Moving Day

"Can I ask you a favor?" said the man, standing on the porch in the brilliance of freshly restored metal chairs, gleaming like a Guards barracks ready for inspection. "Sure," I replied, quickly calculating cash flow, "What's the deal?"

The deal was this, to help my friend move from his bucolic rural retreat into the county seat grandeur of this thriving farming community. 

So, unlike the wicked priest in the parable of the Good Samaritan, I stepped up to the plate and off we went. "Just a bed, a refrigerator and a microwave, yessir," that's all it'd be. It wasn't, of course, but that was alright, we made the haul in two trips.

Move

During a lull in the firefight, I stepped off to inspect the treeline and stood still, listening. You know what it's like, first a kind of null then hearing sharpens, senses begin to live again and the countryside comes alive. Right at that point I heard a slight rustle through the brush and out padded a grey fox.

He didn't see me at first, just picked his way with a doggish grin along the game trail. The occasional shot echoed out in the distance and I wondered at the fox; gunfire didn't faze him. He stopped, as if on cue, while someone's rifle sounded off in search of deer.

A Typical Gray Fox

I looked at the fox and the fox looked at me with his comical face, his amazingly full tail gently brushing away. Then he trotted off in search of the next adventure and I finished off the move. 

Part of that meant bagging a weirdly large amount of lights that'd been strung around the small compound. I told the story of the fox and got a spirited reply, explaining the light show.

Cat!

"Yes! Seen grey fox and red fox, bobcat, coyote, all kinds. There's a black cougar, yes there is. These lights here see him off. Don't want that puppy, nossir! Bag that extension cord. Cost me 68 dollars. Not leavin' that behind for no black cougar."

We left, truck loaded down with half of a man's worldly possessions. Not much when you think of it, two short-bed, tailgate-down loads to account for a life. By worldly standards a failure but listen up.

Ford

"No luggage racks on the top of a hearse" and, in the Gospel, "It's harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle."

Comfort one another with these words.

LSP

Fixed The Rig

After dropping the Cadet (potential) at school, I dropped off the rig at the Brazen Pineapple, known colloquially as Gene's Auto Body. Then I walked home, because I didn't have a vehicle and didn't care to ask for a "loaner."

It still seems odd after growing up in England to see dirt roads within city limits but I like that, it's Centex Country, right along with the grain bins, sorry, bins not in the frame.

So are shacks, which are somehow less bucolic than the dirt roads and grain silos of this small slice of rural Texan paradise. Imagine, there you are in your shack, it's triple digits and the food stamps have just run out because you've swapped them out for meth. Not so pastoral idyll.

Still, the town's getting fixed up, with new shops on the Square and attractive older houses being renovated and sold. Who to? People from Dallas, I'd imagine, who can't afford the 500k+ price tag of living in the appalling and soul-destroying metrosprawl.

I thought all this and more as I strolled down the leafy boulevards of my quaint farming community and pondered the transnational, satanic, globalist elites that destroyed this town to make themselves even richer. Where will it end? 

Pitchforks and Nooses down the Mall? Maybe. More likely a gradual breakdown of central government which, ironically, runs out of cash.

Of course we've seen it all before. Cast your minds back to Rome which, at its peak, was a city of over a million people. Then picture that same city in the 7th century AD, perhaps viewed from the Palatine Hill and the just at that point intact palace of the Caesars. What do you see?

A sea of ruins stretching out to the horizon, broken by still-standing monumental architecture, such as the Pantheon and Coliseum. Below you lies the broken Hippodrome with its ghosts of long dead crowds. Rome at this point maybe musters 20,000 souls.

This Texan town was 20,000 strong 50 years ago, now it's 7,000 if it's lucky. 

Draw the moral as you will.

Quo Vadis,

LSP