Fever Dreams and White Boys

After a late night drive we rolled into Brownwood, TX and slept at my aunt April’s house.  In morning we drove out to the small town of Bangs and ate at their restaurant.  They have the best BBQ in central Texas.  After a delicious meal we headed out to see historic Brownwood.  We found the smallest city block in America, it’s a locksmith shop with apartments above it, and then we stopped at a bunch of pawn shops in the city.  I bullshitted with a guy about guitar gear in a Gold Pawn and he informed me about which beers the locals drink.  Apparently the locals don’t really drink Lone Star Beer.  (Side Note: he claims the Russian Big Muff fuzz pedal by ElectroHarmonix is better than the American version.  We’ll see.)  Brownwood has a dry line, near the railroad tracks, over which no hard liquor can be sold.  What a stupid state.  In another pawn shop I found a 1950’s Telecaster.  It wasn’t for sale.  The guy also had a Megalodon tooth (that’s the giant ancient shark for you non-ancient-biologists).  It also wasn’t for sale.  WTF?  It’s weird to see semi-priceless (is that an acceptable word?) artifacts in a pawn shop.  The archaeologist who pawned that tooth must have come upon some hard times.  Maybe he needed the money to buy the last dodo egg.

Back at my aunt’s ranch, along with my cousin Jonathan, we explored their property and wrangled some cattle.  We had to swap a pregnant heifer with some other cows that needed to get it on.  Ryan caught the calf and tossed it over a fence while a stupid goat stood in a bath tub that was in the middle of the pen for some reason.

That night I had a fever so high that I was hallucinating.  For some reason I was singing Ryan Adams lyrics out loud.  And even though I knew he wasn’t really there, I had an out-loud conversation with my dead Grandpa Louis.  We came to the conclusion that life is hard and some people don’t know how to deal with it.  That’s why he was a drunk asshole.  I dropped my grudge.

We had lunch the next day at the restaurant again and got the scoop on the dirty underbelly of Brownwood history.  It consists of rich, old, white, racist men controlling the town and crushing all opposition.  By the way, thank God I was born a middle-class, white, straight male in American.  The sky’s the limit baby!