My wife has been working from home since before it became fashionable. Her company decided it could use the office space for some other more lucrative undertaking, and so she has her PC, screens and everything set up in our front room, all chained to the internet through a link provided by the company which seems depressingly less prone to failure than the service through which we try to watch television or make phone calls. By the time coronavirus drove everyone else away from their respective workplaces, Bess had already built up a substantial head of cabin fever. She hadn't actually wanted to work from home at all, much preferring to keep her job as something separate, something from which she could leave behind and forget about at the end of each day, but general corporate policy now knows what we want better than we do, just like in the old Soviet Union where citizens were regarded as proud extensions of their work; except apparently it was bad in the former Soviet Union, but now it's good due to freedom of choice 'n' stuff.
This is why we like to get out and do something at weekends, specifically because Bess has been cooped up inside for most of the week and is usually gagging to get out, even if only for the sake of a drive. Today we're heading for Bandera, a fairly small town in the hill country, and mainly just for the sake of getting out and because we haven't been to Bandera in a while. Actually, I've only ever been through Bandera because there doesn't seem to be a whole lot there which isn't directly catering to inhabitants of ranches, but as I say, it's just something to aim for, something to do.
Bandera is in the general vicinity of Mico, which is even smaller, and we have vague memories of there being stuff to look at in and around Mico.
First there are the camels in a field at the side of the highway. The field isn't where I remember it being, but we chance upon it eventually, and accordingly stop and get out to look at the camels. They share a field with longhorn cattle and a donkey. I seem to remember seeing elephants and a giraffe when we were here last, whenever that was, but it's probably been five years or more so I could be mistaken. Temperature-wise, it's way up in the nineties, so we don't actually spend much time looking at the camels.
Medina lake is interesting, not least because I thought it was somewhere else. It's surrounded by a sprawl of dwellings, a town in itself built up steeply sloping hillsides and which cuts off all access to the lake. You actually have to live here if you want to swim or paddle or just stand at the edge. We drive around the terrifying single lane roads which wind up and down the hillside for a while, then head for Mico.
Mico seems to be built along the length of a winding rural road, and for us the main attraction is a particular house occupied by someone who makes sculptures out of trash, anything they've found laying around by the look of it. A wooden sea serpent snakes across the raggedy lawn towards a wheeled animal made from a vacuum cleaner, amongst other things. Last time we visited there was a plastic baby doll hung from one of the trees smoking a cigarette. Now she has a home and watches us from the balcony of something like a bandstand made out of twigs and crap. It's funny, inventive, and also slightly disturbing, the work of someone who would doubtless have been canonised by the Surrealists had they been born a century earlier.
Bandera itself has a natural history museum, a place we visited on the day it opened, back when they had just one fibre glass dinosaur to their name. Now a whole load of them have taken up residence in the grounds around the building. They seem crudely detailed and maybe a little hokey, but are good for providing a sense of scale and it's hard to fault the enthusiasm of the enterprise as a whole. The velociraptor is small, about the size of a labrador, and I recall the boy explaining during one of his many, many paleontology lectures how the beasts in Jurassic Park were actually specimens of the less easily pronounced deinonychus upon which the producers bestowed the cooler sounding name.
Finally we make it to Bandera itself, although we may actually have been through Bandera prior to Medina Lake, Mico and so on. It's too hot to keep track.
There's a stall at the side of the road selling MAGA caps. MAGA, as you probably know, is a slogan associated with President Trump standing for make America great again, something which presupposes it wasn't already great - which seems a little unpatriotic if you ask me - and which additionally strikes me as running contrary to the actions of his time in office.
'I didn't realise anyone actually sold those things,' Bess observes. 'I assumed they were just handed out or something.'
We stop at the gas station and go inside to get something to drink. There are more MAGA hats on sale just inside the door along with related Trump campaign paraphernalia, mostly taking the form of slogans printed on baseball caps, the usual shit about saying what you think and how political correctness is ruining everything.
I don't normally see this sort of shit due to living in a city, but I guess this is where it has its foothold, out here in the middle of nowhere where folks ain't ashamed to live up to the stereotype of the shithead from the south. Somehow I experience a sudden and profound understanding. I suppose I kind of knew on some level, but this is like a giant pair of celestial buttocks have parted to poo the effluence of enlightenment unto me on this day.
You don't actually have to be stupid, just maybe not the sharpest tool in the box. One day someone who reads books looks down upon you, perhaps pointing out the idiocy of something you've said, and you simply don't have the wit or literacy to form a truly satisfying comeback, because go screw yourself, college boy only seems to prove their point. But now there's a man who understands you, and who speaks to you, and he makes a lot of sense. At least what he says sounds like the real world, the one you know about; maybe he's a bit rough around the edges, but you shouldn't believe everything you hear; and even better, every long-haired book learnin' freak who ever sneered down a nose at you hates the guy. Just the mention of his name makes them squirm, and it feels good at last having something that hurts those snooty fuckers! So hell yes, you're voting come November.
Damn straight.
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