Wal-Mart shoppers

I am not a Wal-Mart shopper. In fact, except for our nine-month exile in Marble Falls, I've pretty much stayed away from Wally World and that's hard to do in our part of the country.

So, I wasn't close to a Wal-Mart last week when a contract employee at a Long Island store was trampled to death after he opened the doors to a tidal surge of Black Friday shoppers. And here I thought the South had a monopoly on that sort of Wal-Mart crowd.

It's not that I don't like shopping in big, soul-sucking steel boxes. After all, I braved the Black Friday crowds in search of a bargain on an elusive 37" flat screen LCD HiDef television. While I love to shop for electronics, I really don't like those kinds of intense, high stakes shopping excursions.

I tracked down that tv to Best Buy, a big, soul-sucking steel box. Saved 200 bucks on that sucker and I'll probably go back for the BlueRay thingy and the home theater system every large, flat-screen tv machine screams for (yes, I can hear it screaming -- in perfect counterpoint to the voices in my head -- and it wants digital sound ... ).

So, no, it's not Wal-Mart's big, soul-sucking steel box. It's that I'm politically, economically and morally opposed to Wal-Mart and have been for for a dozen years or so, long before Black Friday became a blood sport for intrepid Wal-Mart shoppers.

Given my background as a publisher of small, weekly newspapers, I could sing chorus after chorus on the evils of Wally World. It destroys local, mom-and-pop businesses, it drives down the cost of labor, most of its employees are on welfare, it imports most of its cheap, shoddy merchandise from China*, will not seriously advertise in local newspapers (a deadly sin, in my book).

Well, as I said, I could go on. And on. And on. But I won't.

But I do wonder this ... not about Wal-Mart but about what happened this Black Friday past and what it says about us. The poor fella in Long Island wasn't the only shopping-related fatality that day. There was at least one other and a dozen or so reported injuries.

Will the reporting on future Black Fridays include a death toll? Is this destined to become our uniquely American version of soccer game riots? This is only the second or third Black Friday I've been involved with (well, as a consumer, that is) and I found the experience less than satisfying. Except for the part about saving 200 bucks. That was satisfying.

Much like I avoid Wal-Mart, I think I will avoid Black Friday in the future. It seems to speak to a dank, dark part of the American psyche that is best left to the professionals like Stephen King to write about. Stephen King scares me so I'll not be seeing you in the soul-sucking steel box next Black Friday.

Unless I can save 200 bucks ... in which case, I'm there!


(*Wait a minute ... considering how much we've borrowed from the Chinese ... and how much Wal-Mart buys from them, does that mean Wal-Mart is the new General Motors [as in "What's Good for Wal-Mart is Good For America]? oh, shit, oh dear ... I"ll have to explore THAT pernicious concept in another post ... shudder.)

Farewell to Marble Falls. Again.

It’s funny, the roads life takes you on. You just never know where you’ll wind up.

Over the years, I’ve run a drug store, sold life insurance, stereo gear and radio advertising; newspaper advertising, too.

I’ve published four different newspapers and worked for five others. I even ran a radio station that only broadcast during daylight (we called it “solar powered radio”).

I’ve helped raise a couple of kids — and the daughter of the woman I love. I’ve trod the boards of several community theaters. Played guitar, spades and Risk.

I’ve seen a counselor and talked privately to several preachers. I’ve studied Zen, but not very hard.

I’ve argued with my Dad and tried to be a good one.

I’ve reported on ghastly traffic accidents that killed little kids. I’ve had to take the pictures for the DPS troopers.

Over my lifetime, I’ve lived in Harlingen, Elgin, Palacios, Corpus Christi, Victoria (twice), Taylor, Belton (twice), Austin (three times), Temple, Cameron and Marble Falls (twice). And that doesn’t count the year I spent in Alpine most of one spring.

I’ve been a Cub Scout, a Lion, a member of a church choir and I marched in the Cotton Bowl and in the Rose Bowl Parades.

I’m a Texan. I have a pair of cowboy boots and I played football in high school (but not very hard).

I’ve been through a divorce. When I married again, my new wife and I held the ceremony at the local VFW Hall. In all the pictures, a bingo sign hovers above our heads.

I’ve camped out at the top of a mountain and walked the streets of London at 2 a.m.

I’ve interviewed congressmen and a governor who became President, and slept in the home of an oil tycoon on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lohman.

I saw Frank Zappa at Armadillo World Headquarters, Stevie Ray Vaugh at Auditorium Shores and ZZ Top at Memorial Stadium.

I was a lifeguard at a church camp and bagged groceries and pumped gas.

I volunteered for Sissy Farenthold’s campaign for governor and helped park cars at LakeFest.

I actually planned to have very few of these experiences. Certainly, I’ve planned and executed specific events (you can’t fly to London without some advance preparation, not on my income) but, looking back, the grand sweep of my life’s major events have been somewhat spontaneous.

John Lennon was right when he said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

It’s both the sublime beauty and ridiculous curse of this mortal coil. You may think you are driving toward a simple goal when life jerks you up by the short and curlies and reminds you that, sometimes, you’re simply a passenger on the journey because, this time, someone else is driving the bus.

So, I’ve learned to be flexible because few plans survive contact with the gears of life. Life is more than the plan. It is the journey. (Any good Calvinist would recognize the irony in these thoughts, especially as they are expressed by a lapsed Presbyterian.)

We didn’t plan to leave Cameron. Life presented us with an opportunity and we took it. We didn’t plan to live in Marble Falls (for the second time!) only six months. One of life’s other aspects – in this case, a teenager’s immutability combined with a mother’s love – re-focused our attention on life’s paramount claim.

So, Tia Rae and I are going back to Cameron, she to be her daughter’s mother and the Feature Editor of the Temple Daily Telegram, and me to be a supportive husband and step-father and — well, I don’t really know yet but something will turn up, I’m sure.

I don’t regret our decision to come to Marble Falls. I learned a lot and believe I made a difference for some of the people working at this newspaper. I’ll miss the friends we made here and dearly wish we could have stayed longer.

I do regret the opportunities we missed to reconnect with old friends. We were able to see a few of you but not enough, and not for nearly long enough.

But the road we’re on has taken a direction different from the one we’d planned to travel. Not because that’s what we planned, it’s just one of those funny things in life.

This was originally published in the River Cities Daily Tribune, August 2006.

The Ragged Edge: Coping with directional challenges

I’d like to thank all the sharp-eyed readers out there who went out of their way this week to point out to me what a lousy sense of direction I have.

Like I really needed this reminder that entropy’s effects are inexorable.

If you’ve been following my stories about the annexation of the old Stone Hill Shooting Ranch property, you’ll have noticed that I placed this 109 acres of land somewhere north of the Marble Falls city limits. In two stories.

If you know anything about Marble Falls, Burnet County or the general Highland Lakes area, you know that this land is actually south of the city.

That’s SOUTH of the city limits.

But, since I’ve obviously taken leave of my senses, I placed the property north of town.

It started several weeks ago when I wrote my first story about how the city intended to annex the property SOUTH of the La Ventana development. This annexation process is only one chapter in a complex story that pits a developer against a major local industry and would take more space than I have here to adequately explain.

So, while searching for a way to describe the property and where it is, I turned the map upside down. It remained that way while I wrote the story. You can see the problem.

The mistake somehow survived the editing process (typically three read-throughs) and made it into print.

I caught the error the next day.

That error was promulgated in the next story, which many of you caught.
The reactions have been … interesting.

One woman called and wondered if SHE was going crazy. I assured her that it was I who tended to drive south into Burnet when I visited Judge Jones about legal issues or Judge Kithil about county stuff.

Burnet is south of Marble Falls, right? And Austin is west of here?

No?

Drat!

Another fella e-mailed me and suggested I needed to replace my compass. … but I’d just turn it upside down, I’m sure, so that’s no answer.

This is odd. My sense of direction is usually pretty good. Left and right have not been a problem for me since about the first grade when I noticed that I had a callous on the side of the first knuckle of the middle finger of my left hand. I’m left-handed and the callous was created by the way I learned to hold a pencil. Whenever I got left and right confused, I rubbed my thumb on the fingernail of the middle finger of my left hand and the confusion left me.

I can usually navigate big cities like Houston and Dallas as long as I know where I am in relation to one of the major freeways. With two or three notable exceptions, I have been fairly successful with this method of direction-keeping.

Now, I have been known to become gloriously lost from time to time. It only takes me about half an hour to break down and ask directions when that happens.

Then there was the time that my wife and I got lost at Enchanted Rock. The rock is basically round, right? Just keep the great gaudy thing on one side of us and we’d circumnavigate the thing. How hard can it be?

Harder than it looks. We were lost for hours.

As dusk descended, we decided that we could guarantee rescue if we would simply light a fire … the park rangers are pretty peckish about that sort of activity and would have come running. The fine would have been a small price for our rescue.

So, though I suspect my affliction has as much to do with the effects of entropy as anything else, I admit my problem and I’m looking for a support group that caters to the directionally challenged.

I suspect I can find some help east in Llano or south in Burnet.

This column was published in the River Cities Daily Tribune June 5, 2006.