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| The Tall City. | Photo: Flickr |
I'm from West Texas. From the Permian Basin—Midland, to be specific. The Tall City.
Midland is the kind of town where black dudes come up to you at the gas pump in the night with a serene smile, promoting their mixtapes and kush;
where billionaires' daughters drive to school in white Range Rovers to sit in class with young Mexican boys living in poverty, whose parents don't give them lunch money, but yet they still afford to buy a gram or two of weed at lunch and maintain a fresh tapered haircut indefinitely;
a Swisher-Sweet and a sweet tea at lunch always does just fine.
Midland is the kind of town where everyone has sold drugs at some point in their youth or another, even the white boys, if only just for fun;
county jail is a revolving door,
sobriety is best practiced in moderation,
and where, if you stay beyond graduation, you either start a family or an addiction
or you die,
usually a thousand times before you really do.
Just ask my buddy Chris.
He was dead long before he went out like Cobain.
He never did do anything small, though, did he?
That's what West Texas teaches you
to never not
go all the way with the damn thing.
parties, drugs, women, football, Jesus, enchiladas—
that's why if you stay, chances are you'll dig all the way to Hell.
Or you escape
and get far enough away that you eventually start to love again
where you're from.
