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DATELINE
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Where the Wild Things Are - The rubber Sasquatch head stared with glassy eyes from atop its pedestal. Beneath its gaze, Bigfoot Conference attendees milled about Tyler’s Caldwell Auditorium. Children peeked at the hairy visage from around parents’ legs. A pale man wearing black cowboy boots crossed his arms as a friend snapped a picture with his cell phone. Three teenage boys gave mocking thumbs-ups. Like the elusive or mythical creature that inspired it, the rubber Bigfoot was indifferent to the awe, curiosity and ridicule it provoked.
- Fort Hood Notebook
- Killeen -- “I’m blessed.” Those are the two most important words I jotted down as I stood in the courtyard of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s apartment complex, 27 hours after he’d allegedly shot 55 men and women. Thirteen of his 55 military and civilian victims at Fort Hood had died, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, a pregnant, 21-year-old Iraqi war veteran from Chicago and Michael Grant Cahill, a 62-year-old physician’s assistant from Cameron.
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Alone With the Greasewood and the Sage - I move along on my own two good feet down an Upper Valley road, the sun mildly shining after an early morning rain, the air a bit muggy but full of the smells of grass and weeds and wet dirt, the sound of water tumbling in a nearby canal.
As it happens from time to time when my inner psychological coffee pot is perking nicely, I begin to sing. At first I just tootle snatches of a song to the roadside—a bit of “Till There Was You” from The Music Man—but before long I am in full throttle, letting rip a Robert Preston, straw-hat-and-striped-coat tribute to the pleasures of being alive: a thanks for still being able to walk my personal glory roads. -
The High Price of Loyalty - In burnt orange they come. The hordes.
Ninety-four-thousand, one-hundred and thirteen of them. All dressed in burnt-orange shirts with burnt-orange hats, grasping giant burnt-orange foam “No. 1” hands and burnt-orange beer holders to hold their burnt-orange beer. -
After Ike: Same As It Ever Was - The night Hurricane Ike hit Houston, I was jittery and basically drunk by 7 p.m., having consumed all the Miller tallboys in our refrigerator to calm myself and prepare for the upcoming power outage (though the storm would not hit until well after nightfall). As Ike moved in, thudding and howling, I called my best friend every 10 minutes until she lost reception. “I’m in a closet with the dog and the wine,” she said. “This is how I always thought it would end for me.” I repeatedly shook awake my apparently unconcerned husband, a native Houstonian who had lived through this before. “Kevin, what was that? What was that? OK, now what the hell was that?”
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Mayan Mañana - My friends and family in Mexico speak of their country these days as if it were the victim of some cosmic ill fortune. Waves of bad news pummel the country day after day: narco-violence, kidnappings, earthquakes, a global economic crisis, and a swine flu pandemic that in April turned the world’s third-largest city into a ghost town.
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Injured Hearts, Injured Minds - In March, Army Spc. Michael Kern, 22, returned to Fort Hood after a year and a day in Iraq.
Shaken by his experience and disgusted with the war, Kern, a native of Riverside, Calif., tried to readjust by getting as hammered as possible. “Put it this way: For the first month, I was drunk at work, I was drunk 24/7.”
In Iraq the violence had been fast and furious. “We were going through all sorts of bad shit: mortars, IEDs, indirect fire. Anything you can think of we experienced the first day.” -
Dodging the Ditches at GM - Michael Hoinski on the uncertain future of GM’s plant in Arlington.
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The Weather Up There - Excerpts from Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains.
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Dr. Strangevox
In the back room of a studio in North Austin lit only by the glow of computer screens, a producer and singer who calls himself Madd Creole lets out a string of gospel-inflected vocal improvisations. As his voice wavers and slides from note to note, it’s shadowed by a ghostly shimmer …
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