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2:12 pm CST
Places I Have Lived: Addendum

And what are those places like now? ...

Newark Avenue, Fort Worth: We left for Arlington in 1957; the other families, all white, were also moving to the suburbs during this time. Within a few years, it had become an entirely black neighborhood. I revisited it several times over the years; as late as 1973 our house was still recognizable. Five years later, when I next returned to the street, it had become a grim place--a ghetto so squalid that nothing was recognizable. Everywhere I turned there were menacing stares. I drove away quickly, and did not return.

Lilly Lane, Arlington: Over the years, our house changed very little. However, in the mid-1990s, it was razed to allow the widening of Center Street. Cars now drive where our house once stood. As for the rest of the neighborhood, it looks much the same, although the demographics have changed. There is now a large Asian population, as evidenced by several nearby Asian shopping centers.

Highway 157, Mansfield: In the late 1960s, someone painted the white house green. Otherwise, for a long time, it looked the same. Then, in the 1970s, the house fell into disrepair, and the property filled up with inoperable cars and other junk. In the 1980s the house disappeared, and now the area is so full of subdivisions and other new structures that it is impossible to tell where the house once stood. What was once rural is now suburbia; no one wakes to the rooster's crow here.

North Main Street, Cleburne: By the 1970s, every house was razed and the entire street became commercial. Several fast-food restaurants now stand where our house and the others once stood. Nothing looks remotely the same. The streets to the immediate east, however, are still residential and are beginning to become gentrified, as affluent new owners restore the old homes.

Forrest Avenue, Cleburne: Shortly after we moved in 1967, the white frame house was razed and replaced by a new brick house. The surroundings, however, are much the same.

Chambers Street, Cleburne: Of the five houses of my youth, this is the only one that remains and looks the same ...

8:27 am CST
Why You Should Be Paranoid about the Google Subpoena, and What You Can Do About It

Mark Morford: Horse Sex Porn Candy Teens! Inside! Fresh Google search terms to confound Dubya and the FBI. Also: Is Bush a fascist?

8:38 pm CST
Places I Have Lived: The Early Years

I was thinking how you could visualize the places you've lived, visualize each room and the objects it contained, also the surrounding neighborhood and the people, and how you could list these things, along with a few of the random memories they evoke, and though it would be an incomplete picture (you would only list memories related to that place and no other, and you would limit yourself to a few hundred words per place), it would still convey the essence of your life at that time, how life felt, and who and what you were--and if you listed the places in order, you would see a progression, it would tell your story, and the things unsaid would still be felt ...

Newark Avenue, Fort Worth: ... traveling east on Rosedale, you turned left on Newark ... a short street no longer than a block, it ended at the railroad tracks ... a street of small box houses with television antennas and neat lawns ... our house was gray and had a gravel driveway ... in the living room was the big green couch and the black-and-white Howdy Doody television set ... in the hallway was the bookshelf which held the encyclopedias, the bathroom was on the right, my parents' bedroom on the left, my room at the end ... in my room was a table where I played with my "little men"--small plastic soldiers, cowboys, and Indians ... on the bedpost hung the string of lollipops Grandpa gave me on his final visit ... in the window over my bed were yellow curtains with a monkey-balloon-giraffe motif; I would gaze at the curtains at naptime when I was unable to go to sleep ... back in the hall, when you got to the living room, you turned left and there was the kitchen ... in the kitchen was the back door which took you to the backyard ... there was a clothesline in the backyard and a woodpile where I stood one morning in my good-smelling fringe leather jacket singing "King of the Wild Frontier" ... the yard was surrounded by a cyclone fence, and beyond were other backyards with cyclone fences ... there was also an alley ... one time in this alley I ran from my mother when she told me to come back; I did this only because I realized I could ... she chased me ... I looked back, saw how mad she was, saw she was gaining, and stopped ... next door was Vicki's backyard where during a birthday party we saw the Goodyear blimp fly over ... Terry lived across the street ... she had a see-saw and swing-set and a sandbox where she made mud pies ... we rode stick horses ... on a winter day she came to see me while I was sick; I was lying on the couch, looking up at the icycles which hung like Santa Claus beards from the eaves ... a milk man delivered milk every morning ... on Sundays my mother and I walked to the church on Rosedale; the preacher would shout and stomp, his face turning red as a beet ... one day, while he was doing this, I asked my mother why he was so mad; she told me to be quiet ... sometimes I would play in the front yard; one day Scott appeared and took away my tricycle ... he was older than me; people said he wasn't "all there" ... when my father got home from work, he went down the street and brought back my tricycle...

Lilly Lane, Arlington: ... our house stood on the northeast corner of Lilly Lane and Center ... at first, there were no houses on the west side of Center or the south side of Lilly Lane, just big fields ... on my fifth birthday, there was a brush fire in the southern field; I watched it through the living room and thought of Bambi ... later they began building houses across the street and the air was fragrant with fresh-sawn wood ... you could make things with the pieces of wood left by the workmen ... our house had a concrete driveway and garage ... in the living room was a mahogany couch, easy chair, a Hi-Fi set, and the black-and-white Twilight Zone television ... the hallway led to the bedrooms ... my parents' and sister's rooms were at the end of the hallway, mine was the first on the left ... I had a desk and child's typewriter that only typed caps, art supplies, and a shelf that held my small library: the outer space book, various Golden Books, Three Stooges comics, Mad magazines ... for a time I had a pet squirrel monkey named Sam who stayed in a cage by my bed when he wasn't perched on my shoulder or running amok through the house ... my window looked out on the front yard; it was from there that I watched the birthday party across the street, the one I wasn't invited to ... in the backyard was a grill, picnic table, and swing set ... on summer nights in the backyard you could hear the cannon shots from Six Flags ... the backyard was unlike others in the neighborhood, in that it had a stockade fence instead of cyclone; thus it served as a frontier fort for many a cap-gun battle ... for a while there was a large hole in the middle of the backyard, dug by my father in an effort to build a fall-out shelter; the project was never finished; he later filled in the hole ... next door lived Roger whom I would visit on Friday nights to watch Tarzan movies ... farther down, on Southridge Street, lived Joe; across from his house was a tree-filled lot; one day we climbed the tallest tree, which held the remnants of an old tree house ... I slipped, cutting my chest on a rusty nail ... an older boy said I would die because the cut was over my heart; I cried ... but Joe took me to see his mother who doctored the cut, and I lived ... the school was in walking distance ... you went east on Lilly Lane to Southridge, then north on Southridge, then turned east on Tucker, then stopped at the creek to throw rocks into the water with the other boys, then continued to Collins Street where you arrived at school, late ...

Highway 157, south of Mansfield, the white wooden farmhouse ... at first, I shared a room with my sister, but later my father converted the sleeping porch into a bedroom for me ... from my window at night, looking east, I could see the tv towers on Cedar Hall ... on a table in my room were my Aurora monster models, and on a shelf was my library: Tom Sawyer, Famous Monsters magazines, DC comics ... on my walls were a 1930s Buck Jones lobby card (bought for 25 cents at a flea market in Fort Worth), a photo of Boris Karloff (received in reply to a fan letter), a picture of the Beatles, and a souvenir map of Six Flags ... the back door of the house was in my room; outside the door were six wooden steps ... one night it snowed, and the snow covered the sixth step ... on the north side of the house stood a tin-roof barn with rusty old farm implements and an antique sewing machine inside ... one day my mother was cleaning out the barn when she reached into a cardboard box and found a large black snake ... she ran screaming across the yard ... when my father got home he killed the snake with a hoe and tossed it into the ditch ... every day I would visit the ditch to see how much the snake had rotted ... next to the barn was the chicken house where I gathered eggs every morning ... and on the other side of the chicken house was the well house where I would climb onto the flat roof wearing a red towel for a cape and jump off ... on school mornings, my sister and I would wait at the end of the dirt driveway for the school bus; in the afternoons I would jump off the bus and run to the house in a hurry to watch Superman on television ... on the same television we watched the JFK assassination coverage, and a few months later the Beatles on Ed Sullivan ... it was quiet in the country, except for the occasional sonic boom, and at night the stars were brilliant ... also, at night, you could see the twin glows of Dallas and Fort Worth on the northern horizon ... on summer nights I slept on a cot on the front porch and woke with the rooster's crow ... the nearest friend was Joe, who lived a mile away down a dirt road to the west; sometimes, on lonesome summer days, I would ride my bike to his house, where a tire swing hung in the yard ... or I might ride down Highway 157 to Sam Jackson's Grocery Store and buy a Mission Orange and read the comics ... but usually I just climbed into the tall tree by the barn and read a book, now and then setting it down to watch the cloud shadows move across the pastures and cotton fields, with no other sound but the wind in the leaves, and daydream ...

North Main Street, Cleburne ... it was called Main because it was the main north-south thoroughfare through town; thus, it was both a business and residential street ... across from the street from our house was a chiropractor's office and a monument works, and for the first few months our downstairs front bedroom served as the office for my father's newspaper; later he set up an office downtown, and our house became just a house ... the house was vast, with more rooms than we ever used ... one of these unused rooms was an upstairs kitchen; evidently, at one time, the upper floor had been rented as an apartment ... my bedroom upstairs was large and cavernous; I did not have enough belongings to fill it ... in the summer we slept downstairs because it was cooler ... as there were only two downstairs bedrooms, I slept on a cot on the sleeping porch, and was often kept awake by the noise in the nearby Santa Fe railroad shops: the idling and revving of engines, the boom of box cars crashing together, all night long ... but, in the fall, I was back in my upstairs bedroom ... it was an old house, like most in the neighborhood ... and most of the neighbors were old ... like Mr. Barnes who lived next door and would tell me tales of growing up in Cleburne in the 1880s ... and the Tamale Lady down the street--called the Tamale Lady because she sold tamales out of her home, but better known for her artwork, the strange dioramas that filled her house: baby dolls in handmade caskets surrounded by Christmas lights and Bible verses painted on plywood ... it was the same on the street behind us: old houses with mostly old people ... but, though the houses were old, they were generally well kept ... as you went closer to the Santa Fe shops, however, the houses were less well kept ... the kids who lived there were more likely to get in trouble, and get you in trouble ... I hung out with a few of them; one of them sold me a Playboy magazine for a quarter, the October 1965 issue, the first I'd ever seen ... they introduced me to shoplifting ... but shoplifting made me nervous, so I stopped hanging out with them ... I roamed the streets on my own, walking up the viaduct to watch the activity in the shops, or walking the short distance to downtown ... I would go to the library to check out books and visit the upstairs museum which no one else ever seemed to visit: dusty glass cases full of Indian artifacts and dubious fossils such as the petrified mermaid ... I would also go to the newsstand where the one-eyed, tobacco-chewing man would sell me Playboy and other men's magazines with no questions asked; I created a false bottom in one of the drawers of my bureau to hide them ...

Forrest Avenue, Cleburne: ... the white frame house ... there was a shortage of bedrooms, so mine was in the dining room ... though there was a door that could be closed and a curtain drawn, and there was another route between the living room and kitchen, this was the shorter route, so my room saw a lot of traffic ... concerned about security, I packed my men's magazines into a wooden box and hid it in the narrow space between the toolshed and the next door neighbor's fence--a good hiding place until I made the mistake of showing my collection to another boy, an innocent who had never seen such things ... I did this not as a favor to him, but to entertain myself with his shocked reaction ... later he got into the box and tore up the magazines and scattered the pieces all over the front yard ... my cousin from California moved in with us to go to college in Hillsboro and work for my father; as a result, there was a change in bedrooms ... he and I were put in the front bedroom on twin beds, and my sister got the dining room ... my side of the room was meticulously neat, but on his side burnt matches littered the floor ... my bookshelf was full of James Bond novels, UFO books, Old West magazines, and comics, but after I made failing grades in math and science my father took away the books until such time as my grades improved ... then, for a long time, the shelf was bare ... my cousin and I talked a lot, often late into the night; he was interesting ... he would reminisce fondly about California, and complain about Texas ... I could see his point, but the complaining got old ... a lot of things got old, such as being the object of his ridicule ... finally, one day in the kitchen I slipped and fell, and right afterwards saw him looking at me as if he thought it was humorous ... I hit him, and he hit me back ... after that, we talked less ... our house was close to the city park; at night you could hear the noise at the Little League games; sometimes I rode there on my bike, transistor radio strapped to the handlebars ... our house was also close to the junior high where I attended school ... I could walk there in a minute ... one Monday morning, on the way to school, I detoured into the alley behind our house and ducked into the toolshed and hid; when everyone was gone, I went into the house and spent the day watching television ... I did this for a week until I was caught ... I had a dog named Jinx ... one day we went out of town for the day and before we left my father chained Jinx to the porch with a bowl of water; when we got back we discovered she had jumped over one of the high ledges on the porch and, unable to reach the ground, strangled to death on her chain ... she was buried in the back yard ...

Chambers Street, Cleburne: ... the brick house ... when we first moved in, my cousin was still rooming with me, but a month later he went back to California and I had the new bedroom to myself ... it was summer; I would play records late into the night; I played Sergeant Pepper over and over ... at first I played records on a portable mono player borrowed from my sister, but the next Christmas I got a stereo player ... I also had an AM radio by my bed; at night I would tune the dial to XERF to listen to the screaming, tongue-talking preachers ... later, I got a shortwave radio and would listen to the BBC, Radio Netherlands, Radio Havana ... on my walls were psychedelic posters, also a poster of W. C. Fields, also the Buck Jones lobby card I had bought years ago ... outside my door was the hallway telephone; it could reach into my room, enabling me to talk to friends in privacy ... friends would sometimes hang out in my room while they were tripping; I didn't trip in those days, and rarely smoked grass ... I was too prone to panic reaction ... I did many things in this room ... I drew pictures ... I played with my tape recorder, creating my own goofy radio shows and avant-garde sounds ... I screened my experimental Super 8 films for friends ... but mostly I read (Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Kerouac, Vonnegut) ... my library grew to fill a huge bookcase ... I stopped reading comics, then discovered underground comics and started reading those ... I also wrote, in longhand and on my Underwood typewriter; I kept a diary, wrote poems, stories, unfinished novels and screenplays ... sometimes I left my room to watch the color tv in the living room, but mostly I stayed in my room ... the entire world was in my room ... but sometimes I could not focus on books, or movies, or any of the usual activities; I would become restless and walk the neighborhood ... the football stadium was down the street, sometimes I would walk there and climb to the highest seat where I could see Highway 67 stretching westward into the sunset ... I wanted to get on that road and take it as far as it would go, then take another road and never stop ...

To be continued some other time, maybe ...

3:21 pm CST
Batgirl!



3:16 pm CST
The Beast System

The Beast never announces its true intentions; instead, it makes its innovations seem reasonable, and necessary, and good. It pretends to protect us from Evil, when it is in fact Evil itself, and its innovations are not for our good, but rather, for our destruction ...
Iris Scanning for New Jersey Grade School

6:25 pm CST
In Defense of Ray Nagin

Total Information Analysis: ... Nagin is also taking flack for saying that New Orleans will be a majority-black city again, that "God wanted it that way." This can be seen as a statement in opposition to the plans of everyone from the UNESCO biosphere goons to local real estate landsharks who want to remake New Orleans into a boutique theme park for adults surrounded by swamps built over the homes bulldozed at gunpoint. Nagin has been working with some of these "visionaries" to some degree, but his MLK-Day statements indicated the reservations he has ... Nagin's remarks have been seized upon political opponents nationwide. Also critical: other local leaders afraid that so baldly criticizing the Iraq war will undermine the Bush-bootlicking necessary to ensure a sufficient flow of federal dollars. In the wake of the federal levees exploding, most New Orleanians see little hope for rebuilding without a massive influx of federal dollars -- despite the fact that most of the federal dollars spent so far have gone into the black hole of FEMA or the coffers of crony corporations like Halliburton ... LINK

6:23 pm CST
Are You Ready to Be Bugged and Tortured By George W. Bush?

Harvey Wasserman: It's not really terrorists George W. Bush wants to bug and torture. It's YOU. It's not really terrorism he wants to fight. It's opposition from people he can't control. It's not really US security he wants to protect. It's the power of his regime ... LINK