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

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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.