Terry Berry: Chafe Not in Peace

Terry Berry died.

Run over by a train? What the hell? How come no one lets me on to this stuff?

To explain: Berry was an Abilene oddball. He walked all over town, usually without any rhyme or reason. He just walked.

But nobody would have cared save for the fact that he always, always walked all over in town in hot pants.

(The link above includes a link to a fine photo essay Ron Erdrich did on the guy. You need to check it out. Words don't do it justice.)

I recall my first sighting. I was waiting for my burger to get done at GW's on South First. Out the window, on a blazing hot May day, a man walked across the parking lot. His socks were pulled all the way up. He was wearing sunglasses and a cheap baseball hat (the kind with the foamy front). The rest of him was covered by a yellow and black striped shirt and a tight and high pair of jean shorts.

I stared a bit, then looked around to see if everyone else was looking.

Nobody else even bothered reacting. They'd lived in Abilene longer, and gotten used to it.

The thought later hit me that a Terry Berry sighting was one of those basic stepping stones to becoming an Abilenian, up there with eating barbecue at Harolds.

"I finally saw Terry Berry today!" was something I heard from a lot of the people in the newsroom.

One city candidate put Terry on his campaign web site. One high school held a Terry Berry-lookalike contest.

There were obvious questions as to exactly where he made his money, but no one ever really delved into that. He seemed like a nice guy (to those who met him, I never did), without any animus towards people.

He loved the attention. Hell, we all do (he wrote in his blog). But he mainly struck me as one of those eccentric types. The kind of people you see at the end of a newscast, when they stuff in a story about some old man who stood at an intersection every morning for 30 years and waved at every car that passed by. Just wanted to be friendly, make sure people knew about him.

Abilene's a little less without him.

Behold the mighty power of my picture-gadget

That's my mailbox. It's in the shadows and blurry, but what the hell -- it was taken five minutes ago. Getting this camera thing to work was hell. Brought to you and me free of charge thanks to the determined efforts of hackers, who'd I name but for the hacking thing.

Notes

And thusly the marriage disdt enter in to the limbo...

Maybe you've noticed that the living details I usually insert have gotten a little sketchy lately. (Or maybe you just tune in for my comments on Bon Jovi and don't care).

The deal is, as we're married and stuff, me and Mer have been trying to work out some details. I.E.: Where to live. And, What job I'll have.

So, as to that, we're looking for a house in the D/FW Metroplex, which is fairly difficult, save for the fact that I'm married to a licensed realtor and I'm sure we'll find something good. We also waited to get married until after the housing market went down, so you can see we're genuises.

As to the job ... Eh.

I went to a career development agency last week, and we discussed "forging personal networks" and putting together an "eye-catching resume." And I couldn't stop thinking how incredibly, mind-numbingly, poke-me-in-the-eye-with-a-cactus-to-keep-me-awake boring the whole process sounded.

More on this later.

Sick
Spent Monday in bed. Had to call in sick to work for the first time all year. Felt better by Tuesday. You don't want to know the other details.

College Station-izzle

This should be a fun week. Tech goes to A&M to do I'm not sure what. Really, no idea. Maybe the Raiders laid a big egg against TCU and will play better. Maybe three points against a moderately talented team is the best they can do.

Whatever. What's fun nowadays is the way Aggie fans have really started to hate us. It's like all that animosity we had for them back in the '80s is finally being returned, and we've moved to a nicer house in the college football neighborhood. And we're the ones playing the funky rap music while they keep whining to the cops about the noise. Etc.

(I was going to put in a detail about Frannchichonine waving his fist and telling us to get off his lawn, but I'll just stop there.)

A small truth

Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas is not that good looking.

Hico livin

I don't have a lot of news to give here as to what's going on with life. Me and Meredith are working out various details, such as how we're going to live in the same house and such. Everything's in limbo.

The dogs are doing OK, though.

And then the dead came back ...
Driving to work a couple of nights ago, and I passed through a cloud of white something. It made no sense. It was too dry for fog. It had no chemical odor. It wasn't dust. It was just a cloud of God knows what.

When I was in Beaumont, I'd leave work some nights and smell this chemical haze, like a mixture of rubbing alcohol and new tires. I at least had some idea of what that was, and I knew I'd be leaving town before I started getting those strange facial bumps sported by about a quarter of the population.

This stuff in Stephenville, no idea.

Where everybody knows your name, damnit
Suddenly, half the people I run into in town see me and ask the question, "You're (name withheld)'s son, aren't you?"

I say yes, and then stumble through a conversation about how they know me. It's not a fun thing. I've always been, and always will be, horrible with names. The talk always goes to someone they expect me to know, who I don't know, so I have to give a fake, "Oh, yeah, him."

I liked the fact that I could live in a town of 1400 and be unknown. I preferred the strange and occasionally hostile looks I got from people as I rode by on my bike. I guess it couldn't last.

Coming soon
Photos. Taken by me. Maybe. I've promised myself I'm going to figure out how to work this bitch.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Rutger-Howerd Plaza, Los Angeles, California, 90210

Got to see about half the show Monday night before I had to take off for work. I thought it was well-written, well-paced and ocassionally funny.

And I doubt I'm going to get into it -- for the same reason I never got into West Wing -- rampant smarminess.

The West Wing, and Studio 60 (at least last night) both revolve around the premise of rich people holding meetings and someone saying something brilliant that solves the problem. Then people implement the plan, fight for the plan, and drink very expensive drinks in tasteful bars while wearing suits.

For my experience, this is not the way the world works. Problems are typically solved at ground level. Meetings are generally where hope goes to die and dumb comes to roost.

I also don't get Amanda Peet's character. How does someone that nice become a major network president in her 30s? Are TV executives some completely different animal than what we've heard?

Anyway. I bet the show's going to be a hit. It's a matter of taste. It's not like there are a lot of shows out there where the adjectvie "well written" applies.

I'll just stick with "Deadwood", a show about people jumping from one disaster to the next, or "Battlestar Gallactica" where the only smarmy characters are robots, and they get blown up all the time.

No, I don't want to talk about TCU/Tech

Three points? Three freakin' points?

It was a good thing I wasn't actually watching the game on Saturday. Otherwise I probably would have lashed out more than I did. My wife doesn't like me much when I lash out.

Was anybody in Red and Black even trying? My only thought right now is that Tech still has a not impossibly bad chance of winning the Big 12. Only problem is that, this year, that'll be comparable to winning the title "Best High School Football Team in Lubbock*."

And what's with Duante Culpepper? I decide I like your team and then you personally destroy it. And then the Cowboys win, even though we all know it's going to be the same sad fade at the end of the season. I don't want to talk about it.

* For those confused by the reference: Lubbock high school football tends to be weak. I should know, I played second-string placekicker there.

Random thought:
"The Thirteenth Warrior", starring Antonio Banderas, is underrated. It's easily one of the top 25 viking movies of all time.

A most wonderful time of the year

A very blonde crime

Watched about 5 minutes of NBC's Dateline interview with the teacher who slept with the 14-year-old boy. (Otherwise known as .... eh, don't feel like going there.) She talked about how she was having a tough time in her life and described the boy as big and flirtatious. The report also talked about how she used to show off her naval in class and otherwise she spent her time hanging around the practice fields "to support" the school coaches.

What hit me as the biggest lie: Lauer asked her if she was popular with the boys in school.

"Really, I always thought it was the girls who just adored me."

Yeah. You're a junior high girl, going through the most awkward time in your life, and some blonde teacher is letting her sex thang hang out and taking away all the boys' attention.

They must have loved her!

Cowboys up and out

Somewhere in my head the past few months there has been a chemical change. I just don't like the Cowboys any more. What's to like with these people? The team is just Jerry Jones' ego brought into physical reality. It's a big ego, but one that way overestimates its knowledge of football.

I watch these games waiting for these people to die on the field.

After almost a decade of feeling the change, it's finally dawned on me who my new favorite team is: Miami. They have my two favorite players and let Ricky Williams move on to his real passion of toking it up and Doritos.

Still, this doesn't mean I'm going to stop watching Dallas. They're usually the team that's on, and habbits that go back to infancy tend to die pretty hard.

Still, who do you love*?

This?

Or this?

The question answers itself.

* Meant in the good, friendly, only a little gay sense.

Notes

First off
My Dad is finally home from the hospital, after spending three weeks there with complications from the heart surgery. These were not serious complications, they were more in line with the car making a funny noise after the engine is rebuilt.

After the first surgery, his heartbeat kept dropping into some kind of strange five-beat jazz rhythm. The surgeons just gave up and installed a pacemaker. This had to be delayed because Dad's blood was hovering at around the too-thin level.

So he's home, sore, resting and getting used to an ABC of medications he'll be on for a while. But he's otherwise healthy and will probably be running around, preventing people from throwing away his garbage, in no time.

The 4400

Started watching the USA series the 4400 with my Netflix last weekend. And I dunno.

It's an intriguing idea (4400 people abducted over 60 years suddenly return without aging and with neat-o powers). The episode after the pilot was interesting, focusing on one guy trying to make a bad neighborhood better.

Where the show goes wrong so far is in the primary story lines. It's like the network demanded the show hit it's demographic plot points at the expense in reality.

Problems:
-- We have a high school student in a blossoming romance, and a rival who tells him, "You think you can disappear for three years and just waltz back in here, freak?" Uh-huh.

-- We have a young mother whose husband doesn't even bother to come by and pick her up after she re-appears. And acts surprised when she shows up, even though he lives in the same damn house that they used to live in.

-- We have a teenager whose been in a coma for three years. He still has his own hospital room so his parents can come and brood over him alone.

-- We have a child oracle. A cute little kid who glances at adults with a smile and says disturbing things about the future. I hate child oracles.

Chance of making it through the first season: 50 percent.

Book review: 1491

Some books provide you with exactly what you want to know, and have the added advantage of being factual.

I remember, growing up, that I was proud of my Cherokee Indian heritage. I read all the books I could read on the history of the Trail of Tears, and spent a good deal of time, like any other blonde kid, gnashing my teeth over the injustice of the white man. (Yep, that one-eighth bloodline goes a long way.)

In college, I knew an art student in the dorm who was also one-eighth Cherokee (like half the population of the United States). Hew was also proud of his indian lineage. "I take more pride in my Cherokee past than in my other heritage."

He was so proud as to make his own artwork and write his own protest poem about the Trail of Tears.

The poem was nothing memorabe. The artwork? Consisted of the angry, vengeful faces -- of three Apache.

Yes, his heritage was important to him, but he hadn't spent two minutes researching Cherokee, otherwise he would have known the men of the tribe wore turbans, not freakin' headbands.

Then came "Dancing with Wolves." Sheesh.

The thought has been forming in my head for a while about what the American Indian is today for most people: A shallow stereotype of a victim. A hippie with a bow, arrow, and magical powers to listen to what the earth is saying. ("White people are bad," says the earth. "Bad!")

And that image sucks. For starters, it's plain wrong. And secondly, it doesn't give American Indians their due as full participants in humanity.

If Indians are human, they will act as humans: Establish societies, make rules, exploit their environment, ponder the universe, etc.

And so I stumbled onto 1491 at the Hasting's in Stephenville.

It's a great book for amateur history buffs, written by a guy with no political aim other than to offer up what current research into early American history says. And it says some things completely different from what we learned growing up.

For one thing, the American Indian population wasn't a few roving bands with a few large tribes. It was more likely in the millions and on par with Europe.

What thinned their population is easily one of the greatest ecological disasters in history.

Some of the other revelations in the book hit close to home.

Doing a story about brush control in Abilene (wow), the guy I was interviewing noted that, before the area was settled by whites, the terrain was covered by grasslands. No mesquite, no brush in general.

I was curious enough to ask why, and was told that the plants migrated in from south Texas with cattle.

I didn't think to ask the next logical question. Why didn't it migrate in before with the buffalo? Deer? Bunnies on fire?

The answer is that Indians really liked to burn land. This kept the trees and brush back and the grass thick. This in turn kept the grass-eating animals they liked to hunt well-fed.

This type of cultivation wasn't done on a small scale either: think in terms of the entire Texas hill country. Or the entire U.S. great plains.

And I'll stop with the details there.

It's a good read, and pretty much a must for anyone who takes his American history seriously.

9/11

Was going to post something or other about some pop culture thing, but getting on-line and going through some of the headlines today killed the mood. Peace, everyone.

Of wood and nails and missing fingers

I was reading through this blog that mentioned shop class and directed me to this site called the New Atlantis. The essay in question is long, but brought an idea to my head regarding my career choice.

Here's a highlight:

"Much of the 'jobs of the future' rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a 'post-industrial' economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking. White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago..."

"So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You're likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable."

So, the question I'm left with is, "Have I wasted my adulthood trying to figure out if the councilman is dicking me around about the proposed 0.5 percent tax increase?" Or should I have been perfecting the world's greatest Oak Home Entertainment Center?

Kind of answers itself, I think.

In the 9th grade, I built a clock in the shape of Texas. It still hangs on the gameroom wall of my parents' house. I've never bothered to frame anything I've written.

On the other hand, I'm not graceful, and fingers are so useful.

Speaking of George Lucas

There are some things you absolutely must post.



Awesome is right. So very right.

Thanks to John.

Quick review: THX 1138

This film is probably well known to movie and/or George Lucas geeks, but sometimes I stumbles into stuff and has to talk about it. Sorry if I'm late to the party.

Anyway, I'd read a few articles about THX 1138, Lucas' first film, based on a project he did in college. He recently did what Lucas will do -- upgraded the special effects and re-released the sucker. My curiosity was stoked enough to put it on Netflix. I needed a break from all the MST 3K and cheerleader dance movies.

After seeing it, I can say interesting, but not good. (Jeremy once referred to a shower he took at the old Hico farm cabin -- no pressure, ice cold -- as "Interesting.")

The plot: Humanity has sunk into a corporate-owned dystopia that forces people to take sedatives and not have sex. Our hero falls in love and tries to get out.

It's the kind of movie only a beginning director would be allowed to make. The studios, in the search for someone hip, give money to someone who shows promise. They don't notice the film is attempting to marry the aesthetics of Stanley Kubrick with "Speed Racer."

And it can be an ugly marriage. It's often a dull film that doesn't bother with making a great deal of sense. Only Lucas could figure out a world that makes everyone a poor slave, yet allows for the existence of awesome rocket cars.

The most interesting thing to do in the movie is notice the stylings that later show up in Star Wars. Lucas really likes his shots of button pressing. And the bad guys in THX wear masks and wield these long baton things that sting.

Here are three reasons to watch:
-- Robert Duval stars.
-- The Turbo Spankamonkey 2000.
-- They use the word "Wookiee". (If you don't have subtitles on, you'll miss it.)

And that's it. Watch if you feel a jones to be mildly diverted.

Feelin' Nealon

Several people have come forth to defend Kevin Nealon, a comedic actor whom I described a couple of posts down as non-comedic. I'll make this addendum to the first post:

I think the guy is a capable straight man, who has plenty of success when people are acting off of him. But every time I've seen him try to carry the load, he trips onto Suck Street.

He only raised my ire with the recent TV publicity push he's made (I guess for "Weeds"). He's always introduced as the "Hillarious Kevin Nealon". He then comes out in a funny-colored suit and proceeds to prance around like an anemic Robin Williams before sitting down to go through his schtick, which isn't funny.

Yes, I realize this is in the eye of the beholder, but anybody who knows me knows it doesn't take much to make me laugh. Seriously, a 5 year old can have me rolling on the floor with a joke about Spider Man.

Diff'rent

Enjoyed a little garbage television last night, "Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Diff'rent Strokes."

I'm not going to guess how this was "unauthorized." Maybe the dead cast members were unable to give their permission.

Anyway, I don't watch this stuff because I usually don't care enough about it to sit through some lame movie. It inevitably ends in a bitter-sweet moment where some washed-up actor talks about how he misses being mega-famous but will somehow find a way to go on like all of us non-famous people who couldn't have afforded a decent coke habbit in the first place.

I had to watch Diff'rent Strokes, though, because it's one of the first shows I remember. (Outside of Zoom!, at least).

I can recall laughing hysterically every show. This was before puberty hit. Afterwards, watching reruns made me realize just how crappy the writing was.

During the Monday movie, Gary Coleman emphasized how much he hated the line. Said it ruined his life. And the one thought I took away was how the line had also ruined the lives of Gary Colemans everywhere.

I knew a Gary Coleman at North Texas University. He was, of course, tall and white. Wrote his name as "G.C. Coleman" just to avoid the attention. Still, everywhere he went, people begged him to say the line. He staunchly refused.

At least I never heard him say it. According to journalism department mythology, he did become drunk enough once to say "Watch-yoo talkin' bout, Willis?" I can't imagine what led him to lose control. Gary was a man who enjoyed his beer.

Speaking of ole UNT:
Read an article in the Star-Telegram about the impending destruction of some old buildings on Fry Street. Some Houston developer is going to come in and put up a drugstore and Starbucks and the usual stuff. A group has started a petition to stop it.

Fry Street is the U. of North Texas party center. It's the closest the university can come to Sixth Street in Austin or the Broadway/University intersection in Lubbock.

I had some good times in those old places, but I can't really make myself care much. My memories are kinda mixed:

-- You could usually tell the bar someone had been to just by their odor. "Whew, Opie smells like the State Club!"

-- Watching cockroaches skitter across the walls and floor was part of the entertainment at Cool Beans.

-- The Flying Tomato charged too much for beer and closed early.

I think I'll just honor the old places by doing what the majority of North Texas students have always done: Drive to another city and drink in another bar.