Yellow Rose

I believe Texas actually exists. I've been through it, so that helps solidify it in my head as a real place. I only went through the top part though, along Interstate 40 through Amarillo. It was an unplanned roadtrip from Southern California, where I am from, to help someone move to what I thought was surely the bleakest part of the world I could think of, the rural area outside of Springfield, Missouri.

But I hadn't been to southwestern Missouri yet, so that was just a lot of conjecture and Big City Coastal Elite* Bias. By the time I got Amarillo, I knew I was wrong about the greater Springfield area, because there was no way anywhere I was going to experience would be more bleak, more sun-blasted and barren, more hostile to life and the human ability to imagine better things than Amarillo. The city itself was completely forgettable, but by that point, once we had climbed out of the Cajon Pass really not too far from where we started in SoCal, the landscape had been an unbroken highland plateau of beige, untroubled by trees, water, variation or hope. There was a small blip of life around Albuquerque, but the memory of it faded like a mirage almost immediately.

Getting through Amarillo, the effect of the ennui and despair had accumulated into real existential oppression. Texas was hostile, or at least showed its indifference to our survival in it by aggressively showcasing its inability to support life by any visible means. Waterless, fruitless, cursed by God and the conquistador legacy with a name that fittingly just means "yellow." It means everything that the people there still also insist on pronouncing it incorrectly, so it in effect means nothing at all.

We were eventually delivered from thoughts of self-annihilation, unexpectedly, by rolling green hills around Oklahoma City, of all fucking places, but that's a different story that will have to use a different metaphor to talk about how fucked up that place is.

I know it's not fair to base all of my perceptions of Texas on one experience with what is certainly it's worst city, but... I don't know, Texas is pretty big. What if Amarillo is only average? That would mean half the places in Texas are worse than that drying carbuncle on the world's ass. I have to believe, rationally at least, that that's a possibility.

I know that sounds uncharitable, but I'm trying to say I acknowledge Texas is there. It's not a fantasy land of faerie and wish-fulfillment, even though the only other current evidence we have is that it is at least in part populated by some combination of trickster djinn and outright devils compelled by their nature to deception and destruction. There's no responsible way to approach Texas as an idea with any kind of credulity after reading the state GOP 2022 party platform, which can only be described as "violently fucking stupid." I mean, it codifies the lie that Joe Biden isn't the legitimate president, calling him "acting president," which means, what, his oath didn't count? And Trump is still lawful president, even though he live in Florida crashing randos' weddings at a golf club and begging people to clap for him? OK, to be fair, that is the same kind of shit he did while he was actually president, but there's no government check that comes with it anymore.

He's not even trying to be president, so according to the Texas GOP platform, there is no actual president. There's a bitter joke here to be made by disaffected progressives that say the result of the Biden administration so far would more or less bear that out, but I'm not sure this is the platform or the moment. It requires some more heavy thinking. After all, Joe Biden is from Delaware, a place I'm almost certain is made up.

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*I know that normally means "Jewish" but in my case it just means I went to college.