I just visited Lubbock, and was impressed by several things. There was actually a possibility that I would move there, given the fact that New Mexico, where I now live, has become unsustainable for family reasons. Certain family members have to find a place to live, and Lubbock was a possibility. We lived there 2012-2016, and I still have a fondness for the place.

First, as a city, it's incredibly manageable. It's easy to get around. It doesn't confuse you or get you lost much. When you have an address you can figure out where it is. It has everything but it's not too big. Well, not everything - no major-league baseball, for example, but Tech provides most of that excitement pretty well. And its airport is functional and accessible.

Second, my friends there are still close friends. Something about the ultraconservative nature of it makes it so all of us in the "other" category have a lot in common. And they have stayed friends even over the five or six years we have been gone.

My joke as a musician went something like this: Person 1: "Lubbock is so hot, and dry, and dusty, and flat, and miserable, about all you can do is sit around playing music." Person 2: "Yeah, that's what I like about it."

My autobiography & more

http://tlevspress.blogspot.com/2021/09/just-passing-through.html

Lubbock and the covid

I always knew Lubbock had an attitude, and I loved Lubbock anyway. I knew that it was one of the only big cities in the US to consistently vote Republican - it is so conservative that even the poor city folk vote Republican. Or at least they don't vote Democrat. In any case, it's one red town, bless its heart.

Well with the COVID it's been deemed one of the worst. It has a bad combination of situations - students who come and go from around the country, if not the world, a government that is not inclined to put any restrictions on business whatsoever, and people who in general value money more than safety. It doesn't seem to me that it's necessarily a "Republican" thing to avoid wearing masks, and to in general discount the severity of the virus. But it has kind of worked out that way, that Lubbock is right in line with that kind of general sentiment, and as a result it is "one of the worst."

Unlike the rest of Texas, Lubbock, along with Amarillo, actually gets something of a winter. The winds blow hard and cold; there is dust everywhere; people go inside a lot. Winter is actually kind of nice in Lubbock. You get the feeling of winter, and a little bit of the snow, without too much of the inconvenience. One winter it snowed a lot, snowed hard, right before the new year, when we were coming out to New Mexico. Here in the mountains of New Mexico it snowed maybe fourteen inches, and the plows were right on it; they had it cleared off, and people were driving in it. Back in Lubbock, where they'd had maybe only four inches, they still hadn't plowed it when we went back. Someone told me they only had one plow in the city, so they just did the main roads. They don't do the residential streets, they said, because people complain about the piles of snow blocking their driveway, and nobody owns a shovel.

Well it's kind of like the hurricanes in Florida after a while. One side of me says, you knew what you were getting into, you knew this wasn't safe. You vote for Trump, people are going to die. You wreck the environment, the environment will come around and wreck you back.

I don't think Trump intentionally set out to kill those quarter million people. It just happened. It's like Yellow House Canyon. It will go down in history, and future generations might not even know what I'm talking about. The winds that rake across the plains, maybe they'll remember.

Hands Off That Pear

Hands Off That Pear

& 23 other short stories
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more coming!

e pluribus haiku 2017

a thousand original haiku

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Those of you who know the Tech Terrace neighborhood may recognize the cover photo...

Mannequin Challenge

& 20 short stories you can't put down

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memories of roscoe