Texas and Hell

Somebody, somewhere, somehow, sometime said of Texas that if he owned Texas and Hell, he would rent out Texas and live in Hell. I don’t know who this was – I only know that it struck a chord deep in my soul – so deep, in fact, that I thought for the longest time it was me who said it.

But it was not me. I might have thought it first -- I feel certain that I did – but somebody beat me to the typewriter, or the press box, or the podium, or wherever the fuck he was when he decided to offer it to the world for quiet contemplation.

I’ve always hated Texas, though I have no clear idea why. When I was a kid, I hated it because that’s where John F. Kennedy was killed, and anywhere where that could happen was no place for me. As I got older, I forgave the Texans for Kennedy (though I never trusted them after that), but I never stopped hating Texas.

It’s mostly like a turnip thing with me. I absolutely hate turnips. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve never eaten one. I’ve possibly never tasted one – and perhaps, though I have never verified this, I have never even seen one. But somewhere, somehow, I decided long, long ago that turnips were the one vegetable I would hate for the duration of my life. Texas is the same kind of thing. I don’t like the way it sounds, I don’t like the way it looks on the map, and I don’t appreciate the bullshit that talk about it inspires. For all I know, Texas might be a great place – but in my mind, it will forever be the turnip state.

People tell me all the time that my hatred of Texas is irrational. Big fucking deal. Ninety percent of my life, and everyone else’s for that matter, is totally irrational. I smoke too much, drink too much, exercise too little, read too little, write too little, watch too much television – the same shit that everybody else does too much or too little of. So I have no problem at all with this Texas thing.

It would be real easy for me to hop on a plane to Texas and dispel all this hatred once and for all– about as easy as eating a fucking turnip. But why? I really enjoy hating Texas and turnips – so much so, in fact, that unlearning my hatred for them would be as horrible as experiencing them in the first place.

One of the great joys of my life comes from thinking about the Texas in my mind that I hate so much. It’s a sprawling , fucking wasteland, littered with cowshit and busted oil rigs and tall goofy buildings all huddled in gaudy bunches with streets full of shit kickers and shit eaters and cow fuckers and pig pokers with ten gallon melon heads and ripping big pork bellies and fat little sausage legs gushing into fat pointy shit-smeared, snake-skin boots – an Armageddon of tattoos and carnival creeps, and junkies, and fat ugly whores with saggy water-balloon tits and steerlike asses, and scared fags, and God-fearing fag-bashing bovine fondlers, and rich, sweaty bald buys with bloated stomachs and little teen-jabber dicks, and runaways, and stowaways, and castaways, and every other kind of horrid, morbid, wretched two-legged creatures light years away from an IQ. A place pretty much like the real Texas – Hell, with a lot of cattle and dumb fucks.

I hate Hell – don’t get me wrong. But Texas is the one stretch of human experience that can make Hell seem like a vacation paradise. Hell, I figure, is a logical consequence of bad living. You make some bad choices, do some bad things, Hell is what you can expect – if you can expect anything at all. But nobody expects that when they die, they’re going to wind up in Texas. And that’s because if you could expect a place like Texas, you’re too fucking smart to get in. Texas is a logical consequence of millions of stupid minds all working together to bullshit the world into believing that the nation’s largest shit heap is an exotic land mass.

Friends of mine tell me that what I describe as Texas is really Hell – that Hell, as it turns out, is that place which you hate most. And I must point out to them over and over again just how silly their logic is. Hell is a place for evil people.

Texas is a place for stupid people. People from Texas can’t get into Hell because they’re not intelligent enough to be evil, and evil people can’t get into Texas because they’re not stupid enough to be Texans. In some ideal universe, people in Hell would be banished to Texas – but Texas is really the devil’s Hell. He’d like to move everybody in there, but he’s smart, so he can’t get in. If people in Texas were smart, they’d realize what a real fucking Hell they had and rent it to the devil for big money. But, alas, the universe is not perfect – and so the devil must have his Hell, and the morons must have their Texas.