election day

OK I'll be straight with you, I'm a Bernie supporter, and a Democrat. As a Democrat my main concern was whether Bernie could win, given who he is, etc. but I had myself convinced that Hillary is so genuinely unpopular that Bernie had a better chance, so I was prepared to vote for Bernie in the Texas Super Tuesday Democratic primary.

But as the election neared, I had two other problems. First, I had a strong urge to vote in the Republican primary (as anyone can do in Texas; you just say which party you are or you want, at the door, and they give you that ballot) - just to register my feeling about the different Republican candidates, and second, I wanted to have a say in who got elected in the Congressional district.

In our district, this guy is retiring who has been accused locally of using the office to make himself rich; he also was unable to distinguish, back in the day, when somebody closed a federal monument, that it was the Tea Party that had closed down the government, rather than the park ranger himself, and he blasted away at the park ranger for closing down this monument. So he was kind of a laughing-stock, nationally, and very well known for greasing the wheels that got him where he was. People took care of him, financially, and he used the government to take care of them. I thought, and people keep electing this kind of guy? What's up with that?

So now you have these eight or nine candidates vying for the Republican nomination, in this district, which includes Lubbock but also Big Spring and Abilene, and the Democrats have nobody. Nobody. Not a primary race, not a single candidate, nobody. So, going into the general election, you have these Republicans, which start with a Bush advisor, then comes the mayor, then comes the steel-toed boot, then comes the ex-Marine, and they get more conservative from there. The Bush advisor, maybe, is the most liberal of the bunch. And the campaign is nasty, with apparently the dirtiest most low-down accusation they could make of each other being the mere association with the gay community, ads that say, in effect, that so-and-so ran in the color race (?), or worked in an organization that allowed gays to work there, and we might be talking about an army base here, or someone who may have had to allow gays to work there. So, if you're not strongly, publicly, energetically committed to excluding gays, you're not conservative enough? That's what it would appear. The steel-toed boot went so far as to say something like, hey, if you even appear to support the gays, that's really not what Republicanism is about, is it? At one point the poor Marine guy went into the hospital. Said he'd been attacked by terrorists, attacked by guys with guns and all, but never attacked so viciously as he was in this election.

Well under that situation, I really wanted to jump in there and say something, because, if not, anyone could be elected; that's how we got stuck with Cruz. In that kind of situation, it's whoever gets a fair number of supporters, enthusiastic or not, and the race is clearly among them; we Democrats, if we're true to ourselves, are off voting for Bernie or Hillary. And in fact, it was a raucous election, and we will get stuck with one of those guys, and if there was a large number of Democrats voting Repub I didn't see them.

At the last minute, I stuck to my Dem identity, and took a Dem ballot. I decided that if we really wanted a Dem to run we should have found a Dem to run, and run Dem. Maybe I should have done it myself. Much as I can't bear the spectrum of Repub candidates, at least they got the signatures. They got up there and ran; we didn't.

The place is crazy; it tricks you into thinking a Bush advisor is reasonable, liberal, educated, clear-thinking, acceptable. This guy advised Bush on energy issues. The others make him look like a calm, friendly, reasonable guy who would be our best choice in Congress. I can tell you this; in contrast to the others, that is true. That I could possibly consider voting for such a person is testament to how twisted my reality could possibly become, in a situation where my choice is basically so far away from my own thinking, that I question whether I can really even call it a "choice".

football

OK so the football season is beyond its halfway point, and I know enough about it to know we Raiders are a little better than expected, but not quite up to the level of the big boys, which this year includes Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Baylor, and maybe TCU who we almost beat. I stand by my earlier claim that science and health are showing football to be deadly, at least at the level it's being practiced and played at these days, but I also find that I totally love Texas folks and can't help be drawn in to this Big 12 kind of town, totally involved in these games and their outcomes.

Of course I also have a lurid fascination for Oklahoma State, which received a few million from T. Boone Pickens, spent it wisely, and got a bunch of Texas kids to come up there and turn around and beat all the Texas teams. Oklahoma, too, grabbed our quarterback and made him a star. And it totally rankles all the Texas teams when they get beat by Oklahoma, it's like your little brother beating you at chess. It's unacceptable! But we don't have a T. Boone Pickens, so we have to play by the book, and use real money, and get kids who don't mind living in Lubbock. A tall order!

So to me the low point of the season was when Baylor's quarterback broke his neck and all they could talk about was this young kid who was coming up behind him, now they'd have a chance to have a look at him. All these teams have three or four quarterbacks, and sometimes the one who's playing isn't the crowd favorite, but wait a minute, the kid broke his neck....the article didn't mention whether he'd be paralyzed for life, or just have to wear one of those ugly neck braces around for an eon. I don't want to be so into fandom that all I can do is talk about the next victim.

Yet, like everyone, I look forward to the Thanksgiving Day game, and the rest of our schedule, and though I don't actually watch any of it, I do care. You can't live in Lubbock and not care. If I ever have a couple million to blow, I'll consider it, really. No, to tell you the truth, I probably won't. I wouldn't support that six trillion dollar war, either, except I had to, they made me pay for it. That's the way it is, though, we're all one family. If one of us is out there gambling the millions, the rest of us end up paying for it.

So the frat apologized today, for the events of last September that touched off the "No Means No" campaign. Their sign had implied that No meant something else besides No, and this was deeply offensive to lots of people, including at least half a dozen in my office building, which houses teachers of Italian, teachers of French, teachers of Spanish, teachers of Portuguese, you get the picture. I found it ironic that people of all these diverse language backgrounds - the place is like Europe, after all - found it necessary to post large signs that declared what "No" meant, as if there was any doubt, or any word that could possibly be less ambiguous in the world of language vocabulary.

But back to the frat. I've been challenged to give one good reason why any frat should be allowed to continue propagating its "brotherhood" idea, which plays a huge role in shaping the social lives of male students on this campus. The women and their sororities don't seem to be as bad, but many of them target the fraternities as housing the most desirable husbands, or boyfriends, to start off properly, and so often they seem to be all in it together. But they play a huge role on campus, so the question would be, can you ban them? Can you even imagine a campus without them? Can people live normal lives free of the entire institutions that keep them going?

When I was in college, frats were enormous drinking machines; there were guys in there who drank it by the keg, and you could tell. Soon after that they turned to coke, at least at Univ. of Iowa, and from what they say here at Tech, it seems to be similar here. Where do they get the money? Who knows? Are they in collusion to see how many lives they can ruin, on the way to ruining their own, or driving the name of the frat down into the gutter? It seems to me that coke makes people more arrogant; they drive faster, they get an attitude, they lord it over people around them. Don't frats have a problem with that kind of stuff already?

OK, so I'll admit, in fact I have no idea what they do in those frats; I don't even have a reliable source to tell me. I can say that it seems that well over half of cars have some kind of greek letters on the window; student conversation on social media such as yik yak seems to be obsessed with them, as if they are everything, you're either in, or not. But I really don't know. And I wouldn't know if it was even possible to ban them, or get a campus to live without them. How would that be done? And would it make things any better?

Start up a conversation. Get some freshman to say he's thinking of joining one. Let people tell you what that entails, besides a lot of money. Do you get access to their test files? Do you get free "tutoring"? Or is it just a benign kind of social thing, where you have somebody to hang with on weekends, and they pretty much just stand around outside, eating good food? Let them tell you some good reasons to join frats. I've forgotten most of the ones I ever knew.

mil here, mil there, whatever

About six years ago a guy was convicted and sent to jail for 25 years for embezzling $77 million from a local company. He was married and had three children. As a writer I have natural fascination for such people and that's where my questions come from. I mean no disrespect, and of course have never met him, I leave his name out of this so that he's a little harder to track down, though people from around here will know who I mean immediately, and if you really want to know you can read about how we trick-or-treated at the house he'd built.

So he was working for a local oil company, and was maybe an accountant, and his superior had more or less lost track, and pretty soon, what, 77 million was found in his possession? He had been buying things around town: a truck stop, a bunch of antique cars, a house that he poured millions into, etc. And nobody saw this? One guy who was working at our house said he thought he knew who we were talking about, if he hadn't been so obvious spending the money, he might have never got caught. It makes sense. But $77 million?

Then there's the question of his wife. Here they are raising three little kids. Is she in the dark about where these millions come from? Or, if she knows, does she encourage it? or cause it? After you've spent three, four, twenty million, do you wonder if this is going to go on forever? Or if maybe you deserve this good fortune? I'm kind of wondering what it does to your head, to have this kind of running faucet of free money to spend, and not really be able to hide it, or be discreet, or do the things that would keep it coming forever. Maybe a craftier way would have been, have a swiss bank account, a false identity, a second passport, whatever. It didn't seem like "crafty" was part of the picture.

Finally, I'm sure the kids have quite the inheritance, and it's six years on now. What kind of damage does that do to them? How are they feeling about their dad, or mom, or former neighbors, or whoever else was involved? Just curious because, I'm sure, it'll find its way into a novel. And that novel could be reality-based, but more likely in this case, not. I think I'd rather imagine, than in fact know the answers.

natalie

So I had this idea the other day, that I should just say before I know too much, and it helps actually that I'm a complete outsider, don't have a clue, don't really even know the people involved.

And that is, the city needs to make the first move, and invite Natalie Maines back into the fold as a native daughter, excellent musician that she is, and give her a place on center stage right next to her relatives and all the other proud musicians who have called Lubbock home.

Now I say this because I know the whole feud is personal, and I'm sure she's said stuff that hurt everyone's feelings, and they've hurt her feelings, yadda yadda yadda. But, she grew up here, she's ours, and we're grownups. It's time to just say, let bygones be bygones. It doesn't matter what she said or did. She's a great musician; time will bear that out. It doesn't matter if some of her songs blast Lubbock or even people she knew.

Lubbock had a music fest the other day; it honored some people with "Hall of Fame" and other status, and some people played music here and enjoyed the beneficence of a city that is now aware of the fine music it produces. Natalie "couldn't attend." That struck me as the kind of thing that happens in a personal feud. That's all I know, believe me. But somebody has to make the first move to get out of this stuff. I say, rise to the challenge, Lubbock.