a different sort of march madness

Someone at my apartment complex drives a truck whose tailgate is decorated with what is unmistakably a Confederate flag. It’s not even worth checking to see if other vehicles are similarly emblazoned – being that I live in Texas, it’s an absolute certainty.

And but it’s uncertain just what these symbols are supposed to mean, exactly – different things to different people. Some folks probably believe the bit about reclaiming some part of their cultural heritage; you know, it’s about “Southern pride,” divorced of its meaning with regards to slavery and racial turmoil. Some people just like to provoke others (a habit I can get behind, most of the time). Some were probably just too lazy to scrape it off after winding up with the vehicle secondhand. And some probably still believe all that racist bullshit, and fuck you buddy but it’s my ra-ight.

It’s this last group that concerns me, and that should concern you.

See, there’s still a Ku Klux Klan. Crazy, right? Now, for the most part the KKK seems to have dropped the bed sheet and pointed hood gimmick. They’ve kept the silly titles – the group is chockfull of grand dragons and wizards and so forth, to the point where they remind me of nothing more than a bunch of D&D nerds, shaking their 12-sided die between bouts of acne-cream application.

No, now they wear suits, or at least the higher-ups do. I know this because the Klan came to the sleepy little town I’ve been working in for the past year. I didn’t go to the rally – I suppose I could’ve gone to help cover it for the newspaper which employs me, but I had bigger things to attend to – namely Texas A&M’s second-round NCAA tournament game versus Louisville, which was an absolute nail biter from start to finish. The two events were coincidental, and as sports editor it was easy for me to opt out of checking out the sideshow at the county courthouse.

The Klan’s impending arrival was a big story for a couple of weeks before this last weekend (speaking of which, what do they have against St. Patrick’s Day?), and the primary thrust of that story, to these already-jaundiced eyes, was the city’s utter inability to handle a shitstorm of this magnitude. Driving down the city’s main street the morning of the event, side streets downtown were already taped off, and a chain-link fence encircled the central courthouse square (which was where the Klan would be; gawkers were on the other side, and there were lots of them, and not just locals) giving the normally quiet area the look of a steel cage match. A comparison that is perhaps not wholly inadequate. (The crowd’s general mien was one of amped-up tension paired with a thirst for blood/spectacle, a phenomenon recognizable to the Hulkster and his ilk)

And there were fights – tensions were high, and the crowd got what it wanted (as did the Klan, as did the anti-Klan group that follows them all around the state), if only for a few moments. Undercover police numbered in the hundreds; one of the anti-Klan dudes evidently provoked an area man who probably wouldn’t mind being id’d as a white supremacist. A few punches were thrown; three jerks landed in jail.

That was the story to me, a person who didn’t go to the blasted thing: they’re all pretty much jerks, the whole lot of them. They chose this place as a staging ground for their petty grandstanding – both the Klan and their antagonists, both locked in an eternal parasitic struggle.

One of the grand dragons made a comment, quoted (somewhat) approvingly in our coverage to the effect that ‘the only hate I sense is coming from the other side of the fence.’ Some of the Klan members wore shirts that made the following bold statement: “Hate sucks.” And what a classic move – jockeying for the role of the aggrieved and disenfranchised, angling to be put upon simply for their cherished, long-held beliefs of “white pride and brotherhood” & etc.

But here’s the thing: nothing’s more disingenuous than a bully dressed up in the language/clothes of victimhood. It’s flat-out dishonest, and anyone who falls for their routine is even dumber than the Klan members themselves.

Much later that night, after sending off the paper around midnight, I parked in that same courthouse lot that hours before had been cordoned off for the sake of a couple dozen wolves in sheep’s clothing. See, there’s a bar across the street – I walked in, waited for something like 15 minutes for one of the overwhelmed bartenders to give me a couple of Shiners before last call, to no avail, and walked out.

But the worst part? The aforementioned Klan sympathizer, a big dude with head/face/neck tattoos, and a swastika inked onto his belly (a fact revealed by a photo taken following the fight, during which he apparently lost his shirt), was there with a little baby girl (her name: Eternity, which interestingly enough equals the amount of time she'll regret said name. It's unclear if she was named after the fragrance or the concept), who he had no qualms with holding up high for all to see, right near the chain-link fence. Daddy and baby even posed for a picture for the paper - with pops proudly holding out his little girl's baby arm extended from her chest: "Sieg Hiel."

Our reporter in the field said the profane chants of the crowd would linger in the city's collective memory, but I disagree. The lasting image was published on our front page, an innocent, harmless human soon to be perverted against her fellow humans by the ignorance of her forebears. Teach your children well.

solipsism, with occasional drinking

“You drew me in like mustard on a sandwich.”

Why would you keep setting up obstacles for yourself in the direct path of a goal – one that you ostensibly want to achieve, one that promises to offer a significant upgrade in any number of different, important areas – that is low-hanging fruit, just right there for the picking?

And so I’m going to break up this sub-LiveJournal pouting with an account of what I did Saturday. It was the sort of night that is going to stick out, if only for the number of unique things that happened, yet a record of it also seems necessary. Anyway: my Saturdays (and the idea of weekends) have been shot since I took the title of Sports Editor. Those are the breaks when you’re a staff of one, and a perfectionist (of sorts). But last weekend was slow with regards to local sports, which is all I’m interested for the purposes of my job anyhow. My responsibility was trimmed from four pages to two, itself a very attractive proposition. And so while things still took time to coalesce, I was done – and had helped edit the rest of the front section fairly early. And I sort of invited myself along with a co-worker and her husband, both of whom are exceptionally rad & down-to-earth people, to a party in a shitty little down just down the highway, in Bluff Dale. After the scare of a few week’s back (happy birthday, York, we’re stupid assholes) I was just a passenger, and went home to begin drinking/get ready.

What it makes me wonder is obvious: is this something I actually want? And beyond that, am I even capable of articulating wants beyond the base and basic – beyond ‘I want a beer/pizza/day off/girlfriend’? I’m not even sure I can fathom what I really want. I can define things I don’t want, and perhaps states I’d prefer – I’d like to not worry, be anxious, feel pain – you know, really gut-level primitive stuff. Career? Sorry, that’s something that would be figured out in some non-reptilian part of my brain, and that just isn’t a place I’m really capable of reaching at this juncture.

So we arrive at the old Bluff Dale saloon, and it’s cold as balls. I’m wearing a sweater, and sneakers, both of which mark me as an outsider like instantly. This is cowboy country, after all – it’s all scuffed boots and heavy beige jackets, except for the one dude wearing what appeared to be a silk (and I think light blue, but this was by the light of a campfire – but I’m getting ahead of myself) ascot of some sort. Yeah, it reminds me of the “Of Mice and Men” character who keeps a glove (both?) filled with Vaseline, too (looking back at least. I can’t make those sort of connections when full of beer). But so here’s the scene – a beat-down old saloon, and out back, folks huddled around a trash can filled with flames. There was a trailer/barbecue pit, too, but I didn’t eat. The band was all strings, and played old country standards. More importantly, they also played a Creedence cover (after launching into an obligatory anti-Cross Canadian Ragweed rant that I agreed with 100 percent – i.e. There’s already a CCR, a better one, and now we’re going to murder one of their classics). The song was “Lodi,” incidentally, which I first encountered as covered by my fave band of all time, Pavement. I clapped along and mouthed the words when I knew them.

The sum total of all of this mental hand-wringing (a ridiculous image to be sure) is a sort of queasy ambivalence. Because although it has been proven ad infinitum that my current situation is basically unsustainable – unless it turns out that all I really want is something to whine about, in which case, hey presto, I’m right where I want to be – I’m still dragging my feet when it comes to actually doing anything about it. I’m writing this when I should be revising my resume, and that chore itself should’ve been knocked out days ago.

As I became more intoxicated, I became more adventurous (natch). There was a cute young girl I had tried making eyes at from across the fire – although the preceding is a grievous bit of romanticization (word?). Hitting on cute girls is hardly my forte, and this attempt was surely as ham-handed as one might imagine, although I’d argue that’s all part of my charm. Short story short: it didn’t work out. She (Shelby?) was a Tech grad, and lived in Bluff Dale, and said something to the effect of ‘I’m sure I’ll see you around.’ Not at all likely, dear. Before that, or perhaps after, I got the band inside to play “Lodi” a second time, and it was – somehow – better than the first time around. We left eventually and I played pool spectacularly badly at a local bar, and was delivered home at closing time, at which point I passed out.

I hear they’re doing it again in about a month, but God knows if I’ll still be here/up for it.