American Insanity
The Last Great Dream had its HQ in San Francisco
Bohemians became hippies and then marketed the crap out of their filthy lifestyle
Jack Kerouac sold a million pairs of Levis and many more cups of cappuccino.
I never wanted to be a hippie, not while I lived in New York in the sixties. Hippies were unkempt, if not dirty. They didn’t work and they only spoke gibberish, you dig man? When I arrived in San Francisco, though, the hippie seemed to be a different creature; he or she had a job in construction or at the post office, with hair in a tidy ponytail, wearing clean overalls and work boots. I saw that I couldn’t beat them, so I joined them. They were younger than I by a decade or so. They played a mean game of softball on Sunday mornings in Chenery Park; on Sunday afternoons they tie dyed T-shirts with the slogan “Eat the Rich” above an icon of a skull and crossbones to show they meant business.
Of course, hippies also smoked weed. Not only did they smoke it but they also grew it in the hills and the valleys above the city, sold it in bulk, transported it across the country and reaped the …
The Front Porch
Every Fourth of July, after consuming my fair share of apple pie and ice cream, I enjoy setting off fireworks with my children on the hill behind our house. There are golden sparklers and red-white-and-blue rockets mixed in with some more menacing-looking items that go boom — which did an excellent job of scaring the little ones in their younger days. Sky rockets in flight, loud noises, a feeling of some mild danger contained within a curtain of safety forged in partnership with my wife, who still worries about someone’s hand getting blown off… these are the elements of a family ritual that can only be fully appreciated by people who know what the absence of family and protection can feel like. Every Fourth of July we are grateful for one another, and to live in a county where recreational munitions are available for purchase along most roadsides.
After trudging down the hill to the …
An Unnatural History of the Armadillo
They travel together in thundering herds, and freeze in headlights like deer on the highway
Antonio Rodriquez was given super-strength by a mad doctor — at the price of looking like a ’dillo
A colossal armadillo drawn by Jim Franklin lifts up a highway strip in its mouth as though it were a ribbon, flinging cars and trucks aside
Like many Texans who reach their seventh decade, I find myself thinking a lot about the armadillos in my life.
Many a time I have been with a ’dillo at its demise — or, to be precise, a short period after its demise, swerving in my car to avoid its remains after it was hit by a truck or car and smeared across a highway in the Lone Star state. I have been close to ’dillos in their prime — for example, during the G-8 Economic Summit in 1990, held in a Houston arena where, not far from President George H. W. Bush and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and their peers, I sat and watched the armadillo race that was held in honor of the global leaders. And while I have not been present at the birth of armadillos, I have known and cared for their young.
When I was in junior high school during the 1970s, to earn a Boy Scout merit badge I did some work at Austin’s Natural Science Center, which …
