+The Magnetic Fields
Europe doesn't think much of Texas. And they really don't think much of Waco. Actually they really don't think of it at all, so I come back home and really don't know what to expect. The tame, well-off Houston suburbs taught me to think of Waco as a lousy third-world Texas town (re: 19th-poorest in the nation according to the 1990 census) rife with unnatural and unnecessary drama (re: David Koresh v. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT, or, in the interest of fairness, a temporal and decaying political entity v. THE REINCARNATED MESSIAH), so my outlook as concerns Waco is understandably biased from the beginning. Its crumbling 19th-century buildings and babbling prophets (or at the very least babbling homeless drunks) pale in comparison to distant glittering towers, state-of-the-art cinemas, and beautiful cars of the richest black imaginable.
But then out of nowhere really life in Europe's most intriguing cities begin to take up a significant portion of my life, and I later come back to find the Houston suburbs a terribly conventional, boring place. And Waco suddenly isn't nearly as forlorn a home. Rome has taught me to appreciate the beauty in decay and ruin, and the fellow transitioning from a constipated state to a more comfortable one while assuming immediate adjacence to the Colosseum made me laugh a bit. I mean natural decay and crapping on historical monuments representative of the human condition are NOT ideal, but these days I do see Waco and its wacky antics as more the rule than the exception. Waco and Rome (minus the idealistic tourists) are the real world. Pearland is not. To quote the aptly named Phony-Shouting-Guy of Family Guy, Houston Suburbia is PHONY! A BIG, FAT PHONY!!!!!
