Commentary

Don't Mess With Texass

Last year, a staff member got lost in Armadillo, er, Amarillo, Texas. He was very unhappy about it. Now there is conclusive proof that in fact, Texas is Hell.

You can never really go home again. I desperately sought a job here in Eugene last spring, to the protests of my parents who reside in San Antonio, Texass. I spent the summer before in San Antonio and ended up with a lucrative (I use the term loosely) job working as a Food Service Engineer with a company loved globally, better known as Pizza Hut.

I have vowed never to work in pizza retail again. The smell eminating from a kitchen which cooks pizza makes me physically ill. So I wasn't in a rush to return to San Antonio and seek employment. However, my mother, an established shrink, wanted me to come home and work for her. In exchange I would get a car. Not just any car, but the car I have wanted since I was thirteen: my father's black, 1979, limited edition, convertible MGB.

Needless to say, the bribe worked and I returned home via an indirect road trip up to Seattle, over to Montana and down to San Antonio making numerous obligatory stops to visit various relations. It took two weeks. It was my parents, my eleven-year-old brother and I. Road trips are Dante's newly revised First Circle of Hell.

Texas is unlike any place in the world. First of all, Texas and Texans have a terribly inflated ego. Exhibit A: "Don't Mess With Texas."

"Don't Mess With Texas" is a slogan developed to discourage littering. This bumper sticker, road sign, T-shirt and billboard is everywhere. It has become the call sign of Texans everywhere. This is annoying. It is just another symbol of the highly inflated ego which dwells from the top of the 10 gallon hats to about ten inches into the soil, wherein you reach solid limestone. That is the only cool thing about Texas--lots of dynamite blowing holes in the earth for pools.

People who have been born and raised in Texas will tell you how much they adore the country, excuse me, state. People from Oregon, such as myself, will point out that it is, in fact, 120 degrees outside. They will respond in that southern drawlin', hair flippin', eye-battin', tobacco- chewin' manner that they "just luuuv the heat."

In the summer, there is no one outside. The only people outside are manual laborers. Everyone else goes from their air-conditioned house to their air-conditioned car to their air-conditioned work and back again. They only venture out before the sun rises or after it sets to "luuuv the heat."

What follows is a true event: I was driving to my mother's work one day around noon and noticed some huge birds, carrion birds perhaps circling overhead--they had spied a jogger. I looked at the psycho jogger. He was gasping and choking on his own sweat. Serves him right, I suppose; not even Satan goes jogging in Hell.

Texas must be Dante's Second Circle of Hell. The guy by the road was jogging to the third: where buzzards pick out your eyes while native Texans in their Jeep Cherokees narrowly avoid your screaming, writhing body.

I had to get a new driver's license in Texas. The Department of Motor Vehicles is the best example of bureaucracy and your tax dollars at work. Why do postal workers only shoot up the post office? Why don't a few of them head over to the DMV and have a little fun? Government conspiracy? I think yes.

I was second in line when the doors opened and it took me about five minutes to get up to the first desk. The woman handed me a form from a stack on her desk and told me to fill it out and then wait in the same, rapidly expanding line again. I filled it out as quickly as possible with a blue Bic which I happened to have with me. Without that pen, I probably would've had to wait in another line, as all the handy pens-on-a-rope had been stolen.

It took me about fifteen minutes to get back through the same line. This time another bureaucrat "helped" me by pointing out the fine print at the top of the paper which stated: "Only black ink may be used on this form." I gripped my blue Bic between my teeth to keep from swallowing my tongue.

I was then to take the written test which would, should I pass, be followed by the actual driving test. An hour and a half later, I was waiting outside for an examiner in my coveted black, 1979, limited edition, convertible MGB which does not have air-conditioning. The sun mounted higher and higher in the sky. However, it would take another hour before anyone inside the DMV figured out that the six of us waiting in our cars behind the little sign which says, "Park Car Here and Wait for Examiner," were not just loitering in the sweltering heat.

I passed the test. But it never ends at the DMV. I had another line to wait in. There were two lines, one which snaked around the 25' x 25' waiting area, and another which was about three feet long. The clincher was that the short line never moved. People began to panic. An Asian woman, speaking only Spanish (don't ask), tried to communicate her fears that we were waiting in the wrong line. I told her not to worry and that there was no way in hell she was getting in front of me.

Forty-five minutes later, I was at the main desk, the end of my journey. With great flourish and a deep sigh, I handed the woman my papers. She began to type and the computers crashed - ALL OF THEM!

Getting up through those lines and hurdles at the DMV is, I imagine, very similar to being on a down escalator with 200 smarmy teenagers when it breaks, hurtling everyone to Hell. Thus we skipped Dante's Fifth and Sixth Circles of Hell: eternal Macroeconomics lectures taught by Peter Thornses and life inside Oregon Public Broadcasting. That makes the DMV the Seventh Circle of Hell.

Well, anyway, that was my summer. It really sucked. Perhaps Texas isn't really so bad. I admit the Riverwalk in San Antonio is a pretty cool place and The Reverend Horton Heat are native Texans and put on a killer show at The Liberty Lunch in Austin but it just doesn't make up for everything else. I never want to go back. Oh, and if you feel compelled to visit the Alamo--don't. Just buy a postcard and send it to yourself, it's much better that way.

Amanda Erickson, a junior majoring in journalism, is Associate Editor for the Oregon Commentator