I often listen to C-SPAN’s Washington Journal in the morning as I eat breakfast and attempt to edit my own crude journals of poetry and memories. Media criticizing medium–very human: the self-critical. War in Iraq and whatever else leaning into our mind view from every side and angle. The nation is divided in a strange way that I cannot really grasp. Is this the way alienation felt right before WWII, Anasocrates? Is this alienation or something else?

I am a Texan, born in Abilene and raised in Waxahachie. I do not see myself only as a Texan. Nevertheless, I am much more a child of the Lonestar than any other kind of name I could use (Irish, German, English, Blackfoot, etc). I have a pride in this state that surprises even me at times, and certainly surprised you who never found a place that you would claim.

Mostly I just love my home; I am unable to comprehend why I should not love my home. I expect that other people in other places love their home so I will not give my place any less viability than do they. Does that mean I accept everything done here? Or that I find no fault with anyone from here? Please, that would be stupid.

Would I choose to live somewhere else? I have lived in Puerto Rico and Mexico and taken long stays in Colorado, Maryland, and New York. I really liked each for its own thing. One of them might have become a new home if I really applied myself. But I came back home and I dwell now in Denton. I really like where I live, a crossroads of diverse cultures and world views without all the imperial pomp of New York/London/Paris or the academic pretense of Boston/Berkley/Oxford.

I lovingly refer to this locale as the NULL ZONE, the crossroads where out and in, above and below cancel each other long enough to let the singular person present him/herself for the impossible exchange with another.

The neighborhood I live in was originally built when there was a missile plant here decades ago. But the Town North division is quiet, especially in the morning, after the sun is just up.

A small amount of noise, drifiting on the wind from the highway, always reminds me of my youngest days in Forreston, on Rural Route 5 about 8 miles out of Waxahachie. The sound of big trucks on I-35E going under the overpass that linked our dirt road up with the sleepy almost no-town of Forreston. The distance of cotton field in-between adding to the mutedness of cars, trucks, and even Greyhound buses in going right on by me.

Very early, the train might moan a signal, slowly chugging past what was left of the little township, over there.

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