Michael Ventura ‘If I Was a Highway’ Booksigning

The Luv Doc Recommends

April 20, 2011

Right now is a really bad time to go hunting jackrabbits with that vintage World War II flamethrower you’ve been storing in your attic. Surely no one would argue that idea is positively rank with the stench of depraved genius (after all, who doesn’t want to woast those wascawy wabbits?), but it will have to wait for a wetter month. May maybe? April has been a dry hole so far, and Mother Nature spent the last nine months cooking Texas up a big batch of extra crispy. You may have to postpone your bottle rocket war as well. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures, and there are plenty of ways to put your eye out that don’t involve incendiary devices. For that matter, there are plenty of ways to kill yourself without smoking cigarettes – prettier and less painful too. Perhaps none of them are as satisfying as taking that last long toke that burns nearly down to the filter, then tossing the smoldering butt into your pickup bed where it will … Jesus! That was quite a crosswind, wasn’t it? Who saw that coming? Is it your fault the side of the road is a golden tinderbox? You’re not one to play the blame game, but if you were going to start pointing fingers, you’d surely aim one toward the heavens – or perhaps toward KVUE Storm Team meteorologist Mark Murray. Treacherous bastard. You just know he’s back there behind the curtain working those weather levers like the Wizard of Oz … a good man yes, but a very bad wizard. He (God or Mark Murray) might as well be driving around Texas straddling a tanker truck hosing down dry brush with gasoline, whooping and cackling like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove. In the movie, Slim was riding a huge boner/nuclear warhead rather than a gas truck, but the results of either are pretty much the same: a blackened, smoldering hellscape. That describes more than a million acres of real estate in Texas this week and several hundred homes as well. Is this the beginning of the apocalypse? Is it time to stop using your rosary as anal beads and start knocking out some Hail Marys? Well, truly that’s a pretty decent idea regardless of whether you’re going to burn in hell – for safety reasons alone – but it’s doubtful the current conflagration is a sign of end times. Rather, it’s an ecological phenomenon that’s been going on for ages. Good lord, didn’t you read Little House on the Prairie? With the roaring prairie fire in the screaming wind? Whether you live in a wooden house, a sod house, or the Lord’s house, every now and then, things burn. Yes, Texas is experiencing a bleak springtime, but it’s springtime nonetheless, and this weekend we have Easter to remind us (whether gory Christian bloodbath or pastel pagan fertility rite) that life and hope spring eternal, even in the blackest of times. Eventually the charred landscape will get recarpeted in green, homes will be rebuilt, fences will be mended, and lessons will be learned. The first and foremost of which is: Everything changes, just maybe not on our timetable. On a geologic scale, these events and even the whole of human experience are infinitesimal snapshots. It’s a good thing we have people like Michael Ventura to develop these snapshots and give them the importance they deserve. If you’re not intimately familiar with his work, Michael Ventura is the author of the Chronicle‘s “Letters at 3am,” a brilliant column of essays about life, mostly set in the American Southwest. This Friday he appears at BookPeople to promote his latest book, If I Was a Highway, a collection of some of the best “Letters at 3am” essays combined with black-and-white photographs by singer-songwriter/artist/photographer and West Texas desert rat Butch Hancock, whose song of the same name lends the book its title. When it comes to good writing, Ventura is almost always on fire … much like Texas itself.

33rd Armadillo Christmas Bazaar

The Luv Doc Recommends

December 16, 2008

Let’s assume for a moment that you’re growing psychotic from holiday shopping and want to take the edge off your misanthropic rage with a couple of longnecks at the Carousel Lounge. You exit the top ramp of I-35, cross Airport, and head north on the access road where you will cross 51st onto Cameron and hook a hard right on 52nd. You’re so close, but wait a minute … you forgot … in order to get to the Carousel from the I-35 access road, now you have to make a completely unnecessary, asinine detour through the Mueller development. You’ll be driving past Best Buy and Home Depot and Rack Room … all the big, big boxers … plus their hordes of greed-crazed shoppers who drove into town from places like Marble Falls, Elgin, Lockhart, and Smithville – ostensibly so they can go 5 mph in front of you in the left lane, periodically hitting their brakes and turn signal and weaving perilously close to either the curb or the traffic speeding around them. Fortunately, you are sustained through your journey by the knowledge that there is a pawnshop just around the corner on Cameron where you can buy an assault rifle to hunt down the evil dirtbag city planner who signed off on this depraved boondoggle. Surely he will be the one walking around with a huge lump on his ass from a wallet stuffed fat with developer payoffs. He will be the only city worker who drives a Hummer with gold rims and a license plate that reads, “BBOXBUKS.” You don’t actually have to shoot him, but maybe keep a muzzle trained on the security guards while your buddies put the beat down on him with a couple of orange road cones. Scarier still is the possibility that there is some sober rationale behind the design – that perhaps some committee got together over cold bagels and Starbucks and hatched this idea out of thin air. It had to be thin air. Clearly their brains were oxygen starved at the time. Maybe they were exhausted after a full day of replacing four-way stops with traffic roundabouts, the beloved panacea of urban planning – unless you happen to be a bicyclist pasted to the brush guard of a ¾ ton 4-by-4. Maybe that’s what they were going for with Mueller: a huge traffic circle – albeit with stoplights and product placement. You never know when someone is going to get a hankering for a bigass chain-store burrito or some discount child labor sneakers on their long journey back to traveling in a straight line. The concept isn’t new. Highways all over Texas are routed through dying little towns with empty main street storefronts and Wal-Marts the size of football fields. You can’t blame a chamber of commerce for a couple of speed traps and some schmaltzy holiday decorations designed to lure casual travelers into buying fake antiques, chainsaw sculptures, and tooth-breaking peanut brittle, but the Mueller development isn’t some Rockwellian hometown fallen on hard times. It’s a pricy piece of downtown dirt – pricey enough, apparently, to prohibit participation by local businesses. Then again, local businesses would probably have been too ashamed to sign on to such a gallingly deceitful site plan. They’re more likely to dangle the carrot of live music, which is exactly the tack the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar has been taking for several decades. This week’s performers include local favorites like Paula Nelson, Jimmy Lafave, Shelley King, Butch Hancock, and the Eggmen, plus 130 booths of arts, crafts, clothing, furniture, and jewelry by local artisans. Admission is $6, and you have to drive to it, rather than through it, but it sure beats big boxing.