y’all can stay in hell, i guess i’ll stay in texas…for now.

it was 2003 when i first went to florida…

…i fell in love with the redneck riviera. did bits about my adventures there even though i was only there for a weekend. thought maybe it was a place i’d relocate.

then i hooked up with alex.

she told me stories about all the hurricanes and what not, and sure enough the first summer she was living here (2004) we watched storm after storm bitch-slap her adopted home town of miami (she was born in estelli, nicaragua). “fuck all that” i said to myself…i’ll stay in texas. leia tries to tell me the weather is worse here than it is in her adopted home town of tampa. sure, we get warmer – but we don’t even see A (as in singular) hurricane impact, let alone impactS (as in many) on any given summer. so america’s wang is off my “to move” list permanently, despite how glorious it sounds in dorsey’s books.

then last halloween i went to NOLA. loved the place, reminded me how much i miss bret & leo, and the culture and the strength of the city was almost overwhelming. you saw it everywhere – from the elevated manhole covers that gut low cars (which was why bret wouldn’t let me drive anywhere in my bmw) to their own neighborhood, where million dollar homes sat right across the street from boarded-up shells that still had the FEMA spray paint on the plywood over the windows where people didn’t have the right kind of insurance and as a result couldn’t rebuild, i was just blown away by the place. great food, great people, free-flowing booze, i was thinking – damn, i could move here with the pups, start over, and never look back! katrina’s come and gone years ago, what are the chances that’ll ever happen again?

well “lucky seven” my ass – today marks seven years since katrina bitch-slapped the big easy, and i’ve been glued to the tube watching isaac do the same thing…in between texting bret for live updates (no power, trees everywhere, but we’re grilling steaks for lunch!”. gotta love them boys! but it made me re-thing the NOLA thing, too. again, been here for forty-one years…and if you’ve ever driven to the coast from here you know there is a LOT of real estate for a gulf storm to cover in order to reach me…and it’s a lot of varying terrain that will slow a storm down. hell, i remember when the last “big one” hit texas a few years back – they actually cancelled a longhorn football game…and short of a hand-written note from God himself that just does NOT happen…and i went to the movies. got a little rain on the ride. but not enough to make the camaro roof leak, and that didn’t really take much for that to happen.

so needless to say it wasn’t shit.

i might still look at taking this show on the road eventually – in less than a month i will have been in this house for thirty-four years. that’s longer than any of my relatives i’ve ever known have lived anywhere. so i have the title – maybe it’s time to take myself someplace new and see if it gets my life out of the rut it’s in. shit, at the worst it doesn’t get any better but i have new shit to write about on here, right?