i was working on a couple of new sites, the revival of my pop art gallery, and the siuc pop art gallery, the second a kind of tribute to my eighteen years at siuc, but all in the service, basically, of backing up and putting online numerous lost photos, when i was diverted by the story of kai, who hit the news when authorities began searching for him and arrested him today.

i went back to the original video that had gone viral and made him famous. kai was a young drifter who said he was from west virginia, but wouldn't give his full name. hah, that was easy enough for authorities to find out. he also claimed, on this youtube, that he'd been picked up hitchhiking by this wild guy who claimed he was jesus christ and who intimidated random pedestrians; he also said that he'd taken an axe and whacked this guy because he appeared to be assaulting this random woman. kai also mentioned whacking some guy in an orchard because he displayed too much ownership of a woman and kai had felt that this was just plain wrong. i wondered why he dredged up the orchard incident as if to dare the authorities what orchard, what guy he'd whacked. when it got right down to it, he didn't want to give his name, but he immediately picked up hundreds of followers on an assumed name, and started preaching to his facebook choir.

now that's the first difference between today's kai, and I, who was quite a drifter for many years and saw myself in kai. kai had the opportunity to become famous, and took it. his story was just out there enough, that a lot of people were attracted to it and latched onto him. from the rainbow people he had gotten such ideas as, don't give them your name, call yourself "home-free" rather than "home-less", and wear nice ragged long hair held back only by a bandana. drift intentionally and take rides from total strangers. the problem is, in the modern world, so few people will pick up a drifter, that only the twisted ones remain, and the drifter becomes immediately a victim of those crazies out there, who are the only ones left that will actually give a ride to such a guy.

but back to kai. from the rappers he seemed to have gotten a foul mouth, and somewhere he got a proclivity to violence, which, when somebody is such an innocent-looking kid, you never know what to believe. for example, anything could have happened in the orchard, where there were just some drifters camping and living on apples, presumably. on the street, he was being interviewed by a newsman, who couldn't believe his story or his foul mouth, but nevertheless continued with him until he told the whole story, that being a street incident in fresno where the driver assaulted a pedestrian, then was laid upon by kai, who was a rider in his car. whether kai had actually killed this guy, i have no idea, since he was apparently released only to appear in new jersey some time later.

but this brings us up to the murder charge; apparently he was picked up by a 73-year-old lawyer, who drugged and raped him, or so he says, then he appealed to facebook to decide what to do; he liked one friend's suggestion that he whack the guy, and he whacks the guy. how much of this to believe, i have no idea. but facebook left a pretty clear trail. the lawyer is dead. kai is in jail. where he will probably stay, for some time.

i'm about to reconstruct my drifters' book, which was written during my drifting times, the 1970's. if it so much as encourages anyone to do that kind of drifting, i won't like it. i wrote it to tell my story, to get it out there, after a lifetime of holding up a professional career, raising five kids, trying to keep the boys in a line, nervous that they, like me, might take to the open air, the camping life, the "home-free" life style. gratefully, two boys seem to have better sense than that. they also don't have the anger issues that i had or even that kai clearly shows. somebody somewhere, upset parents i imagine, were giving kai a bad feeling about such concepts as "home". i look back at that time in my life and i'm glad i didn't end up like kai, in jail, feeling like a murderer, abused by someone or other. he got caught up in crossing over, trying to be both a rainbow and a rapper, and, doing it in an era when there's no such thing as privacy, or getting away from it all, or not telling someone your name. it takes them all of five minutes to find you these days, and that's what happened to him, and where was he when it happened, but philadelphia.

our black cat, edgar, walked out of the house in the middle of the night when the back door blew open and my wife was awake but in the bathroom. because it was the middle of the night, she didn't know what was going on and did not go retrieve him immediately. by now he's gone, and we drive and walk slowly through the alleyways, looking fruitlessly. he was half wild, born wild, and might be able to make it on his own. but life is tough out there. there's at least one fox prowling around. i saw one dead cat just while i was cruising the alleyways looking for him.

the dust has cleared on finals and grading, which means i can now concentrate on personal publications: putting on amazon two sets of stories, pile of leaves and a dozen crime stories; developing my tlevs press site; printing and distributing a volume dedicated to carbondale, boxcars on walnut; possibly updating e pluribus haiku and getting the 2013 volume ready (this i'd like to publish on july 4); possibly getting just passing through ready for publication; and possibly working on my novel. i've become tentative about all this stuff because i know there's only so much time, and also i'm completely exhausted from teaching. but the blood is flowing; i have time in the mornings; the sun shines and leaves me free of mold and rot.

unfortunately a misty rainy morning is supposed to turn to 97 degrees by afternoon, and news comes of six dead in west texas tornadoes. west texas, now, we can call anything west of fort worth starting at about weatherford, which is an interesting mix of total upscale suburb and old west history, but weatherford is where the tornadoes started, that's where they were. i came home and some guy was on a movie explaining how the whole system is going to collapse, the whole economy, the whole kit & kaboodle, though my daughter says she thinks things are picking up. things are not picking up. the weather is going haywire, years of overspending on useless wars is catching up to us in the international market, and though we frack the heck out of every available square foot, that just leaves us with more instability and the need of earthquake insurance. i'm a pessimist, i think we lost it when we invaded iraq and sat there for fifteen years, at a couple billion a day, hoping the place would turn around. we should have declared victory and left, although something is to be said for having an independent kurdistan with the right to free trade and clear skies above it.

another thing i learned upon my arrival home was that scientists believe they have uncovered the white city in the honduran jungle in central america. this immediately brought two interesting memories to me. one, i often tell people about, because it lodged in my brain and wouldn't budge. when i went to peru, arequipa to be specific, they insisted on taking me to a museum which had been established to display the body of a young woman who had been found in the andes mountains, and removed, and preserved, to display modern knowledge about the inca empire. the inca empire stretched up all the way into central america, they explained, and in fact this young woman, about thirteen when she was killed, had come from up there, based on her dna. why had they made this young woman walk all the way down to southern peru, to be the victim of the incas' religious belief that she was part human, part god, born to be sacrificed? well, they didn't know everything, but that was the best they could figure. they displayed the gold and silver that had been buried with her. they told the story of the german archaeologist who got onto her location, and used his considerable power to see that her body be removed, brought to town, displayed. i wondered if anyone objected to the disruption of a religious burial site. sure, they said, lots of people were opposed. but it happened anyway.

now here's the kicker. arequipa was a beautiful town, made in the shadow of these volcanoes that occasionally would blow, but were dormant at the time. it also had occasional earthquakes. it was sixty or seventy miles from the sea, but it was impenetrable jungle and people didn't go there much. the weather was stunning, blue skies every day, never too hot or cool, always crystal clear except in the city center where there was some pollution. it was known as the white city. why? its building had always been created from a whitish volcanic ash, which was kind of like adobe, very practical if you knew how to build with it, because it preserved heat and cool, and gave a better living environment, as well as a whitish hazy beautiful appearance to all the city's buildings.

now you see where i'm going with this. two white cities? the legendary white city in honduras is called that, only by legend, who knows where that legend came from or why it became known that this incredible, buried city in the mosquitia jungle could be a huge ancient empire city. are there any volcanoes around there? well, maybe, i have no idea. are they two edges of the same empire, with the center being machu picchu, or some other place?

i never really got to the bottom of why a woman from way up north, central america, would be proclaimed the goddess of an empire, born to be a sacrifice, and to be brought down to peru, led up into the mountains, killed and buried with gold and silver. i don't think they got to the bottom of it either. it wasn't as if the peruvians had conquered the hondurans and demanded a lowly serf to be payment for losing a battle. she was a goddess, they said; she was told, probably, that she would be treated like a queen from the moment of her birth, and the best they can figure, she ate pretty well. i'd actually like to know more about these ancient civilizations, because my teaching of anthropology and archaeology has stirred up the desire to put it all together a little better. one thing i've learned is that the old people knew a lot more about the stars and the clear sky than we know, and they mapped things out, placed things in ways that reflected knowledge that we're only now coming to grips with.

my wife has gone to illinois leaving me with two fairly pleasant boys finishing the school year, and this hole in our hearts due to the cat walking away from us. the black cat's brother, a portly white cat named casper, is despondent; my older son also is depressed that it would even be possible, that a cat would choose to walk away and not come back. that appears to be what has happened, though, and life is going on. the misty rain is clearing up and the sun is searing, the temperature beginning to rise, and i've shut up the house, turned the fans on, and begun to hunker down to do some kind of work in the house, quick while i can. my bicycle, by the way, was stolen on the same day the cat walked away, this would have been tuesday. with fewer bikes on campus, somebody must have noticed that it wasn't really locked, and just walked away with it. i'm slightly aggravated about that, but i don't especially need it at the moment, and can take my time looking around for another. my wife was even less concerned than i was, since biking is so much more dangerous than walking. she said, basically and correctly, i'm too young to have a bike anyway.

i'll keep you apprised of the publications coming out; i'm not really in a very creative mood. when i can't make new stuff, i just package old stuff, which is ok because i'm way behind on that as well. my goal is to have it all on amazon, all available, and all reasonably packaged, so that the writing stands out on its own, and the legacy and record is there online, where a single broken computer won't do me in. i have the same goal for my pop art, and, this computer being ready to capsize at any moment, another job for this break would be to go through that pop art until i really know what i have, know where it is online and in storage, restore some of the galleries that i had in better times. an siu gallery, for example, would display popart from the siuc campus as a kind of tribute to my eighteen years there. i have enough on castle park to make one of the best castle park galleries ever, but it's all stored away in my dropbox which is kind of like a musty suitcase, and nobody can see it anymore. this has to be corrected, now if not sooner. time to get moving.

whoa, time to take a break here, and just blog. usually, when it rains, one might tend to stay home, make a pot of coffee, watch it rain for a while, especially if one just finished one's grading and has every excuse to not go out in it. i, however, felt a strong impulse to go out in it, especially since it's really the first rain of the entire spring here, and the ground was parched, not green at all, literally crackling for it.

ah but when it rains the gutters fill up, and the right hand turn lane from nineteenth onto flint on the north side of the intersection has maybe two feet of water in it, which the large trucks enjoy, whether they intend to splash you or not. the smaller cars creep carefully through it, terrified that the water will get above their intake and ruin them forever. but my main point is, though campus is less than two blocks from here, i can't get across this place, on foot or on bike.

reason to stay home? still not. i walked down the middle of the busy nine-lane until i found a jumping place (a ford, i like to call it) and ran across the road, and hurled myself past this high water. living dangerously, it was. cars and busses were splashing up water all over campus. by the time i got where i was going, i was soaked.

met the wife of a cotton farmer the other day who was telling me, the rain carries nitrogen, unlike what you water or irrigate with, so it's inherently better for the ground than simply pulling it up from beneath and spreading it. she said controls were about to come down on the cotton farmer, which would be a catch-22, but i couldn't quite figure out what would be catch-22 about that. is it that not growing cotton would make the situation worse? i'm not sure.

anyway, these folks, who were from around here, said that the last truly wet spring was in maybe 2006, and they're figuring on a seven-year-cycle, so they figure it should be over in maybe one more year. they're saying that all the farmers and landscapers are likely to go broke in the meantime, since seven years is a long time to go without water, but that's essentially what has happened. the really bad year was 2011, worst drought in texas history, but by the time we got here in 2012, they said the worst was over but in the big picture, it wasn't over. and people were watering like crazy.

i walk by this one house where they water like crazy. the fertile lush green grass sits below these enormous trees that appear to be very healthy, roots not coming up at all. and the shade makes it possible for this grass to grow, a rich, full, green. i feel like stopping, lying in it, and thanking them for offering up their greenness for public consumption. problem is, they did it mostly just for themselves, though they for sure wanted us to at least see it. the parks at least keep those sprinklers going all through the spring. sometimes i'm walking around the park at night, and a shoot of sprinkler comes up and hits me right as i walk. it's ok though. you live around here, you don't mind a little sprinkler once in a while. my point is that i think it's good to go out and use the community supply, rather than always hauling it all up ourselves, why not share? a little patch of green can be that way for all of us. maybe i'll even meet these folks someday.

reminds me of the word fountain garden. in this place the fountain is a hand that has a number of letters in it. the water comes out of the top and tumbles down from within the letters, which is why it's my favorite fountain. at the bottom is a pool which i wouldn't swim in, because of the chemicals, but the wet nature of the place brings a lot of birds. grackles, doves, and mockingbirds dominate as they often do in this part of texas. there are other kinds, i just may not know what kind they are. these birds are noisy. i'm not sure what it is they have to say. maybe they're just interpreting the fountain in their own way, trying to tell each other what they think it means.

pictures coming. it's back to work for me.

What will we find?
Nice movie, Noah & I on the music, Noah the filmer

listening to a tape of international teaching assistants who want to become teachers, but in some cases have no tone, or no pronunciation, you can't figure out what's going on. it's kind of like wandering around back streets, not really sure which direction you're going. or waking up in the middle of the night, for no reason, knowing you've had a strange dream, but forgetting it entirely, except that now you can't sleep again.

i'd actually like to get out of lubbock, but i don't know the area well, and have had almost no time to explore. there are lots of places out there, worthy of exploration, it's a wild country, and it stretches way down into mexico. full of prospectors these days, oilmen, filling up the motels, hauling in the money, i'm not sure what else they're doing. everyone needs to make a living, i guess, and in some ways it's better than sitting around. fracking is a regular discussion we have. in illinois it's considered a sin, my son says. here it's just an everyday thing. the question is, how much can we pull out of the ground, before we have no ground, and it all caves in? i'm not sure.

it's baseball season, and soccer season both, but a cold spell came down and it was below freezing, in may yet, last night and tonight. a late winter system, maybe? people were even talking about snow, though i haven't seen any. earlier the wind was blowing hard and dust was coming up. the dust, they're used to. but freezing in may? that's a little unusual.

got pictures coming. i see more than i used to, things look ironic, even when they're not. my son has an active creativity going. made me realize, it's not over yet. i can still do stuff. i can finish my novel. i can make a cd too. i can put pop art, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, all together in one piece. plenty of time!

it's a busy city, making money, staying alive. the sun is due to come out and splash, we'll bathe in it for a while, but it doesn't seem to slow down life much. i'm thinking of setting up the trains. make sure the air-con works, then hide in it. the hot asphalt fries, outside, the dirt gets baked up, and sometimes a bit of rain will pass across and a little will come down and sizzle on what's there. i might water the lawn, but i'm just pouring water on red dusty hot-baked dirt, and it doesn't amount to much. these days i water for myself, for the feeling it gives me, though i realize i'm just wasting money pouring it back into the earth from whence it came. the birds come around looking to see what might happen if there's a little water around. most of it evaporates before it even gets an inch below the surface. it's like a mirage, it's there, but only for a moment.

got out of the habit of walking, or even swimming, though i was still riding my bike up to the corner and risking my life at nineteenth and flint. finally i started walking again, the usual 5k, five times around the big wide green park, the dog wallow, and tonight it was cool and clear, maybe the last night like that. orion is gone. a hot sunny spell came through, good for my son who is visiting from chilly illinois, but then yesterday it was both 90 here and 45 in amarillo, about 70 miles up the road, and then pretty soon it was 45 here and then 30. reminded me of lake michigan, where a hard wind could roll in from the north and you'd lose 50 degrees in an hour, it was like that, only the wind was harder. the wind on the plains is like a wild horse, it shrieks and changes directions easily, and doesn't seem to be influenced by the water, because there isn't any.

i was mulling over that boston situation since it's kind of my alter-ego, that other leverett, whose ancestors are buried there downtown near leverett circle, who lives like a yuppie and enjoys the fine life of a regal, beautiful city. who's to say i'd be hanging around the finish line of a marathon, but it's all pretty random sometimes, you never know. other times it seems like it was meant to be, but how can you say that when nails are flying all over the place? i say 5k is as much as they'll get out of me and i'll avoid the crowds, thank you, and the new york subway too, my sister's moving out this way, to las cruces, and she might wilt in the sun like a saguaro but she'll at least stay out of those subway caves where you can't get out unless you can jump a turnstile, and you better not say anything bad about the yankees.

then there's west, texas which got me for a minute until i figured out it was west, texas, not west texas, because i live in west texas and you know something like that can't happen without everyone being related to everyone and tragedy compounding. to me it's ok as long as it wasn't deliberate, i'm getting kind of tired of these people just wiping everyone out why, because they're sick or something. if you make an honest mistake, say you drop a cigarette in the fertilizer vat, that's a different story.

with my son here, i'm hoping to play some red-dirt, get out the instruments, string the guitar and maybe fix the lap dulcimer, play the fiddle and his mandolin, maybe get some people out here. i don't know what it'll sound like altogether, if i could get some people out here. not even sure it could be done. but it's worth a try and we already have a quick gig coming up, an end-of-semester party for the writing lab. they like their music around here. there's no way we can go, and not bring these instruments. might be, they know slightly different songs like dixie soldier, and they play them faster. aside from that, it's nothing i can't handle.

as for the corner, saw two wrecks up there in two days, right next to each other, but that was after going a few months without seeing any. so you never know, you can't take it for granted. if i'd a been better prepared, or had a few minutes to rub together, i'd a whipped out my phone and taken pictures of shattered glass, tow trucks, policemen standing around discussing speed and tire marks, a woman just sitting there, in her car, dead center of the intersection, as traffic starts up and gingerly goes around her. what do you say to someone like that? you know she has a phone, already called for help, even though you don't hear anything yet. a guy walks over to offer to her, i'll push your car out of the way, if that's even possible. but it's not. the tow trucks do their thing and an hour later, i'm going back to work, kind of riding a tenuous bicycle over little glass shards.

first little league baseball game coming up, tomorrow, i'll be there; then, maybe, we'll go to a tech baseball game and see how it's done by the bigger guys. then, a birthday coming up, and, i've been working on the folk tales, and that's good, but somewhat incomplete, like everything, and i've done virtually no other writing, poetry, stories, anything. just a red-dirt song, and an unplayed one at that. not much to show for april, but then, a person's got to take a break once in a while, from everything. period. ba.

happy birthday!




















april rocks!

tradition

back when the wind was coming from the south, it was hot and dry and dusty, and i was beginning to notice that line somewhere around 20 mph where the little gritty sand gets in your teeth. i'm not sure about that line; i'd like to know if it's at 20, 23, 18, or what, but i know it when i feel it. i could hear some fire trucks out in the city; apparently when it's that windy & dry, there's some fire danger.

but then it all got hit by a cold front from the north. the sky got cloudy and gray, and this wind was much colder. when we woke up this morning it was sleeting and freezing on the ground and then it became huge snowflakes that were blowing all around blocking your vision, not because there were so many of them so much, but because they were all over the place, and not just falling straight down. of course when it's snow it's water and we're glad to see it on one level or another, this place being as dry as it is, but i'd covered the plants and they wouldn't get much of that water anyway. and also, you got an inch of snow or so, that's not really all that much water. it's equivalent to a light watering. if it clears right up and gets warm, which it certainly will (this being april and all), that water will be gone in a minute. things might be a shade greener though.

speaking of april, watch for the april rocks display which i'll make the minute i have a minute. things have been a bit busy lately what with kids, soccer and baseball practice, doctors, and running around. i haven't been able to create much, haven't even tended to business much. i won the ncaa bracket but of course i don't gamble; i'd picked louisville for the men's championship, and they won, and this was like the only time i ever got it right. it's pretty much of a random pick on my part anyway; some years i do better than others, but for the most part i just like having the names of all those universities roll off my tongue and that way, when somebody mentions some place like gonzaga, i know a little about it, where it is maybe, or something about its luck in the tournament over the years. we've been talking basketball a little because we have a good friend in the program; we changed coaches here and the new one took him on, and this is good because we like him and we can continue to know a little about the program, the games, etc. i got some hunches from him, about who might win, who might upset someone else, but it was the first inside information i'd gotten in years, and it only pertained to few teams, and besides, when you get five young kids on the court to play five more, anything can happen any time, and that's about the only solid thing i've learned over the years.

so apparently, you get all this snow and rain and ice dancing around on the roads, you get a few accidents out there, and people have a little trouble getting to work. it's not so much that they can't drive in it as that it appears unexpectedly in places you didn't expect it, around a corner or when you were looking at something else. a few no-shows here at the lab, and i actually have time to blog, but i have to give an exam later, and i'm walking, because i wouldn't ride my bike in this stuff. when i walked in, the cold hard wind was blowing snow in my face and even my wool hat wasn't keeping me warm enough. i thought about when i arrived in iowa, what was it 1975, and for many years, the whole eleven that i lived there, i kept hearing people say, april ninth, april ninth, worst blizzard we ever had was april ninth. another thing they said was, yeah, mostly the snow comes from the west, comes rolling off the rockies in colorado or montana or alberta, or wherever, but every once in a while it comes around from the northeast, circles around and picks up all that snow and bluster from the lakes, that's what happened on april ninth apparently. this doesn't seem to be an issue on the high plains, we don't have any lakes, but we're a bit closer to the mountains, so it can be a lot colder and come whipping around like it did today, suddenly and in these wide, sweeping fronts blowing across the plains.

it reminds me, i was telling my story about how people don't know north from south anymore, they don't need to because of their phones, they don't even need to know first street from second, and this guy tells about moving to town with a moving van and being unable to find the simplest thing, because of the lack of mountains. how do you know which way is west, if you don't have any mountains? i'd never thought of it. i'd heard, living in kansas one time, that everyone in kansas knew north from south, knew where they were every minute, you had to, because it was so flat. if it was daytime you'd look at the sun and notice how it moved across your windshield as you drove. i'm not sure how people do it. maybe you take out your phone, and your phone notices which way the sun is moving across the horizon, and it asks the sun if it's daylight savings time or what. phones make it their business to know this stuff, but i'm like everyone else, i'm beginning to lose track. i'm glad, though, that they make most of the streets east, west, north, south, because i've lived in places where they twist around and it unsettles you, whereas here you get that kansas feeling that everything goes somewhere eventually, though it may take you a while, if you get on the bigger roads, eventually you'll see a sign. and that's what you use, even if it's pitch black outside.

live in west texas, you have to go to a rodeo, i figured, so when i heard the abc professional rodeo was in town, i rounded up the kids and headed over there. this parking lot near the auditorium was totally full, it had some trailers that were ten parking spaces long, lots of horse poop there, that parking lot seemed to be for the rodeo workers itself. we ended up way over by the football stadium, in spaces that were heavily marked for football game day, but seemed to be pretty much empty at seven on a saturday night in march. the stadium itself was lit up, empty, pretty, as we walked by it on our way to the auditorium. in the auditorium we bought tickets, and they gave us five free small sacks of popcorn along with huge drinks.

when we entered the auditorium they were doing some spiel about how great the usa was, and everyone was standing. i sensed the anthem coming, and stopped, but it was hard to stand there with three drinks, five popcorns, and a hat that the little fellow got tired of. we kept walking. but then the prayer started, and i felt even more comfortable, so i stopped again. but it was a long prayer. and i was afraid of spilling these enormous drinks. eventually we kept walking again. nobody seemed to mind.

the rodeo is cowboy skills: riding a bull. riding a horse while roping a bull. jumping off the horse getting the bull off its feet, wrapping a rope around its feet. some of these guys were pretty good at it. others just plain missed the bull and didn't get another chance. they had these 'rodeo clowns' and apparently one of their jobs is to distract the bull so that if he's going to gore anyone, he goes after a clown who knows how to get away. it's a whole world and people came from far away to see it; the performers were from far and wide, towns like calgary alberta and boot stomp, wyoming.

they announced that any kid under ten could come and enter the arena and try to win these big prizes and my seven-year-old wanted to do it and led me to this tunnel going down onto the arena floor; the tunnel was enclosed, and hot, and there were a lot of kids though some of the parents stuck with their kids as long as they could. i let him follow other kids down into the tunnel but i could still see him from the rail above. then they had to wait about ten long minutes. i got claustrophobic, even though i wasn't the one in the tunnel. i began to worry that he was the only black kid in the whole auditorium, and that he was surrounded and unable to get out of the tunnel even if he wanted to.

he, however, was happy in there. i heard the rules; there'd be hundreds of kids out there, and three small calves would have pink ribbons on their tails and the idea was for the kids to pull the ribbons off their tails. when it started the kids tore around in a huge pack and the little calves, scared, stuck together and tore around also. mine was right in there among them. the heck of it was, though, that he didn't appear to know the rules. everyone else knew the rules, but he didn't hear them, because he was in the tunnel, and didn't come to the rodeo last year. or whatever. he tore around, and seemed to catch up to a cow, but didn't come out of it with a ribbon.

i breathed deeply. claustrophobia over. it seemed like a pretty safe crowd, kind of like west texas itself. conservative, religious, maybe, but safe.

the question, as i told my boys, one of whom wants to be a cowboy now, is whether it really hurts the animals or not. sure we saw cows and horses bucking and throwing themselves way in the air, trying to get rid of their rider. had they been tortured before being turned loose? it was hard to say. they were active, and looked mad, but sometimes they just looked confused, or they were like, ok tie me up, but then let me go so i can go eat. sometimes the animals had these airy looks in their eyes, like why would thousands of people want to see this?

they take easter seriously around here; they give you monday off, on the assumption that most places in texas are seven to ten hours away, so to really give you sunday off, they have to give you one more day for driving. they don't seem to hold that feeling for friday, though. easter services, it was beginning to be spring, but the eggs, filled with candy and such, were hidden out on a muddy yard where they'd done construction, and it was an uneasy match of easter's best clothes, and texas's reddest mud. my own son, who lives entirely for the candy, happened to step on a construction nail, but we couldn't find any blood, so didn't ship him off for a tetanus shot. a religious experience, i guess, kind of like how i felt, letting him go down into that tunnel, trust in fate, hope that it'll be ok, keep your eyes open so you don't lose a little kid in a big crowd. one thing about being mixed race, father and son, is that although everyone's reasonably friendly, still we are pretty quickly recognizable, if someone came by maybe five minutes later and said, did you see those two, and where did they go, everyone would know. it would be like if someone wore purple hair. people would pretend not to see it, but in the end, everyone saw it. and noticed it. we weren't the usual cowboys.

but both places were, in the end, safe, and friendly. the lazy river was too; we had our first day of lazy river, of the season, and all i could think of was, this could be the best place in the whole world. one son came out with a pinkish glow in spite of using sunblock. we swam and swam, and stayed outside. we felt the glory of the spring, the sun coming out, the grass turning green, slowly, new flowers and plants coming to life. i get the sense that you have to get out now, while the getting is good, enjoy the sun, do the fun stuff. it doesn't last forever.

looking up the hill toward the texas book depository


pink cowboy hat, dallas hotel


flags over dallas


dry rivers on the way home


one schmuck finds the grassy knoll

note: these pictures are not in order. if you want them in order, go to one of those other weblogs.