When you have kids you always find all this weird half-finished stuff lying around the house. (Half-finished drawings, half-finished bananas, etc.) I found this comic on the kitchen table, drawn by Owen at age 5. (“Julese” is his 3-year-old brother, Jules.) Drawn in a comic book notebook by The Unemployed Philsopher’s Guild.
“Tex-Mex — that’s one thing that I really really miss when I’m in New York. The thought of having to pay for chips and salsa is a crazy thing. You should just sit down, there should be a bottomless thing of chips and really good salsa and then your meal starts. This whole thing about sitting down and ordering chips and salsa and paying $5.00 for it is insane.”
—Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent)
If and when I leave Texas, this will be thing I miss the most. Not the brisket, no, but a plate of enchiladas, rice and beans, chips and salsa, and a cold Mexican beer. Done, as my former native co-workers would say, “Correct.” Served, with a towel or an oven mitt, and shout of, “Hot plate!”
There’s a reason ZZ Top used a Tex-Mex spread for the gatefold of their classic, Tres Hombres. (To quote Pusha T, “If you know, you know.”)
This might be the greatest album artwork of all-time. (The food came from a long-shuttered Houston restaurant called Leo’s. The back cover reads, “In the fine Texas tradition.”) In 2016, chef Tom Micklethwait recreated the meal, and ate it:
“Have mercy!”
A few years ago a neighbor a few streets down was giving away a bunch of stuff before he moved to another city, including a huge Hammond organ that he kept in the garage for his kids to noodle around on. I drove over there to pick it up. A bunch of other neighbors were standing around in his driveway, chatting and checking out the goods. “I’ve met so many nice people in the past couple of hours,” he said. “I’m starting to wish I’d given a bunch of stuff away when we first moved here!”
1) the full moon can be glorious, but it’s really the moon phasing in and out that is the most interesting to me
2) morning moons sometimes beat evening moons, especially when they hang big and low by the horizon and startle you when you turn a corner or come out from under the shade of a tree
Above: a happy kitchen table scene from a few weeks ago. Below: the guardian spirit for my new diary.
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