Got some perspective on Lubbock recently when I left it, and went to the mountains of New Mexico for a vacation. Upon my return, Lubbock was sizzling - going over a hundred every day this week, and people driving their white pickup trucks around, air-conditioned cabs and all, like this is how life is to be lived.

It brings up some interesting questions. If you can make a lot of money by being where the economy is, where people are building, and people have money, is it worth living in a hot plains, flat and dry, with a howling wind and nothing to look at? Actually I kind of like Lubbock for all those things, but you have to admit - not much of a downtown, not much for things to see as you drive around, and endless, relentless, hot & dry.

People have been nice to me in Lubbock, I'll say that. Natalie Maines complains about the culture, the churches, the pressure to be born again or whatever. That doesn't bother me. If people think that you need to be saved, and they love you, and they want to see you go to heaven instead of hell, why shouldn't they open their mouth? You can take it as genuine concern and let it go at that. They don't do that to me, because they don't know me, or maybe because they figure I'm doomed anyway, but either way, I see the church-going nature of the city as a sign of meaning well, no matter how misguided, of wanting what's best for their kids and the world.

So it's like 95, and it's only about noon, and all these white trucks are tearing around cutting me off and getting in a hurry to go somewhere or another. When you have a "peace" bumper sticker you always assume that they're cutting you off out of hostility toward your bumper sticker, but in fact they probably cut everyone off, and they're just in a hurry to get down the road to their next construction site. One guy I saw, maybe at Einstein's bagels, was all dressed up, and I was wondering, you're ok at Einsteins, and in an air-conditioned car, but can you really function in this 95 + weather, all dressed up like that? Seems like the pits of hell to me, especially the synthetic part of it, which gives me a rash. But you have to dress up, get into the political thing, impress everyone. Then, you can eat your bagels on your break.

I myself took the bagels, and headed for the mountains.