Adventure!
Totally Not a Fighting Cock, Paniqui Philippines.
Today, I am going on an adventure.
I'm taking a bus to Houston. Not a nasty Greyhound bus; I did that once back in the early 1980s, never again. A guy two rows back brought a fucking chicken on board. No, this is a classy bus with assigned seats that recline, and wifi. I'm looking forward to not having to concentrate for two long drives in a weekend.
I'm going to Houston for a photowalk of downtown.
Houston is a funky place. Lots of people who don't live there claim to love it. Self-loathing friends from Dallas talk of how it's a "real city," which means "no zoning." This means you can have an elementary school flanked by a strip club and a liquor store. Houston is like that friend of yours who says the world can't handle her because she's "too real," ie "free from consideration for the needs of society." Houston is indeed very real.
My friends who've actually lived in Houston for decades no longer live in Houston. They live in the Woodlands or Katy or someplace much less real. The Woodlands is particularly unreal. I like it. It's like that Simpson's episode set in Cypress Creek, where Hank Scorpio is both the world's greatest boss and also an international terrorist/Bond villain. Sigh. I would totally work for Hank Scorpio.
Just like a Simpson's episode, this weekend's adventure will end with things returning to status quo. I will be back in my Dallas-area suburban development, ready to face another week of mind-numbing boredom as I work from home, trying to hang on another 2,426 days until retirement, after which I will be bored at home in a different country, a "real" place where everyone has chickens and zoning is something people with money beg for, eventually.