The Great (green greasy) Texas Dereferencing Tour of 1998 and Almost 1999

By Leonard Richardson

Part Two: The Revenge

Dallas

The hotel, high-priced (except not to us) as it was, was not very interesting. There were overpriced snacks in a fridge by the sink, and a separate living room and bedroom, but I felt like I was in a Motel 6, which was fine with me. I am not someone who craves luxury in rooming accomadations, certainly not the way I cave tacos.

However, I will point out one thing that I like, and that is a little continental buffet the cost of which is absorbed into the room rate (I hold no misconcoptions about it being "free"). This prevents you from having to spend $20-$30 at a proper breakfast place, and most of the good cheap motels will give you this. But the bumbag hotel design people decided that, instead of doing this, they would write misleading advertising copy which would make you think you had free breakfast coming, then trick you into eating at their overpriced, underpowered restaurant. We fell for this trick this day. My mother tried to rationalize this fact away by saying that the food was good, but it wasn't good enough, nor was there enough of it, to warrant its price.

There was what is called a shaving mirror/eyelash mirror in the bathroom. It rotated and swiveled on two axes. I rotated and swiveled it madly and said "Oh no! The Hubble is out of control!". That's the sort of wacky, spontaneous humor that makes me so fun to be around. Right? Right?

The wedding was not to take place until the next day, so we had some time to kill. We killed it by going to the much-vaunted Dallas Galleria. I honestly cannot see why it is so vaunted. It looks just like any other mall.

It was in the Dallas Galleria that my mother convinced me to get my hair cut, hippy. It was cut by a young lady named Pamela, who was very excited about the prospect, and talked all the time she was doing it. I asked for a sort of high-tech look, like Andy has, but my hair won't do that, so I got a kind of early Beatles haircut, which I can also wear in the disheveled mode or the bangs-ever-both-sides-of-the-face mode that the kids go for. It's a pretty good haircut, and my hair has gained in body over the past five years so my bangs stay out of my eyes.

Pamela asked me if I used hair gel. I don't use hair gel. She asked me if I used natural plant oils. I don't use natural plant oils. Until Pamela brought it up, I had never considered the possibility that you might want to use plant oils as a personal hygiene product rather than as food.

I told Pamela that I didn't like putting stuff in my hair. Pamela strongly advised me to make use of natural plant oils. I will admit that I would rather use natural plant oils than hair gel.

I know what she was talking about. I have a tuft of hair at the back of my head that sticks up like Alfalfa hair. It takes serious work to get it to cooperate, even in the disheveled mode, where, unhandled, it makes me look more like a slob than like the funky sex machine the disheveled mode should by all rights make me look like. But I survive, as the cave man did, without natural plant oils.

Good things about having short hair

• Shampooing takes less time
• Combing takes less time
• I can go the weekend without combing and be fine.
• I don't have to carry around spare ponytail elastics in case my current one breaks. I don't have to deal with them at all, in fact.
• I can muss up my hair as a fidgeting manueuver or while thinking
• Easier to impersonate a beatnik, or Fonzie.
• I am no longer mistaken for a woman.

Bad things about having short hair

• You have to keep getting it cut.
• The Alfalfa part.
• I look more like other people.
• Can't do the cool thing where you string your hair down your face and then suspend some of it by looking up and blowing really hard.
• I no longer get to emberass people who mistake me for a woman and then realize their error.

As you can see, I'm enjoying my life as a short-haired alpaca. It was time for a change, and eventually it will be time for another change. Such is life.

• The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius knows it's limits.

This was a tricky one. The proprietors of the store intentionally added an apostrophe error to their T-shirt so that pedantic people such as myself would go in and complain. My mother fell for it. It was a nice store, though.

We ate lunch at the Wall Street Deli. They have potato chips which are supposedly really good (they love to brag about them on the chip bags), but none of us could distinguish them from ordinary {potato chips,table salt}.

I don't remember what we did the rest of the day. Just hung around the hotel, I guess. Eventually all our relatives arrived, and we hung out with them.

We pretty much had the whole hotel to ourselves, as it was a hotel aimed towards business travellers and not much business travel is going on the week before Christmas. After everyone arrived, we went to the Olive Garden. Joseph Walch, my cousin, a few months younger than I, took us the wrong way on the freeway both going to the Olive Garden and coming back. Good one, Joseph.

At the Olive Garden, everyone gorged themselves on bread sticks. I had some ravioli that were really good. Everybody else seemed to get a raw deal compared to my mighty ravioli, as they all wanted some of my meal. I ended up giving away about 1/6 of my ravioli. The sauce was really good. I don't normally like red sauce but this was excellent.

Dallas -> San Antonio

This was the day of the wedding. My cousin Alyson, who is about a year older than me, was marrying (and is now married to) a chap named David, making three Davids in that part of the family. I feel no pressure to marry, because Alyson is a Mormon and a woman and that means marry right away. I, being a male and a heathen unbeliever, can marry whenever the mood strikes me (given a willing partner, obviously). I can even choose (or be forced into the position of having) not to marry at all. Innovation!

Anyway, it was the happy day for the young couple. I dressed up, expecting that I would be expected to trek out to the Dallas temple and wait it out in the visitors center (the wedding ceremony is highly exclusive; a more cynical man than I (ie. Jake.) can read deep memetic meaning into this) and then hug Alyson when she came out married. To my surprise, the nigh-futility of this arrangement had been forseen by people besides myself, and I and my sisters were given license to wait in the hotel. Rachel went anyway, I think.

Susanna and I ate breakfast at a passing Denny's. There was ice all over everything (outside, not the food), and we both slipped on the sidewalk ice.

There was also ice all over our car. All. Over. Our. Car. We tried scraping it off. That kind of worked. Some helpful neighbors (shown actual size) came and helped us scrape the front window with their actual scrapers, not our spatula. Meanwhile, Susanna went to the room, filled all our water botles with hot tap water, and brought it down. The helpful neghbors had recommended against using hot water to melt car ice, but we did it anyway, stubborn California folk that we are. It worked like a charm.

We were packed and ready to go. All the cars except the one my mother and uncle Robert and aunt Sandy were in had arrived, packed, and left. Knowing of the icy roads, we feared for the worst. Attempting to build tension, I wrote purple Victorian sentences. We (Susanna, Rachel, uncle Jon, Michael, and Shelly) were about to call Ann (mother of the bride) on her cell phone, when they showed up. They had stopped by the Mormon bookstore on the way back, to buy Christmas presents. Doh.

So off we went, south, towards San Antonio, where they know what salsa should taste like. Jon had joined us in the Saturn. First we took out lunch from Arby's. I don't like Arby's as much as I used to.

Drive, drive, drive. Finally we made it. You didn't think we would make it, did you? Well, we did.

Time for the wedding reception! Whole lotta people crammed into the house and ate stuff. I wore one of David's ties, and talked with Jon about ancient computer history. This picture of my cousin Lorna has nothing to do with the reception, but I put it in here by mistake and I like it so in it stays.

Robert, Jon, Michael, Brian, and I spent way too much time thinking up a blasphemous travesty on the Scout... I'm not sure what it is. It's not the Oath or the Motto. It's the litany of properties of a scout. Brave, clean, and reverent, you know. It reminded me of the actual boys in my troop when I was a Boy Scout.

There were candles everywhere. I was leaning against a shelf talking to Robert when I became aware of something burning. In the deadpan with which I deliver all sentences, be they lines or no, I casually remarked/asked "Am I on fire?". A classic line. I was on fire actually, and my cheap Goodwill jacket (the (Boss) tweed one, not the courduroy one) now has a burn mark somewhere on it. I can't find it at the moment. It may have been lost wherever Susanna's prom dress (bought at the Galleria) was lost.

There was a cake, as is the custom. There was also a secondary cake, shaped like Texas, and with an cake armadillo on it. The armadillo was made of red cake inside, so it was all very gory when it was cut. I thought that was hilarious. I think it was Alyson's idea.

San Antonio

Today was probably the worst day of the vacation. Not to start out on a negative note or anything, but hardly anything went right on this day.

It started out okay, with cleaning up reception stuff. We went to HEB, which is a Texas huge supermarket/drugstore. We went to Target, where I got a new notebook to replace the old trip notebook which I had filled (it was almost empty anyway, I having previously used it as a CS151A lab manual). We ate lunch at the Taco, Taco Cabana, which had good tacos and good pico de gallo.

Then it was decided that we were to visit the Riverwalk, across the alley from the Alamo, deep in the heart of Texas. We packed up and had a second lunch at a place called Cici's. They serve all-you-can-eat pizza for $2 a person. It might be $5. But they have a pizza buffet style which I don't think would meet health code muster in California. But what do you want for $2 (maybe $5) a person?

There was a big TV which was tuned to the Cartoon Network. A special entitled "Yogi's First Christmas" was showing. I was struck by its utter lack of depth, the sameness of every situation. I realize that cartoons are like that, but good cartoons like old Warner Brothers cartoons have a minimalism about them which makes this shallowness seem like the only correct move. Trying to flesh things out with subplots, moral lessons, songs, etc. can only loosen the already tenuous grip that cartoons can gain on my interest.

Look at that picture. Go on, take a good look. You see what cartoon holiday specials do to people?

At the Riverwalk mall, I got into a big argument with David (my uncle, not my cousin) in the Gap after he offered to buy me a pair of Gap jeans. I should have just accepted and taken the jeans back later for cash money, but I was not thinking straight.

My mother then tried to get a picture of us in the Gap. She was reprimanded by a Gap employee, who cited fear of foreign nationals taking pictures of the Gap's floor plans in order to copy their highly innovative floor plan technology. I was reminded of the MAD Magazine camera ad spoof with Nikita Khruschev.

My mother and I left the Gap and sat outside it while my sisters and cousins browsed Gap products for purchasing. My mother, deciding that the Gap employees could do nothing if we were not actually in the Gap, took pictures of the Gap from the bench, just to annoy the Gap personnel. One such picture is reproduced here, and if you click on it you can peruse a big version in which you can clearly see how the Gap makes all its money, as well as seeing cousin Kristin, Susanna, and aunt Ann. The Gap employees were highly annoyed, for fear of the foreign nationals (not the streets), you see. David joined us, and he and my mother were soon acting as immature as I had been acting inside the Gap. You see, kids, the Gap can bring only harm.

Fortunately, that was eventually over, and we left the evil prescence of the Gap and wandered around the mall for a while longer before actually going down the Riverwalk. It is, as the name implies, a sidewalk next to a river. The San Antonio river, in fact.

Anyway, my poor mother was unable to keep up with the other people, due to her bad feet, so I stayed behind and walked with her and the other slow people.

At the end of the Riverwalk is the famous Landing, home to the Jim Cullum Jazz Band. I had grown up hearing of their wacky antics on the radio (a slight exaggeration), and Joseph (for those who are not keeping track, my cousin) and I resolved to came back later to hear the band play.

Next to the Landing, unfortunately (for Joseph and I), is the San Antonio Hilton, or whatever. A hotel. Which happened to be the hotel to which Alyson and David had retired the previous night to spend their first forty-eight hours of marital bliss engaged in arts and crafts activities such as folding origami cranes and cutting Mobius strips out of construction paper. [1]

We went back home and ate leftover reception food. Several of us brought out the Star Wars Special Edition Monopoly board and played Star Wars Monopoly. I thought that Star Wars Monopoly was a dumb idea, but I played anyway. Finding myself in an unwinnable (unplayable, even) position due to a lack of people willing to trade with me, I resigned. I still think Star Wars Monopoly is a dumb idea. I would think that even if I had won.

The best-laid plans of Joseph and I for attending a session at the Landing were dashed by Aunt Ann. She first nosed into the moral character of the place, as if they had a pool table there or something (actually, the Walches have a pool table in their living room, so that's not a good analogy). Impeccable, we said. A dinner club, home to the best jazz band on earth.

But the crushing blow came when Ann found out of our close proximity to that of Alyson and David. What if they decide to come down for dinner and see us there? The horror this concept struck into the heart of dear old Aunt Ann is nigh-impossible to describe. We all know the feeling of all-consuming paranoia which suddenly descends upon us for no rational reason when we consider some unlikely possibility (well, I do). This was an example of that. I mean, get real, why would they leave their room for any reason, building fire included? If they intended to be out and about they could have just stayed at the Walch's house a few miles away and saved a bundle.

My mother took our side, but Ann forbade Joseph to go, and if he couldn't go, I couldn't go, as Joseph was driving.

We went to bed in a bad mood and now there's gum in our hair.

San Antonio

Yay, it's Christmas. The Richardsons opened their meager presents, including the maternal stocking which consisted entirely of stuff purchased at gas station shops. Actually that's not true. There was some licorice salt-water taffy which Susanna had gotten at the Galleria.

Then we went down and made and ate breakfast and beheld the grand Walch present-opening madness. Alyson and David came back to open all their wedding presents, adding to the madness. The little girl cousins got annoying laughing dolls, pushing the madness meter into overload. I got $50 in cold, hard cash from uncle David. Thanks, David.

Alyson and hubby David had not, in fact, gone down for dinner at the Landing. Whew!

The males of the clan played RISK. I had never played before, and put in a respectable showing by dying second. Part of the game seems to be to yell loudly and try to influence the decisions of others, even if you're not actually playing. I think this behavior should be reserved for games like Diplomacy.

David and I resolved to go to the Landing tonight, now that we had prearranged not to meet with Alyson and David. Michael went, as did one of David's friends whom I don't know.

We didn't get reservations. There was a big long wait. We sat outside instead and listened to a two-man outside band and drank sodas. Cheap thrills.

I swear it took us an hour and a half to get out of the parking garage. We went through the whole Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and part of Burl Ives. I've never been in such an annoying transportation position before.

San Antonio

You thought yesterday's entry was short, today's is even shorter.

I made the itinerary for the rest of the trip. We went to the used CD store and I bought Zappa, Bach, TMBG, and some midevil songs. We went to the Goodwill and I got pants.

My mother gave April as the date for Beanie Baby market collapse. This did not happen.

We probably ate stuff. The end.

San Antonio->Alpine

We left bright and early, after much of the family-leaving protocol. Susanna had left ahead of us, taking the plane back to Bakersfield, so it was just my mother, Rachel, and I.

We had intended to visit Seguin, east of San Antonio and home of the world's largest pecan (not a real pecan, but a large statue of a pecan on the lawn of the city hall). However, we forgot, and it was out of the way in any event. We were heading west.

Our goal was to make it back to Californ in three days. Doable, but with the number of things we wanted to see along the way, just barely.

There were fireworks stations all over. Mr. W. Gorilla Artillery Shells. Why your average Texan craves firework action all year round, I have no idea.

It was a "drop a dime on crime" sign. There is just some local saying about the eyes of Texas, which the Big Texan Restaurant merely adapted. My spirit was crushed, but my mother took it in stride.

For some reason, we started seeing a lot of roadkill. I hadn't seen any on this trip yet, and suddenly they were coming at us hard and fast. Well, lying on the road hard and fast.

• skunk
• possom
• rabbit
• coyote
• armadillo
• skunk
• racoon
• deer
• rabbit
• deer
• chipmunk or squirrel
• deer
• rabbit
• hawk

Our final goal was Alpine, in southeast Texas, near the allegedly great and mysterious Marfa lights. Our secondary goal was the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis.

We were about to go to the caverns of Sonora, in Sonora (oh, the irony), but realized that we had already been there on a previous trip, and would have to wait 45 minutes for the next tour, so we left, but not without taking a lot of unneccessary pictures. I bought a quarter pound of fudge at the gift shop, something I had not been allowed to do the last time we had been in the area. It was mint fudge, which was weird, and I barely ate any of it before it got lost in the car.

As the picture on the right shows, at one point we went to see Pete the roadrunner, the largest roadrunner statue in the world, or something. I'm placing this on this day because of the clothes Rachel and I are wearing. I do not remember seeing Pete the roadrunner, so I am forced to go by the evidence in the picture when placing this paragraph in the travelogue.

Between Sonora and Fort Stockton is a town called Bakersfield. Actually there is a sign that says "Bakersfield" on it. There is no town. There is a gas station which could charitably be called part of a town, but one gas station is not in itself a town. It's just a lot of dirt. Possibly there was a town called Bakersfield there at one point, but between then and now it had been demolished by a top-secret bomb that completely destroys a town, but leaves the city limits sign and gas stations intact.

So of course we had to get out and get our pictures taken by the sign.

Between Saragosa and Fort Davis is this desert country which, looks like something from the age of the dinosaurs. I mentioned this, and, doing a sort of nature documentary/Giant Gila Monster thing, said something like "It is in these lands that the mighty pterodactyl makes its hunting grounds." There was really nothing to do while driving through this area, so we all milked the pterodactyl gag for all it was worth ("This horse still bears the scars of a pterodactyl attack."), punctuating each bit with a pterodactyl squawk. It was fun.

The McDonald Observatory was not in Fort Davis, but some twenty miles away from Fort Davis, at the top of a large mountain. I don't know why we had expected anything else. The view on the way up was incredible. The pterodactyl hunting grounds were nice, in a deserty sort of way, but this was the forest/mountain terrain which I like.

We didn't actually go to the McDonald Observatory, but we did go to the gift shop, which is almost as good. I got an awesome solar system T-shirt, which I am wearing in some of the pictures later on, and which I wore to LinuxWorld Expo.

We passed the Marfa Light observation station while it was still light, but just barely. We were all starving, so we decided to go on to Alpine, eat, and then come back.

I am not a big fan of the general atmosphere of your average Chinese resturant. It makes me want to reach, Chairman Mao-like, for my hypothetical gun. There was a completely-out-of-place-in-Alpine little Chinese pagoda thing next to the parking lot which I feared was the restaurant, but fortunately that was just a (closed) nightclub. The real restaurant was in a large trailer. It looked like your average greasy spoon and served slightly weird American Chinese food. My kind of place.

This is not to dis elaborate Chinese wood carvings and statues of jolly Buddhas and the like, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that we are engaging in a cultural experience when we go out to eat, particularily when we go out to eat at a place like this, or at the Canton Cafe in Arvin. [2]

We finished eating and went back to Rachel, who had eaten two pieces of her pizza. She doesn't eat a lot. We went off to view the mysterious Marfa lights.

We returned to the official Marfa lights location. We had cameras and zoom lenses to capture the Marfa lights with. There were lights at 2 o'clock which my mother claims were mysterious Marfa lights, but which had all the properties of the headlights of cars going down a hill. My mother also claims to have seen a flash of light at one point. We stayed for about 20 minutes and then left. It was fairly cold and, even if the things with all the properties of car headlights were mysterious Marfa lights, they were not terribly exciting.

At one point in the evening (I believe it was while driving to the Marfa lights from Alpine), I saw a beautiful shooting star. It was the single best shooting star I have ever seen in my life. Nobody else saw it. This makes up for all the deer that everybody sees but me.

Part 1
Part 3