Lies That Life Is Black and White

If this isn't a metaphor for my life, I don't know what is.

This is an actual photo I took this morning, looking down at the parking lot at my IRL job.

That's my friend and traveling companion, Benedict Cumberhatch, down there.

Let's take a closer look.

You can't stage this stuff.

Drunkards, that's me, all day every day. A little red hatchback in a sea of monochromatic sedans and SUVs.

And...I'm OK with that.

I say, if you can choose, why choose to look like every other rolling pile of debt on the Tollway?

You don't have to be the biggest or the newest or the best. I prefer to be different. And cute.

Plus, I never get lost in the parking lot. That's got to count for something.

Taking My Victories Where I Can

First, a confession: I just now (well, yesterday), finished reading Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Because I'm cheap and I waited for someone to buy it for me. And also because I could only read a chapter or two at a time before hyperventilating and being overcome by feelings of inferiority and depression and having to put it aside for a while. Because this is the book I always wanted to write and felt I could (except for the part about the dead-squirrel puppet), and the Bloggess has written it.

So it took a while to get through it, is what I'm saying.

But I cheered up a lot when I got to the end. I read the bonus chapter (you high-class early adopters who bought the hardback edition didn't get that, neener-neener), and the I read the acknowledgements, which were sweet and funny. And then I came to the Reader's Guide.

The freaking Reader's Guide.

Let's talk about book clubs.



I don't understand book clubs in the least. Regular readers likely have gleaned that I am not a joiner. I subscribe to Groucho Marx' credo of not wanting to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Also, the last time I volunteered for anything at my kid's school - as the result of a blatant dare by Precocious Daughter - God Himself sent an ice storm to North Texas so that the event for which I had volunteered to participate would be canceled.

God totally has my back. Thanks, God.

I really love the idea of sitting around and debating whatever book, movie, TV show, or current event I've recently been exposed to with friends and then getting bored and moving on to other things when I get bored (like work or taking care of my child). I hate the idea of a bunch of people who tangentially know each other setting a strict date and time to discuss a book that everyone has been assigned to read as if we were all still in high school so that we can feel both "social" and "intellectual."

Because why not take something organic and enjoyable and turn it into a forced learning experience?

Book clubs, along with houses like this, are very popular
in Plano, Texas.

Don't give me that bullcrap about how - really - book clubs are just an excuse to sit around and gossip and drink. I don't need an excuse to sit around and gossip and drink, and don't ruin my love of reading by using it to justify your shallow pursuit of pseudo-intellectual legitimacy.

Also: Yes, I have issues.

Getting back to Jenny Lawson's book. I felt a rush of petty and evil superiority when I saw that Let's Pretend This Never Happened concludes with, of all things, a Reader's Guide - a list of suggested "discussion topics" for people who aren't smart or creative enough to actually discuss the freaking book they claim to just finished reading. Wine-guzzling suburban poseurs: If you enjoyed the book, you should be able to talk about it without Cliff's Notes. If you didn't enjoy it, you should have enough confidence in the integrity of your own opinions to state why. If you're really only at the meeting to drink and look smart, go home and binge-watch "Real Housewives of Wherethefuckever," which clearly is where your heart lies.

I may get some hate mail, but I don't want to live in a world
where I'm expected to know who these people are.

I read through every single "discussion topic" in the Reader's Guide, thinking that at some point, the vapid questions would give way to humorous satirical entries - you know, like the closing credits in Airplane!  But no. Somewhere along the line, some editor decided that a funny, profane, irreverent book like Let's Pretend This Never Happened was crying out for a series of vapid talking points to make the dumbest of its readers feel empowered.

Smarter than 94.8% of book club members.

Here are some actual entries from the Reader's Guide from the Bloggess' book (which I can only assume were added without her knowledge while she was drunk or fighting off vultures):

Lawson describes her hometown as “violently rural” and struggles to find a point to its existence. In your opinion, did growing up in this town help or hinder her?

Chuck's Answer: She's a world-famous blogger and bestselling author. What the fuck do you think, suburban housewife whose husband works in finance and probably has three mistresses?

Lawson wrote about her OCD, phobias, and other mental struggles. Did this make her more or less relatable to you? Have you or has someone you know had a phobia or mental illness so severe that it affected your life?

Chuck's Answer: Don't ever admit you might have human frailties, but surely you know some piece of human garbage who is less than perfect. Talk about them in a condescending manner here.

Lawson made the decision to infuse humor into even her most traumatic stories of dealing with infertility, loss, and arthritis. What do you think of this choice? Have you ever used humor for healing?

Chuck's Answer: "Healing" is the word upper-middle-class automatons use when the rest of us mean "finding some damn way to survive." What embarrassing problems have you found socially acceptable euphemisms for in order to marginalize them in your social circle?

Lawson made the decision to infuse humor into even her most traumatic stories of dealing with infertility, loss, and arthritis. What do you think of this choice? Have you ever used humor for healing?

Chuck's Answer: "Humor" is what some people call to the emotion you refer to as "I make fun of what I don't understand." Do you understand that your life in the bubble is not normal?

What do you think Lawson was looking for in her life? Do you think she has found it?

Chuck's Answer: You have no fucking right to tender an opinion on this. Mote, meet beam. Drink some more wine and flirt with the Starbucks barista, you overly-Botoxed bitch.

Seriously, I'm disappointed that Jenny Lawson even allowed a Reader's Guide to be appended to her book. Drunkards, I promise you now:  When/if my book gets published, the only discussion questions tacked on to the end will be penned by yours truly and will mostly address your opinion of monkeys, squirrels, and politicians with great big hair.

And my book will be the better for it. I promise.

May Is Over? But I Still Have So Much Bile to Spew

As I was saying...

Having replenished the supply of precious Prozac coursing through my veins (or wherever it is that Prozac courses, I'm a blogger, not a doctor, dammit), I can now present yesterday's scheduled post, "Plano, Texas Is Full of Wankers."

Plano before the arrival of the wankers.

Full disclosure: I lived a significant portion of my teenage years in Plano. I graduated from Plano Senior High, Class of None of Your Damn Business. My parents lived in Plano for nearly 30 years before fleeing to a cabin the middle of the woods in northern Wisconsin, which to my mind represents a clear improvement to their quality of life.

To this day I maintain an ambivalent attitude toward Plano.  I mean, on the one hand it's good that so many shallow sheep-like consumerist soulless hypocrites have volunteered to contain themselves within its discrete boundaries. On the other hand, that concentration of toxic material canNOT be good for the environment.

Is that a poor person? Set hose to "obliterate."

And of course I'm way over-generalizing here. There are many fine people who live in Plano. For the  most part, you'll find them quietly going about their useful, productive lives while the wankers jump and down and wave their arms (or have their au pairs do it for them) and bleat about what fine people they are. Also, COMMUNITY. VALUES. They yell those words a lot. I think it's a specialized form of Tourette's Syndrome, possibly brought on by the high concentrations of entitlement around them. I don't know, it's sciency.

So, the big news out of Plano is that voters finally approved a measure allowing retail liquor sales! Yay! Unless you think liquor is Satan's nectar, in which case ERMAHGERD DOOM GLOOM DESTRUCTION OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY JESUS.

Oh, honey. If you put him in Plano schools,
it's not "liquors" he'll be shooting up
before he's 15.

Click here for a brief, entertaining (albeit now somewhat dated) history of alcohol in this part of the world.

In a nutshell, last week, 36 years after it allowed beer and wine to be sold in stores, Plano finally, overwhelmingly voted to allow liquor stores in the city. Because that's how democracy works. Because most people in Plano wanted the convenience, the jobs, and the tax revenue that retail liquor sales represent.  Also because the opposition's argument against liquor stores boiled down to: OH MY GOD DO YOU KNOW WHO SHOPS IN LIQUOR STORES WHORES AND PEOPLE OF COLOR THAT'S WHO.  And apparently, even in Plano, Texas, that argument doesn't fly because LIQUOR.

Hear, hear.

Actual pre-election quote from Collin County Commissioner Matt Shaheen, opposition tool:

"I used to have to walk by a liquor store on the way to work. And there are a lot of people who have turned to alcohol and they're hanging out in the front of a liquor store. And you can tell the devastation it's having on that surrounding area."

Yes. Because all the urban blight that results from poverty, political disenfranchisement, neglected infrastructure, high crime, and lack of investment would be free to resolve itself if only the outer wall of the local liquor store weren't such a comfy, tempting place to lounge.

Not to mention those sweet zero-lot park benches.

But just in case you're tempted to flock to Plano to buy delicious, legal liquor, be aware that the city is teeming with snakes.

Why, are they Muslims? WHAT.

OK, so according to a local news outlet, Plano snakes have been gettin' it on like crazy this Spring, resulting in a lot of goddamn snakes. This was a troubling development to one alert Planoite, who did what any responsible suburbanite would do when confronted with the prospect of God's creatures living and breeding in a natural environment: He called the city on them.

To be fair, there is very little one can do in Plano that won't result in having the city called on one, including painting one's mailbox - or being born with one's skin - the wrong color. But I digress.

The city came out to the serpent-infested park and discovered that every last, single, solitary snake there was non-poisonous and harmless. As, you know, actually, most snakes are.

Hi!

But really, dude? This is Texas. There really ARE poisonous snakes here; even in the suburbs, it's totally normal to see water moccassins and copperheads among the rat snakes and garter snakes. (They're the bitey ones.) And my message to you, Mr. Concerned Citizen, is that if you live in Texas and can't tell the difference between a poisonous and non-poisonous snake, you are too stupid to live in most places, but most definitely in Texas.

But mostly, this quote:

"Most kids like to get close to the water, and they don't know the difference between a snake and a turtle," he said.



OMG. They're freaking twinsies.

Forget legal liquor: I'd like some of whatever this man is illegally ingesting that causes his mind to create the terrifying snake-turtle hybrids he believes to exist in Plano.



He'd probably shit if he watched "Piranhaconda."

I've got one more wanker for you.  This one is a doozy.

So a few years ago, Plano had this idea that maybe its emergency responders should be able to do their jobs effectively. To that end, they planned a wireless communications network that would cover the entire city. Most of the equipment was installed on city-owned power poles. But six percent of Plano wasn't covered by the data net because the local power utility owned the poles in those areas and didn't want the city to piggyback its equipment on them. So the city erected 30-foot poles to make sure the network was complete.

Well, some of the fancier-schmancier neighborhoods where they were installed decided the integrity of emergency communications simply wasn't worth the cost of having a hideous eyesore in their midst.

I'm guessing they're pretty pissed off about
the aesthetically unpleasing fire hydrants, too.

One wanker in the Hills of Prestonwood - which is an area of McMansions that has no hills, no woods, and is nowhere near Preston Road - mounted a campaign to have them removed. His sane, logical, and not at all batshit-insane argument against them?

"We don't like unsightly things. This is a golf course community."

Because yeah.

This week the city announced that, instead of spending time, effort, and money on things like hiring firefighters or repairing roads, it had worked out other arrangements for their equipment and would tear down the poles at the taxpayers' expense.

Because the needs of the wankers outweigh the needs of everyone who doesn't live in a 4,000 square-foot house.

Don't worry, the Prozac will mellow me out any minute now.

Just wait for it.

P.S. It's the last day of May, and I haven't done X, Y, or Z for the A to Z Swearing Challenge. Xiphias! Yikes! Zounds!

P.P.S. OK, a xiphias is just a swordfish. Sue me. Or, in the spirit of the challenge, go fuck yourself.

P.P.P.S. I love you all!

President. Soul Singer. Cowpoke.

In Plano, Texas there's a great burger place called Country Burger. It's been in business since the early 1600s, or maybe it just seems that long. Anyway, it's a family-owned place and it makes the best fast, no-frills hamburgers in the world. In the world. The Baudelaire family has been eating there since before there was a Baudelaire family, when we were just a guy and a girl and an unfertilized egg somewhere deep in my Fallopian tubes.

There, don't say I never run any pictures
of Precocious Daughter.

I could rhapsodize about Country Burger all day, but really, go to Plano and eat there. That might be a bit more difficult for my Ukrainian readers (yo, Ukes!), but still, it's worth the trip from anywhere.

Even Highland Park. Or, you know, send your third butler.

Country Burger is decorated with, in the immortal words of Moe Szyslak, "a whole bunch of crazy crap on the walls." Most of it is Texan, country, Plano, or used license plate in theme. Like the huge ratty cowhide tacked to one wall (which was a lot less ratty 20 years ago, but still huge). But there are also two framed paintings of cowboys, hanging right between the cowhide and the soda fountains. We see them every time we eat there, but it took us a long time to identify the cowboy on the right.

Do you see it yet?

Then one day, a couple of years ago, it hit us:  It's Cowboy President Obama!

Do you see it now?
Or am I on drugs?
Wouldn't you like to know?

Once we saw it, we couldn't unsee it. That picture's residency in Country Burger way predates Barack Obama's presidency, so it's kind of weird. But...I mean, you see the resemblance, right? You see that it's a painting of President Obama sitting on a fence in cowboy garb, don't you? We're not crazy, are we?



I mean, if he can slow-jam the news, he can rope a cow, right?

You think we're crazy, don't you?

Fine.

Then I won't even show you the other cowboy painting.

Harumph.

Obviously, the idea of Cowboy Vincent is simply absurd.

Oh, when you go, have a strawberry milkshake. Yum. Just don't touch the cowhide - that thing is being held together by cobwebs and hope, I think.

Won't Someone Think About the Llamas?

My daddy is a smart man. You know those fiber-optic Christmas trees they sell everywhere?

Like at ThinkGeek, for instance.

My daddy had the idea for those things years before they actually showed up on the market to make our holidays garish and vaguely psychedelic. Of course, he didn't actually patent or develop the idea, and so someone else is eating solid-gold oysters tonight instead of my daddy. He's smart, but maybe not so much visionary.

Anyway, another development he predicted decades ago was that Plano, Texas was going to turn into just another decaying suburb within 20 years. Which seemed pretty inconceivable at the time. Back in the 1980s, when I lived there with my family, Plano was among the brightest, shiniest, most embarrassingly prosperous places in the country. Even if you've never been to Plano, you can get a pretty good approximation of it by watching any John Hughes Brat Pack movie. Plano was just like the idealized suburban Chicago of Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, only with ugly brick ranch houses instead of charming Colonials. Seriously, you couldn't walk through the halls of my high school without bumping into some douchebag who looked like James Spader.


Who usually was busy ignoring someone who looked like Jon Cryer.

In the interest of full disclosure, I freely admit that I lacked the looks, the popularity, the fashion sense, and the money to fit in with the beautiful people of Plano in the 1980s. Or, what the hell, now. But back in the day, even if you were just crouched on the sidelines watching the parade of affluence and cultural significance pass you by, it was impossible not to sort of enjoy it vicariously and believe it would go on forever. Like a Mardi Gras celebration or a particularly vapid reality show.

But Plano has in fact become an aging suburb with aging-suburb problems. Even though it still has a considerable population of the wealthy and beautiful, along with all the amenities wealthy and beautiful people crave, the number of minorities and economically disadvantaged residents has grown considerably. Many of the neighborhoods that were considered top-tier when I was a kid are now decades old and have been abandoned by their original occupants in favor of newer, flashier, more exclusive subdivisions. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods that weren't top-tier are even older and less desirable. Plano has experienced a huge amount of physical sprawl, and there is an ongoing struggle to balance resources between upgrading the older parts of the infrastructure and maintaining the standards demanded by those in the newer, wealthier areas. Typical big-city problems, but pretty jarring in a suburb that was named the richest city in America in 2008.

I'm not going to knock Plano or my experience living there. I'll let Plano native Lance Armstrong's biography do that.  Personally I've chosen not to live there, but I know many fine people who do. There's a lot to like about Plano, and a lot to dislike, depending on your perspective.

Actor and Tony Romo brother-in-law Chace Crawford
thinks it's a great place to smoke weed, for example.

But there's one thing in Plano that everyone loves - rich or poor, native or transplant, pre- or post-implant surgery - and that is Haggard Farm.

The Haggard name looms large in Plano history. The family settled there before the Civil War and owned vast tracts of land that now comprise large parts of modern Plano. You'll find the name on schools, parks, streets; the word "haggard" even describes how actor and Tony Romo brother-in-law Chace Crawford looked in his mug shot after he was busted for smoking weed there (see above).

And smack-dab in the middle of crowded, sprawling, hyper-developed Plano, at the intersection of two busy streets, are 120 acres of peaceful farmland populated by hay fields, cows, and llamas. Haggard Farm is the single biggest undeveloped piece of land left in Plano. I would dare say that every single person in town knows it well. A large proportion of them probably moo at the cows when they drive by. Or maybe that's just me.

The thing is, Haggard Farm is universally beloved. Whether you appreciate its history, enjoy having a little oasis of grass and livestock in the center of suburbia, or marvel at what must be its astronomical monetary value in a city where a one-acre lot can list for $825,000, it's a very cool place.

And it's about to be turned into a subdivision.

The Haggard family has decided to finally give up its wonderful, historical, charmingly anachronistic suburban farm to developers. Plans are already on the table to turn the land into 400+ homesites, plus areas of retail. Thank goodness. If there's anything Plano needs more of, it's places to shop and poorly built zero-lot-line McMansions.


Remember, your turret-to-chimney ratio must be
approved by the homeowners association.

 I'm sorry the Haggards have made this decision. But it's their land, and their decision to make. They held out for decades, when the temptation to cash in on the Plano land boom must have been akin to Eve and the apple. There's speculation that the property taxes have become too much to justify the minimal level of farming that actually goes on there. Or that the family finally got an offer they couldn't refuse. Or just that they got tired of cleaning up llama turds.

My guess is they're pooping machines.
(These are not the Haggard llamas. There is no full-scale replica of Machu Picchu
 on Haggard Farm. Although I'll bet one of the new McMansions will have one.)

I'm sad that soon there will be no more Haggard Farm. A lot of people in Plano are sad. Losing a piece of your personal history is hard, especially one so unabashedly pleasant. I'll miss seeing the llamas when I drive through Plano. It's a hoot to see llamas in the middle of a featureless suburb. I wonder what will become of them. Someone needs to make sure they get a good home.

If the nearby Chili's starts serving llama fajitas, I'm going to be pissed.