Grande to Ciudad Juarez would be standard fare. That was long ago, when my friend, Rene, with whom I was visiting and I were both much younger.

As a matter of fact, Juarez seemed to provide little to no fascination for Rene, who is Mexican-American and whose summers as a youth  included stays at his family’s ranch in the Chihuahuan interior. The pace of life in El Paso’s twin city seemed to have become too much for my laid-back old friend from our Navy days in Mississippi. Since I spent most of my life in East or Central Texas though, the bustling neighbor of El Paso to this day interests me.

Juarez, of course, has all the Mexican border town kitsch. I can once remember seeing a jackass, painted with black stripes like a zebra, with a cart it was pulling parked along a street. Trust me when I say, it wasn’t a zebroid. And donkeys have their own perverse connotation in Mexican border towns, but I won’t tread there. There were the cab drivers offering to take young males off to an adventure at a whore house or who knows where. There was all that is bad about border towns in Juarez that is bad and all that is bad about border towns that is good.

Also to be found in Juarez was the elegant, the storied and even the historical. Some spots were all three such as the Kentucky Club. A trip to Juarez wasn’t complete, at least in my eyes, without a stop for a margarita or two at the old bar with its high ceilings and carved wooden fixtures located on Avenida de Juarez. Anyone who was anyone in U.S. history during the last half of the 20th century had stopped by for a drink. Maybe they thought they needed one after seeing sights like jackasses painted as zebras!

In all during the visits I made there in the last 30 years, most while I was accompanied by a fluent Spanish speaker, I didn’t feel particularly threatened. Young, foolish and bullet-proof, a cousin of Rene’s and I once partied somewhere a good distance from the heart of the border area of Juarez. Exhausting most of our money we were forced to hoof it back to the border. We walked through some areas that, well, were probably dangerous then but we made it back safe to near the crossing where we each ate a burrito then had to borrow two cents from the lady at the taqueria to get through the turnstile to enter the U.S. side.

I even visited during my last trip to El Paso, which was on business, some six years ago when the city had begun to become more violent. Now, I am thinking of flying out to see Rene sometime this spring. I know he probably will not want to cross the border and with all the violence there — some 2,500 murders in Juarez last year and about 800 something already this year — neither will I.

The most recent episode of carnage to catch the Norteamericanos’ eyes, that is after the 15 teens were killed in January — are the killings of three people with connections to or who were employed by the U.S. Consulate in Juarez. Two children of one of the victims were also wounded in the attack.

It is a shame and unbelievable how out of control things have become in Juarez and in Mexico in general. What is at the root of it? Drugs? Well, the root of it like the so-called “root of all evil” is the love of money. Add in the lack of money, power, and if people are stupid enough to use in excess the drugs that they sell, a bundle of wired machismo and you got yourself one hell of a problem. That is exactly where the Mexicans find themselves now, to the point where walking for days with little food and water through the Chihuahuan Desert to illegally attempt a better life in el  Norte doesn’t sound all that bad does it?

Our perfectly coiffed Gov. Rick Perry wants the Pentagon to send Predator drones to patrol the border. Great. Maybe the unmanned planes will be armed and can cause a lot of things to go “boom” in the South. That is what probably a lot of the unthinking crowd feel would solve the problem.

But this is a problem that is beyond the grasp of our air-headed Texas governor. It is about, at the very least, a hemispheric economy and what kind of Mexico will be our future neighbors. Will they become a socialist state or one ruled by a dictator as in Mexico’s past? Will they become a failed state? Or will they maintain their course as one of the world’s emerging markets after getting past all the violence?

Whatever the answer, it sure seems the status quo isn’t working out.

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Hide your funk! Here comes the Mi3Ls.

It happened in a flash last night that I finally realized how “plugged-in” I was — or wasn’t — in today’s technopalooza world. (Note: I don’t know what, if anything, “technopalooza” means but I thought it was a good word to insert since nothing else came to mind at the time. Needless to say, the word infers a technologically all-encompassing society. Feel free to use any other word that you want!)

My friend Paul, who lives in Tokyo, and I communicate with one another by e-mail, Facebook posts and Facebook sort-of real-time chats. We were friends in college and lost touch with one another. We recently discovered the other was still alive through Facebook or Classmates.com. I don’t remember which one. We have not actually talked to each other for somewhere around 26 years.

Those modes of communication also go for my contacting other, though certainly not all, friends. Also, some of the friends with whom I keep in contact, be it through chat, e-mail and post — oh and I forgot ye ole EFD — I have actually seen live and in person and perhaps talked with by cell more recently than in Paul’s case.

Paul posted on Facebook a quiz by which a number can be attained to put one’s self up against the so-called “Millennials.”

Millennials are the generation of those teens and 20-somethings who are coming of age as adults at the start of a new millennium. A recent study by the Pew Research Center looks at the characteristics of this new crop of young adults and found some interesting although sometimes, not-so-surprising, traits. The quiz on Facebook was likewise revealing though I was not greatly astounded by the results. You can take the quiz here and you don’t have to be on Facebook to do so.

One who has paid the slightest bit of attention to what has gone on around them  during their lives — and can still remember things reasonably well — should not really be surprised that the Millennials are in general:

” … more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.”

As well one has to have been in a coma for the last few years to not know that the Millennials (Mi3Ls–hey I made that up just now!) have suffered setbacks in their first jobs courtesy of what Pew now pegs as, the “Great Recession.” That this generation is unfailingly plugged in to different modes of communication and self-expression such as Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, etc. — 83 percent of the Mi3Ls surveyed sleep next to their cell phones compared to my Boomers at 50 percent — should also raise a great “duh” from someone who has a fraction of awareness of our current society. And that includes those who have a penchant for using “duh” as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc. I kind of like “etc.,” don’t you?

What I believe the Pew study does exhibit very well is in their conclusion that the Millennial generation are, for the most part, kinder and gentler than previous generations. One can only hope that is more literal than the rhetorical term President George Bush the First used.

The study and quiz, as well, allows some reflection and some introspection (I feel some 70s soul slippin’ in, now) into how in touch one is in the larger sense of the word. I scored 22 on the quiz, which puts me about smack dab in the middle of the profile between Baby Boomer and Generation X, which would seem fairly logical because I was born in the middle of the Boomer years.

I am sure there are all sorts of variables these researchers kept in mind during the study. This sort of thing is where sociology and statistics and economics all merge, the latter two makes me dizzy even though I work somewhat in the last field. But from this research it does somewhat startle me when I think of just how much I have grasped technology — or it has grasped me — in really just the last 15 years or so.

This research and self-reflection somehow has made me feel relevant. I think were I to explain how I would question my relevancy my head would explode. But that is the good I see from such knowledge in my own personal way. What more can an old aging Baby Boomer ask for, relevancy and hope for the future, and perhaps, the entire Beatles collection?

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The nuts of Texas are upon you(r textbooks)

It was most appropriate that I had a few mixed nuts before I sat down to read a newspaper article awhile ago.

The New York Times story told of how the conservative nuts on the Texas State Board of Education finally passed a rewrite of social studies curriculum that will attempt to warp the young minds throughout the United States. You see, Texas is a big state and orders a lot of textbooks. So other states end up, by and large, buying textbooks that reflect the Texas education board’s stamp — or more appropriately, mold, — of approval.

That means Thomas Jefferson will likely be just a president rather than one whose writings provided inspirations of revolutions during the 18th and 19th centuries. It seems Tom isn’t very well liked because the majority conservative voting bloc on the board doesn’t like his words about that “separation of church and state” thing. These members, who are not historians, simply do not believe in separation of church and state. Member David Bradley, whom I am ashamed to say is from right here in Beaumont (or maybe not, there has been some dispute as to whether he actually lives in his board district), says he’ll donate $1,000 to one’s choice of charity if the idea of separation of church of state can be located in the Constitution.

Mr. Bradley must do quite well at his real estate and apartment rental business. But as a historian, he leaves a lot to be desired. A number of what we consider rights cannot be found explicitly in the Constitution but were instead borne of landmark court cases such as Marbury v. Madison and Gideon v. Wainwright.

The nut majority on the education board also have also ordered that “capitalism” be replaced in textbooks with “free enterprise system” along with other changes that say your kids, whether in Big Lake or Baltimore, learn all about the National Rifle Association. I like guns and all but c’mon, why don’t you just add the tobacco and alcohol lobbies in there too?

Some states have, with the help of technology, managed to break free of the Texas education board’s conservative headlock on education. Hopefully, more will do so. Then perhaps some of tomorrow’s minds won’t be quite as warped. Boy, are some kids going to be really surprised when — or if — they get to college.