Texas Drivers No Survivors

A customer said a cold front was coming to Corpus. I looked forward to it until 20 gallons of water poured into my window onto my guitar in thirty seconds. A cold front is what they call a monsoon. It actually wasn't cold at all and the humidity is currently unbearable. I'm certain my COPD is caused by chronic humid conditions that have crippled my lung capacity and led to a rasping wheeze. So, the drought is over in seconds and the waves wash over the front of my fender. I'm indifferent to the speeding cars and swerving trucks. Go ahead and hit me. Who fucking cares? Now the futile pick up trucks with nothing but sand in the bed make sense because the water can rise to two or three feet in a few minutes and these trucks plow through it to the next stop light or to get to the strip club. When I hit a puddle the water splashes under the engine compartment and irrigates the popcorn seeds I have growing under my seat. It's a sparse landscape of the bleak morality we call patriotism.



In an effort to cure my coughing I went to the air conditioned dollar cinema and watched the Total Recall reboot with Colin Ferrell. It cost 75 cents and someone left behind a huge tub of popcorn that I helped myself to. Yeah, I'm really worried about catching some bug from someone who is probably addicted to hand sanitizing gel while I live in a breeding ground for West Nile virus and stray dogs.
The original Total Recall (1990) is superior for several reasons.
1)The Governator
2) Lower Budget
3) Kuato
4) More intriguing P.K. Dick metaphysics.

The remake was watchable even though Jessica Biel's ass wasn't featured nearly as much as I'd hoped. An unintended consequence of this film was how the dominance of media speak/talking heads/ group hysteria/fake news/information being packaged to instil fear/etc. are becoming a mockery of itself. Raise your hand if you read or hear about the conflict in Syria and could explain to me the issues at stake. Raise your hand if bits of useless information like Hillary Clinton's pronouncements and Obama's campaigning and Celebrity gossip and weight loss tips are tossed around like bait in a shark tank and you can actually do absolutely nothing with the information because your life is so specialized that to deviate from the electric rail to your own demise is impossible. When someone like me takes great pains to refuse to be his own jailer and refuse to tread a worn path becomes abhorrent to society then I really wonder what is happening. My goal is basically to embrace reality and be free to respond to reality as I see fit and what I have found in 4 years is that this is:
A) illegal
B) despicable
C) completely misunderstood
D) Damn fucking hard.
E) Terribly depressing

Reality can not be studied using traditional media outlets because they have been purchased by land barons with ulterior political agendas. Our police state now incarcerates more Americans than EXISTED in the days of Thoreau (1845). The catholic edict to reproduce, was strictly a political policy to ensure the dominance of the Vatican, (which would obviously be overrun and turned into a sweatshop manufacturing digital hooded pajamas if Steve Jobs had his way) The Total Recall movie concentrates on the nature of memory and reality but within that realm there is the question of self-destiny, of authentic lifestyles, of self determination and efficacy. All of these have withered away to the point that it's admirable to be a caliper brake specialist and do nothing but work on brake pistons and wheel cylinders and hydraulic lines in the recesses of a Ford Taurus. That doesn't make sense to me and I reject that paradigm. I recall a class I took at Humboldt State University called "Altruism" At the time I wanted to see how such a class would be taught and I can say it was taught very well with group projects, consensus, matrix charts, presentations, good leadership, no manipulation. But now I reflect and can see that the fact such a class exists, a class to teach someone how to think independently and react to reality as they see fit, that such an approach has become outdated and something that you need to be trained to do, is deeply distressing. The number of chronic and epidemic problems I see are mounting to the point that even when The Onion makes fun of them I don't laugh. As long as Americans could make up their own minds then we were in good shape but over the last 20 or 30 years that skill has vanished, or I should say it has been deliberately suppressed and besieged by corporate media and political flim flam. The propaganda is overwhelming and it's safe to say I didn't have a choice on certain things when I was growing up. I was on the electric rail to a determined destiny. It all sounds dangerously like a conspiracy theory, which is yet another media construct to dismiss genuine distress and keep people buying Big Red soda and eating fried chicken by the bucket.
Sometimes I accidentally read the wrong piece of news and am physically repulsed by how obviously the philosophic war is being waged on the innocent mind of children. And immediately following my depression I will identify the good cop/bad cop routine in the media source. All media has become a variation of good cop/bad cop. WAR IN SYRIA....Pretty Girl gets Married.....THOUSANDS SLAUGHTERED....new Cancer Drug effective in mice....OBESITY EPIDEMIC....new menu at fast food restaurant...on and on. I can't believe these news employees are human because they manage to speak AS THOUGH NONE OF IT WERE TRUE. But they are not reporting news, that's not their directive. No, they are concentrating their efforts on producing reactions, to attacking original thought. It's the shock doctrine or fear and awe and the techniques of the torturer who slaps you around and then sends in a kindly man to wash your wounds. But it's global and it's crippling independent thought and if the future world is built on the foundations of concrete dust formed from the sovereignty of children THEN WHAT KIND OF FUTURE IS THAT?


I'm dangerously indifferent to my situation and have determined my van is road worthy for a trip to the Yucatan Peninsula with or without drive shaft u joints. They have u joints in Guatemala, right? As long as I am not forced to inhale second hand cigarette smoke then I think I'll take any kind of destiny. I have my guitar and my knitting needles and an outline to a novel that will make Boris Pasternak rise up from the grave and give me a bear hug. I can tell the van doesn't belong on the coast of Texas and I'm going broke fast here so the best plan is to buy a bass guitar and take the show on the road before the owner of the Firebird drives it away and it explodes.

I won't miss this neon town a bit. Like a good Texan I like to arrive uninvited, murder the local Indians, annex the land by force, shamelessly exploit the natural resources, and leave behind a god awful mess that no one will ever clean up. We call it "progress" because the lexicon of destruction is pliable and at the mercy of political shamanism.