…from a moving truck.
Fort Worth is hell.
I thought all of Texas would be hell, but people here have been pretty chill for the most part. We still see anti-bush bumper stickers mixed
in with the “with us or against us” stuff, and those are mostly on gas guzzling trucks. The people here have turned out to be, well, people.
But Fort Worth, damn, this place is awful! Yeah yeah yeah, i know, your Mom/Brother/Best Friend/Hamster come from Fort Worth and they said it
was the friendliest place on earth, best food, good people, yadda yadda yadda. I love you, your Mom, and your hamster. But Jeeze…
I was sick of finding us nice places to stay, so we decided to stay in the first place we found closest to the gig. I mean we were only staying there 2 nights, how bad could it be?
Where do i start? I need to pause here to collect the proper adjectives and inflammatory rhetoric. The motel was in, as far as i can tell, the
worst part of Fort Worth, and therefore, Texas, and therefore, the U.S. (except maybe Florida… again no offense to your Mom/Brother/Best
Friend/Hamster.)
Imagine a horrible room with cinder block walls, pealing grey paint and the same picture on two different walls. Check that out, why have two of the same picture in the room? why not just have one picture? Do two of the same picture cost less than two different pictures? The utter nastiness of the bathroom made the rest of the room seem actually quite cheerful by comparison. We went to bed thinking it couldn't get any worse. This silly myth was popped like a soap bubble by the drunk man pounding on our door at 2am asking us for money [J note: well, actually it was more like 11pm, but that didn't make it that much more pleasant]. We moved out the next morning.
The rest of Fort Worth seemed, well, ignored. It looked desolate and forgotten. Our first night there we desperately tried to acquire food,
only to find an utter lack of grocery stores and every restaurant closed, even the ones that had hours posted as open. We would've been
creeped out if we weren't so brain addled by starvation. We ended up eating in the only place open for miles. It was (i am not exaggerating
here) an Italian restaurant, run by a Slovak family, with an entirely Hispanic clientèle. They had a TV playing Hungarian movies, and a small
storefront selling nothing but Cyrillic magazines and bad east European chocolate. I think i confused our waitress with the word “vegetarian.”
[J note: We actually really liked that restaurant, and we found out what the Czech phrase 'krasny den' means, which has been bugging us,
except the food was pretty awful. I just ate garlic bread.]
The university was pretty normal, and our new hotel was better. Although i would describe our room decor as, “an ode to hunting dogs.” Once the show was done, we got the hell out of Fort Worth.
Some things we've seen while traveling through Texas;
1.) Variegated hills – as far as i can tell the hundreds of thousands of cows that walk the land don't like to walk up or down hills, so they
graze walking around the hills in a sort of spiral pattern, making every hill into a sort of huge topo map. Creepy but kinda neat.
2.) Austin botanical garden – Amazing constructed Japanese streams and waterfalls running through the whole park
3.) Bumper sticker, “We're making enemies faster than we can kill them.”
4.) A truck on the side of the highway engulfed in flames. [J note: This time, G's not exaggerating.]
