Okay, I just cannot NOT reply to this…..
Abby’s and Sony’s conversation involved the term, ‘twin cities.’ I used to live in Texas a hundred years ago and I can tell you with absolute subjective authority that there are only two ‘twin cities’ groups in Texas. There is Dallas/Ft. Worth and there is Midland/Odessa. Lubbock and Amarillo are NOT twin cities!
How on earth can Lubbock and Amarillo be considered ‘twin cities’ when there are approximately 8.7 million head of cattle, several million acres of cornfields and a whole lot of NOTHING separating the two cities? If Lubbock and Amarillo were both in Delaware they wouldn’t even be in the same state!
I’ve driven that long, long, long and lonely stretch of highway between Lubbock and Amarillo several times and they simply are not close enough to be considered twin cities.
I have lived in all four cities of the two Texas ‘twin cities. I’ve lived in Odessa, Midland, Ft. Worth and Dallas. Currently, I would consider suicide as a better alternative than living in any of those four cities again. I’ve also lived in Lubbock and spent a very drunken weekend in Amarillo once.
It was close to noon on Halloween Day, 1985 when my newlywed bride and I were sitting in a Greyhound bus that had left Midland, Texas earlier that morning and was heading for Santa Fe, New Mexico. We kept looking out the bus window for that sign that would read, “New Mexico State Line.” When we finally saw it we jumped up from our seats and started yelling and cheering and shouting, “Hallelujah!” We almost got thrown off the bus.
It was both of our deepest desires to get the bloody hell out of Texas. My bride had lived almost her entire life in Texas. After living on both coasts and numerous states in-between as well as a few places in Europe, my years in Texas led me to realize that there are two realities on this planet; Texas and the rest of the world. I developed an insatiable yearning to return to the real world. Having visited Santa Fe countless times, I considered it the ultimate destination. It was a blend of old world and new world, it was extremely culturally diverse, it was an artsy-fartsy city, it was architecturally un-American, it was historically the second oldest city in America, it was cool and hip, and best of all, it was the antithesis of Texas. (At least all these things were true back in the mid-1980s.)
We arrived in Santa Fe in the evening of Halloween. The first thing we did was take a walk around the ancient downtown. People were walking around the city in their Halloween costumes while a light snow was falling. My bride and I both wished we had brought jackets (or very well-insulated costumes). But our love and our joy at having left Texas kept us warm. On that cold Halloween night our lives were irrevocably changed. It wasn’t long before my newlywed bride was pregnant. Masturbation never entered our minds.
Thanks, Abby, for your autobiographically introductory dispatch from that other reality.
By the way, I am also a big Patsy Cline fan and I swear to God that her music sounds a lot better above 8,000 feet high up in the Rocky Mountains. But, then again, what music doesn’t?
Also, by the way, I have an extreme aversion to basketball. The sound of tennis shoes squeaking on a wooden floor drives me utterly batshit crazy. How on earth can anyone sit through an entire game of that? To me, it’s even worse than the official Texas state religion of football.
And, another by the way, I once saw Waylon Jennings in concert in Waco. I saw the Judd sisters in concert in Odessa. I also saw Asleep At the Wheel live in concert in Lubbock. I also once fell asleep at the wheel in El Paso. I totaled the car in which I had an 8-track player that was always playing Willie Nelson. Except for Patsy Cline, I have since given up country music. It reminds me too much of Texas.
