Eight Feet Deep

A few moments ago I stuck my head outside the apartment door just to catch a little of the pre-twilight air. The local squirrel was making its rounds balancing itself cautiously on the wooden fence before leaping into a small tree. I say it’s the local squirrel. I think more than one squirrel call the trees in my neighbor’s yard home.

This one was certainly fat and sassy. My downstairs neighbor had the habit of leaving peanuts in a couple of plastic containers on the fence, so the squirrel may have bulked up on peanuts. The neighbor no longer leaves peanuts for the squirrel as he is in jail on a parole violation. He is the third paroled sex offender who has lived in these apartments since I moved here less than a year ago to violate parole and go back to stir. Jeez, you’d think this is a freakin’ halfway house.

Squirrels are neat to watch though. They take your mind off things like for a little while, like having neighbors who are child molesters. Watching this squirrel, it seemed to me that it was using its tail for balance as well as radar. Squirrel radar. Now there’s a concept. I realized after watching it be a squirrel that I really didn’t know a whole lot about squirrels.

I looked at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department Web site to read up on the critters. Sure enough the squirrels do use their tails for more than car antenna ornaments and more:

“Squirrels’ long bushy tails are used for a variety of purposes. They can be wrapped around a squirrels face to keep them warm, used as an aid in balancing when they run along tree limbs, or spread and used as a parachute if the squirrel should fall. With a little practice, watching a squirrel’s tail movements gives you a clue to their mood. Quick jerks of the tail signal that they are nervous or upset.”

I suppose I’ll have to start watching my local squirrels more closely. Perhaps I can learn to read their moods by their tails. It sounds like a useful talent. Maybe I could become a squirrel psychologist.

Me to Mr. Squirrel: “Now do humans really drive you nuts?”

Okay, that’s pretty bad. I’m sorry.

I did find squirrels can be dangerous. That is not just because they are rodents and can carry diseases like the plague. No, they are stone cold dog killers.

The above article, along with other tales of squirrels wreaking havoc, can be found on the Squirrel Defamation League Website. I kind of get it that they don’t like squirrels.

But I like squirrels just fine. As long as they mind their own business and don’t go bats**t on me and attack, we will all peacefully coexist. The same goes for my parolee neighbors.

This will be the first full spring I have spent freelance writing. I knew challenges would be ahead when I started doing this. I was right. It’s a tough biz but I love my job.

One problem I did not foresee and certainly should have was spring fever. After lunch, just now, I stepped out on the balcony and was zapped by a full-blown case of the fever. The symptoms are unmistakable: lethargy, daydreaming, feelings that you should be on a shady creek bank somewhere with a fishing pole and some ice cold beverages.

It takes willpower to work for yourself and by yourself at home. It takes even more when you’ve got spring fever. But I’ve also got another tech writing project, so I guess I’ll just suffer through my affliction and get back to work … and then take a walk in a bit.

Is the Perry-Sharp proposal meaningful tax reform or are they just blowing smoke?

Is it ironic or just a weird sense of timing? Who knows why things happen when they do. But it is funny that the movie version of Christopher Buckley’s hilarious, satiric novel “Thank You For Smoking” has hit theaters just as the Texas Legislature is about to enter on April 17, a sixth special session on funding public schools. You would think the Lege is the hardest working “deliberative” body in show business. But you would be wrong.

This sixth attempt to undo the state’s school finance system will take up what is strangely called the Perry-Sharp tax proposal. I say strangely because it is named after our Republican Gov. Rick “Goodhair” Perry and John Sharp. Democrat Sharp is the former state comptroller and who lost the race for lieutenant governor to Republican David Dewhurst.

Sharp chaired a state tax reform commission that looked at ways to replace the present system of funding schools with property tax known as the “Robin Hood” system. It is called Robin Hood because the system was designed by a fellow named Sherwood Forrest. Only kidding! The school finance scheme basically takes property tax money from the rich school districts and gives that money to wealthy fatcats who smoke cigars on their yachts. Only kidding dos! Poor school districts get tax money from the rich districts. And the state’s supreme court said: “No can do.”

Robin Hood came after years of back-and-forth about how to fund public schools. It seems like this issue has been around all my life and I’m 50 years old. Now the Perry-Sharp proposal would supposedly have lower property taxes without Robin Hood, with adjustments to the state’s business tax and by raising the tax on cigarettes by $1 per pack.

“If Texans want a fairer and broader business tax without loopholes, a stable source of revenue for our children’s education, and substantial property tax relief, then we’ve got a plan that works for them,” Perry said in a press release.

If grandma had balls she’d be … Shaquille O’Neal. It would almost seem the governor is saying to Texans: “Smoke ’em if you got ’em. If you don’t got ’em, go out and get ’em.”

It’s really kind of weird when you think about it. A good portion of the school finance proposal is based on people firing up an addictive drug. Why not crack? It is a plan worthy of the MOD Squad.

The movie “Thank You For Smoking” is about the lives of three lobbyists who represent, respectively, the alcohol, tobacco and firearms industries. They call themselves the MOD Squad, MOD being an acronym for “Merchants of Death.” It is a very funny novel and I hope the movie does it justice.

Your guess is as good as mine as to whether the tax plan will be adopted in the special session. The fact that it is the sixth special session should give you a clue. Gov. Rick may end up telling Texans: “Thank you for smoking.” But he won’t be thanking me because I quit. Thank goodness.

“Main Street is the climax of civilization.”
— Sinclair Lewis, “Main Street”
If you have ever tasted small-town life then you know what Sinclair Lewis was talking about. I grew up in a small town and later edited a small-town newspaper. Does that make me an expert? I guess it depends on how you define expert. And you can also get into a complete separate discussion on just what is a small town. I live in a town of about 110,000. Is that small? Compared to Los Angeles or Jakarta or Mexico city or Houston some 90 miles away, yes, it is small.

My hometown had about 2,000 people and the town in which I edited the weekly newspaper was about the same size as well as about 60 miles apart. When I was in the Navy I used to tell people jokingly that the town I was from was so small, its power plant was a Sears car battery. Ba-dump.

Small towns have their charms as well as their shortfalls. But I am not here to deconstruct the American village as Sinclair Lewis so aptly did. Instead I wanted to touch upon an often overlooked and quite possibly vanishing piece of the Americana pie — the small-town newspaper columnist.

Now I wrote a column when I edited the newspaper, but I normally didn’t deal with life inside that small town because, well, I still had to live there. My paper had a regular columnist who had been a fixture there for years. His front-page column told of weddings and funerals and deer hunting trips as well as his own rightist take on world events. I inherited the guy and, frankly, I thought of him as a legend in his own mind.

The paper in my hometown used to have the correspondents from outlying areas and they would write of people coming and going — even if they were coming and going from that community to my hometown. I found that kind of strange until I started understanding more about so-called “community journalism.” The bottom line is people like to see their names or their loved ones’ names in the paper.

But truly some jewels exist in the world of small-town newspapers. I just happened to think about one of my favorite rural stories that was written by a contributor to the “Jasper Newsboy” in Jasper, Texas. The writer, the late Landon Bradshaw, was no Twain but he could spin a folksy tale like the one he wrote about mile markers (or ‘mileboards’ as he called them) being erected on the early highways of East Texas. Bradshaw wrote that years after these signs were installed they were found to be highly inaccurate. Bradshaw postulated a reason for this:

“Legend has it that a crew of two men measured the roads and nailed the boards up. These two men would set out early in the day, carrying a rod chain, a supply of prepainted boards, tools and a jug of whiskey. They’d measure the first mile put a board up, take a drink of whisky and move on.”

These sign installers would repeat their routine until, according to Bradshaw:

“By quitting time, the pair could be seen staggering along erecting mileboards every 200 yards.”

Bradshaw said when he researched the story one of the supposed mileboard men had died and the other denied the story although the man did admit to having:

“… given to strong drink most of his life. The excessive use of alcohol was generally bad, he said and would eventually kill a man, or at least ruin his health. ‘Look what it’s done to me,’ he said. His leathery skin was blotched by an occasional liver spot and his wizened face was plowed with wrinkles. Although his hands were steady, he seemed to have trouble focusing his eyes.

“He said he lost his appetite, he didn’t sleep well at night and he was so tuckered out right then, he didn’t know if he could make it back to his jug or not.

“Oliver Curl was 102 when he told me this and he’d been hoeing peanuts all day.”

A collection of Bradshaw’s columns were published in a book called “These People Actually Lived in East Texas.” I don’t think you will find it on Amazon or Borders. And I know you won’t find columns like that in “The New York Times.” You also may need to look far and wide to see such columns in even small-town newspapers today. And I think we are poorer for that.

It seems that an announcement is imminent that Katie Couric will be named as the new CBS News anchor. It is a pretty disturbing thought on a couple of levels.

First of all, interim anchor Bob Schieffer seemed to be doing just fine replacing Dan Rather. I actually like Schieffer more as an anchor than Rather. He’s like what any number of local news anchors should be were they not too busy being minor celebrities. But I admire Rather as a journalist and he was also kind of like this ticking, cornpone, time bomb that was apt to go off at anytime. I like that too. The dominant anchor on the evening network news followed forever what was known as the “Voice of God” format. The New York Time’s Alessandra Stanley had a great characterization of Schieffer in her piece about the new networks’ evening news configuration after Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw left the scene:

“NBC offers the old, familiar one-man anchor format; ABC is experimenting with multiple anchors. CBS is testing a hybrid of both: a voice of God with backup singers. “

The other reason Couric becoming CBS anchor troubles me is because I don’t know if she is up to it. I’m not saying that because she is a woman either. There are several women whom I think would be a better choice than Couric, NBC’s Campbell Brown for one. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien is another. I realize Couric was a journalist before joining the fluff world of “Today.” But she just doesn’t do it for me as a serious news person.

Your network news anchor is someone both solid and human. They are the persons who pull everything together during our presidential assassinations like Walter Cronkite or our space shuttle tragedies or our 9/11s. Katie just seems a little too perky for such gravitas.

If Couric does become the new CBS anchor as expected, I wish her well and I hope that she surprises me in becoming the best anchor ever. Meanwhile, I will watch and wait.