Slowly Going Bald

• It's deeply unsettling to ride in a plane with propellers, i.e., a non-jet plane. I saw it pull up at the airport and felt like I was living in that scene in Major League where the team thinks they're about to board a jet but is instead shunted onto a small, rickety old deathtrap. If only I'd had Serrano to keep me company.

• Riding on said deathtrap is equally frightening. The single flight attendant, she announced to us over the intercom (though she really could have just raised her voice, it was that small an area), had been forbidden by the captain to walk around, because of the turbulence. As we began our descent into DFW, the captain told us to prepare for landing, only instead of using the airline-standard "Flight attendants, please prepare for landing," he said, "Jesseca, please get ready to land," because when you've only got one flight attendant, you might as well call her by name, no matter how much it might freak out the passengers.

• Her name really was Jesseca, with all Es, not 2 Es and an I. It's like her parents loved her enough to give her a normal-sounding name but also hated her enough to give it a brutally retarded spelling, so she'll have to correct people on the matter for the rest of her life.

• People in Texas get excited about pretty much anything; people in L.A. get excited about pretty much nothing.

• There's something in the air or the water in the middle of nowhere in West Texas that turns most of the girls there into some frighteningly hot women. And it's different than the L.A. kind of hot. Flying out of California, the woman in front of me as we boarded at LAX kept unconsciously shaking her head to show off her hair, and stood there with back slightly arched and chest high and ass slightly out, as if trying to signal to every nearby male her potential to breed. But the mix of desert and heat and decades of religiously and politically conservative ideologies in Texas adds like 19 new levels of psychic anguish to the whole ordeal, because the girls there are often known to wear the highest bottoms and the lowest tops and skip gaily through the May sun and in general destroy the central nervous systems of countless fraternity boys, but when it comes right down to it, their personalities are a mixture of a "Sorry, Bobby / Can't go past the lobby" kind of teasing disappointment and something bordering on shock that all these good ol' boys are walking around having these bad ol' thoughts about the legions of nubile coeds that seem to swarm underfoot like crickets in August. Los Angeles is a place of open sexuality, but the Key City seems to ask that those hormones be repressed, fought against, tied down, which leads to a generally palpable sexual tension in the air, sending many of the young men into alternately downward spirals of physical debauchery and self-flagellating periods of piety.

• All that to say that college is an emotionally interesting era.

• About the getting excited: This is mainly because there's not much to do in West Texas, so that social events become havens from boredom and rare chances to get all gussied up, whereas there's so much crap to do after dark in L.A. that you usually bail on it all and just stay home. It's a weird rule, but tends to hold.

• Many, many people in Texas use "Coke" to mean any kind of carbonated soft drink. It is useless to try and change their ways on this.

• Texas looks like Texas, even from the air. Some people would say that roads and trees and fields look like roads and trees and fields pretty much anywhere, and that to distinguish Texas from the air is impossible, but these people are dead wrong, and if you follow their teachings you will stray from the path of learning. Texas looks like Texas. I'm a (relatively) smart guy, so I understand the idiocy of that tautology, but there's almost no other way to define it. It just looks like Texas: Wide fields, access roads next to the highways, a kind of casual enormity to the cities that communicates the idea that the planners and residents gorged themselves on the open space around them and decided to spread everything out just for fun. It's directly against the idea you'd expect most people to have, where you would put things in a city near each other for the sake of convenience. But Texas is second nationally in land mass only to Alaska, and its citizens like their space.

• People drive slow in West Texas, and I don't mean slower than you or I or slower than one would expect, but full-on objectively slow. It's amazing. If the speed limit on a given street is 40 mph, you can bet they'll be tooling along around 36, playing it safe, enjoying the sunshine and talking about how Dr Pepper is the only kind of Coke they like. But I think they drive so slowly because they have nowhere to go, both in the immediate and meta senses. It's not just that their destination of the store or the flea market is so mundane that any sense of urgency in travel has long withered and died, but that they're past middle age and have by some unknown force of the cosmos or some truly bad karma found themselves living in West Texas with nothing to do. They don't drive so slow because they're lazy, but because they've looked into the future and seen that they have nowhere important to go. Ever.

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