Spreading the truth....in Texas...

I’ve given up trying to write outside today at the rest stop under the gazebo where a large empty cement picnic table is shaded and a nice cooling steady breeze is lowering the temperature by at least a 2 digit degree!

But flies dominate! Little tiny ones, medium size ones, and larger ones – all equally annoying, persistent and fearless, landing on my water bottle as I drink and my keyboard as I attempt to type. Yuck. Too many fuckin cows around here.

I’ve also decided NOT to mosey thru the small isolated towns of western Texas but to stay on the highway until I get to the ‘larger’ towns. I felt ‘comfortable’ driving the truth thru the tiny towns of California and even Arizona – especially as I could see no visible yard signs or bumper stickers touting ‘him’.

But here in Texas – except for El Paso – everything is so isolated and only after the sun goes down revealing a smattering of flickering lights every so many miles is there proof of human habitation.

But the thing that REALLY gives me pause is the sudden absence of internet. I can’t even get mobile data working, let alone gps. Texas rest stops used to boast free internet for all travelers. I ask an old man who is resting in the shade after mowing the brittle dead grass around the picnic tables.

He tells me that internet is no longer because Texas can’t afford it. I’m incredulous – and I immediately think it’s a lie. They already invested – for years – in the hardware so it can’t be that. Unless it was a trump-type business man who claimed bankruptcy after he had all the work done.

The monthly service fee might be off the hook but that’s why god made charges: they’d just have to charge people to connect, which I’m sure would be a profit-making business. Even I’d pay occasionally.

But given the attitude of the police yesterday, the border patrol checkpoint last night in the middle of nowhere on I20, and the proximity to the border, not to mention the womyn’s revolution kicking ass in Texas and maybe even the anti-pipeline anti-oil corporations organizing here, Texas wants to eliminate or at least minimize our contact with each other and the outside world.

Many of the menacing glinting black police cars here boldly brag they are bought and paid for by ‘homeland’ ‘security’…

I’ve carefully pumped veg oil into my main tank, finishing off the 50 gallon drum and almost half of my largest tank. I’m HOPING I can connect with my clean veggie oil source in Atlanta – I’m alarmed at how many of the old sources have dried up: both because of the fuckin corporatizing of the biodiesel industry plus the it confirms my suspicion that many of these guys got into the biz not because they were concerned about bombing people to steal their oil but because they were furious that the price of fuel had risen so much.

Now that the cost of fuel has dropped, so has the number of boys running veggie oil.

So I’m hunkered down inside my camper, longing to take off all my clothes at the very least, making myself write. That’s a good thing!