The Nutcracker Buck Sessions

Man, he really hated homemade ice cream.

I don’t blame him.  Everybody thinks his homemade ice cream is exempt from the rule that all homemade ice cream tastes like crap, but everybody is wrong.  Just like everybody’s wrong that somehow his bloody mary will convince me that I’ve been wrong my whole life that all bloody marys taste like drunk blood.  I always hated bloody marys, and nobody would ever believe me until I tasted his or her bloody mary, which tasted just like every other bloody mary I ever had, which is to say it tasted like cold, drunk blood.

Obviously my new recording set-up hasn’t resulted in a sudden new professionalism or greater quality of recording or songs.  (I don’t know why this one has that windy sound in it. I’m using the iMovie application on the Mac; maybe I don’t know how to do the audio right.  That sound isn’t on the computer’s recording, only on youtube. [Update:  The sound, or part of it anyway, was because there was a forgotten-about misaligned tambourine track on the song, now removed.) This wasn’t a first take, believe it or not.  It sounds like a simple little song, and it is, but those are the hardest for me to play because the meter is so rigid.  I play it just fine until the red light is on, but then I have to concentrate on not bumping into the microphone, and my right hand gets confused in alternating bass strings, and then I have to start some stupid song all over again. I realize it’s painful to listen to these things even once, but imagine if you had to perform them multiple times (and this was my attempt at writing a sing-along song, no less.)  The phone rang right at the end of the most unobjectionable take, but I went with it anyway.

We were planning a trip to the Bluebell Ice Cream factory this weekend, but then we learned they don’t give tours on the weekend.  I was excited that I’d get some relevant video, but it was not to be.  We went to the fake farm at Washington-on-the-Brazos state park instead.  I like Bluebell Ice Cream, we almost always have it in the freezer, in fact I had some last night and the day before, but I blasphemously submit that it’s overrated.  It’s sort of a Texas national symbol by now, though I don’t remember hearing of it until I was in my teens.  Seems I’m always finding out about stuff just now that has been around since 1912 or whatever.  I don’t know if companies just make that stuff up or take very liberal calculations in determining when they started.  Some guy milked a cow in Brenham in 19-whatever, probably, and that’s the date they chose for their “Since ___” claims.  It’s good ice cream and good value, but it’s not great ice cream.  It’s not Hagen Daaz or Ben & Jerry’s.  That’s great ice cream.  But who cares what I think about ice cream.

Houston; Debt.  Here’s a very nice article about Houston, specifically about Houston post-Hurricane Ike, from the next-to-most-recent  The Texas Observer.  I don’t know the writer, Jennifer Mathieu, but her time in Houston equals mine, and her experiences are much like mine, and I’d like to meet her.  Here’s my favorite quote from the essay:

Things I began to understand about Houston when I moved here almost 10 years ago:

1. We tear down any building more than five minutes old.
2. We are probably friendlier than people were wherever you came from.
3. We get it done.
4. Nobody else seems to like us very much, and this troubles us deeply.

I can vouch for all but that last one.  I don’t know that people don’t like us very much, and if they don’t, it doesn’t trouble me much. Houston is its own reward.  It’s the fourth largest city in the country, and when it’s not being maligned it’s being overlooked.  It’s sprawling, generally ugly, unbearably hot for at least three months out of the year, if you’re planning to leave town you should have started yesterday, and every one of those truisms is overstated.  Most people not born here came here against their will, and most of them who’ve had the opportunity to leave haven’t taken it (it’s not mere coincidence that it’s the fourth largest city in the country.  To have as bad an image as Houston does and still to be this big is saying something.  Of course New York and LA don’t have an image problem—they own the movies and the TV!  Houston has nothing of the sort.  I don’t know why Chicago is bigger than Houston.  I think their population figures must include frozen corpses.)  In matters of diversity, integration and general good democratic government, not to mention great restaurants, I’d put it up against any other city in the country, including all those who take especial pride in those matters. (I’m looking straight at you now, Austin.  Diversity means more than tolerating all lengths of pony tails on middle-aged white guys.)  The influence of blacks and Hispanics is deeply embedded and continuing, and the more recent immigrants have established deep footholds here as well. There are huge populations of Chinese, Middle-Easterners, Salvadorans (pupuserias galore!  Almost as many as taco stands), Vietnamese (there are street signs in Vietnamese in Midtown, and they’re not cutesy ironic street signs [though I think that one shown to the left is Chinese]), Thais, Hondurans, not to mention big expat communities of Canadians, Scots and everybody under the sun (or at least everybody born near an oil field).  And those disparate communities are not entirely Balkanized.  Their kids go to school together. The parents do business together.

The business of Houston is business, to paraphrase Coolidge, and Houston is the best argument I’ve seen up close for the democratizing power of capitalism.  I don’t intend to bite off any more of that topic than I can chew, and it’s been awhile since I’ve been to the dentist, so I’ll just make clear that I’m not an apologist for capitalism and acknowledge that at a certain point, which we pass and then back up on and pass again (and we’re past it now), capitalism becomes inimical to democracy.  The two concepts depend each other but are continually out to screw each other.  That’s why I’m here to act as referee.

You can make a living in Houston.  You can thrive here.   I don’t care who you are, who your parents are, where you went to school, or whether your nose is pretty, and neither does Houston.  The anti-regulatory attitude of Texas generally promotes that kind of wide-open attitude, you might say (“Grab a broom!  Get busy!”), and I am one who thinks that it is not such a good thing to turn over regulatory matters to the industries purporting to be regulated.  We really could stand to have a more courageous state government. But while I won’t deny that that’s a big part of Houston’s fertility and the least healthy part of it, the bigger reason for the can-do attitude of Houston is the can-do attitude of Houston.  And the generosity of the people and their happy willingness to take risks.  Those virtues are unqualified, asterisk-free.

I came here ten years ago this month, thirty-two years old and with nothing but paper credentials and a heap of student loan debt.  The most money I’d ever made in a year was $18,000.  I know that because I see it on those Social Security lifetime-earnings statements I get every year.  Most years I made $10,000 to $12,000; a couple of years I had no reportable income. I came here because this was where I was offered a job.  The law firm that hired me—more precisely, the two men in the law firm who decided to hire me —didn’t have to give me a job, and other than grades there wasn’t really much to recommend me.  I had no relevant experience in what I was being hired for.  In that respect I was no different from any other fresh-out-of-law-school graduate, but I didn’t even come from the kind of background that would at least have given me some sort of underpinning or at least a starter vocabulary in the business/legal world.  I was a lifelong English major who stumbled into law school at 29 years old. There wasn’t a line of employers clamoring for me.  I wasn’t entitled to that job and I didn’t deserve that job.  Everything about my resume indicated that the next candidate was probably the worthier candidate.  Clients don’t typically pay top hourly rates for work that rhymes, after all.

Still, they hired me.  I bought a king-size bed and the biggest TV Sears had, got the next-door neighbor to help me carry it in.  

That was ten years ago.  We still have the same TV and the same bed.  We don’t have that neighbor anymore, and I don’t work for that law firm any more—in two weeks I celebrate two years of self-employment.  We have two kids, two couches, two vehicles, six guitars, a piano, a mandolin, and enough Legos to build a structure that would probably withstand nuclear armageddon.  Ten years ago all I had out of that list was three of those guitars.  And yesterday I wrote the final student loan payment checks.  Thank you, Houston.  Thank you, Bob and Denis.