we built this pyramid on rock and roll

(Amarillo, Texas) In the midst of the growing economic crisis facing Panhandle Truth Squad, I holed up last week in my offices in the sky, at the very tip of the pyramid. As I am wont to do, I drank 100-year-old Irish whiskey and gazed down at the fabled intersection of Tenth and Burr. As the Bushmill's neared the lower half of the bottle, I reflected on how much had changed. Amarillo had been revitalized, in our time. I looked down at a city that never schlepped, a teeming metropolitan nightlife that would have once been unimaginable.

But I found myself longing for the old days, when We Built This Pyramid to be the highest thing ever to rise over the Best Lighted Main Street in America. To get where we were today— or rather, to get where we were the day before, before the stock crashed and the investors started wailing and gnashing their teeth— we had to tell literally thousands of the sorts of rambling stories that run into one another, none of them coming to much of a conclusion. We had to mix up a few metaphors along the way.

We fought some battles, didn't we? We should probably have know better. But, hell, we were allowed to our opinions, weren't we? Even in the Texas progressive blogosphere? And, as I stared down at the drunken masses, I realized that we had yet another story we probably shouldn't tell—

. . .

We were at a Christmas party, talking to one of my S.O.’s colleagues. Somehow the subject of a, um, home-schooled relative of the colleague came up. This poor girl was home-schooled all the way through grade twelve, and after that her parents wanted to send her to a Good Christian School.

But the parents were apparently a bit sheltered as well because the Good Christian School they ultimately chose was S.M.U.

Now, I went to S.M.U. for two years. And I was there for a full year before I really even realized that the school had any religious affiliation whatsoever. I was hanging out in the Student Center, listening to OMD on my Walkman, one bright fall day, and I passed a girl talking to a grad school representative on the pay phone. That's what we used in those dinosaur days: pay phones. That's what we listened to: Walkmen. Anyway, the bow-headed pay-phone-talker said something about “Southern Methodist University,” and that’s when it hit me.

Oh, I remember thinking, that’s why we have the God Quad.

But, even in the God Quad, it’s not like there were legions of fundies and Bible-thumpers running around forbidding us to dance. I may be slow, but I think I would have picked up on the nominal religious connection a lot sooner if there had been.

. . .

Not long after the Christmas party, the S.O. and I went around collecting kids from various friends and relatives. We ended up with a five-year-old, a two-and-a-half-year-old, and a fourteen-month-old. (Spacedark Jr., age fourteen, hung around for awhile and then went to the mall.) After watching the fourteen-month-old lurch around Casa Spacedark for awhile, I determined that there were two eras in life that were very similar: the few months after you first learn to walk, and freshman year in college. During both periods, you experience an exhilarating sense of freedom. You run around knocking things over and putting other things into your mouth, just to see what will happen. You fall down a lot in public. You make incomprehensible sounds. And so on.

The young lady who naively went to S.M.U. because it was a Good Christian School after a lifetime in homeschool was experiencing that exhilarating freedom without adequate preparation.

Hell, I went to Caprock, where kids constantly offered me drugs and daily tried to peer-pressure me into stabbing Prodigal Son with a switchblade knife, and I still managed to suddenly decide I was Hunter S. Freaking Thompson the second I arrived in Dallas.

spacedark