To the Beautiful People of the East and West Coasts, Houston is a derogatory term. It is a geographic epithet; a punch line for all that is supposedly wrong with America. Besides being plunked down in the middle of that vast and apparently backward terrain of red states, it is a part of Texas, which only magnifies the disdain. We harbor colossal evil like Enron and Halliburton. Heck, even that UN Oil For Food scam involved a local business.
You hate Houston. You know that you do, even if you've never been there before.
I lived in San Francisco and Manhattan prior to moving to H-town. My friends and loved ones all thoroughly prepared me for some kind of irredeemable Third World shit stall -- a town that residents of Lagos sneer, "Well at least we don't live THERE!" I played along with the In The Know Crowd -- the amiable dunce heading to hell. I joked of getting a gun rack for the Honda. I pulled into town roughly two years ago at this time. The humidity, as they had warned, hung like a soggy towel on my back -- the air was thick and soupy like a steam room. You walk slow and sensually in the summertime there.
Twenty-three months later, I took my leave of Houston, eventually heading back to the coast, to the Beautiful People who must think, "How relieved he is! To finally get out of such a terrible place!" It pains me to say it, but to those blue state elitists, I say fuck you. Houston is the best-kept big secret in America.
http://houstonitsworthit.com/
He has been drinking the Kool Aid, they will say. He has lost his marbles. Surely, there is no way Houston could compete with our sophistication; our glitterati; our self-satisfied sense of being the center of the known universe.
No, Houston cannot compete on those levels. And that's precisely why it succeeds. On glitterati alone, we showed our aww-shucks country hayseed celebrity deference when the Super Bowl rolled through town and we gawked at B-listers shopping at the Galleria. "Look mom! Richard Dean Anderson!!"
Houston shines for all the reasons it is not New York or California. It is not expensive. It is not pretentious. It is both wildly larger-than-life (where else would a church move into an NBA arena?) and genuinely down to earth. While other cities take themselves way too serious, Houston is completely unafraid to laugh at itself (see: Art Car Parade). Optimism. Opportunity. It has a senseless can-do logic that never shows up on the coast, where cynicism, perfectionism, repression and guarded insincerity reigns.
Houston would never check itself out in the mirror. We're much too fat, apparently, according to that rigidly academic annual study at Men's Health. (And should we really take shit from a magazine that's run the same cover for 20 years?)
If a city has to sprawl, let it sprawl like Houston, which has about as many zoning laws as Mogadishu. Skyscraper unexpectedly rise up like obelisks from residential patches; oil baron mansions shoulder in on avenues alongside project housing.
Pride floats -- and Texan Pride makes you wanna hook your thumbs in your overalls. On the barbecue barn across the street from my old apartment, a huge painted message announces: "You might just give some serious thought to thankin' your lucky stars you're in Texas." At the mall they sell t-shirts that proclaim, "Texas: It's Bigger Than France." Some locals like to say, on their bumper stickers, "I wasn't born here, but I got here as quick as I could. What happens when irony is the only emotion you know? Move to Texas! And damn quick. These feelings are real.
I miss it like hell. Already.
- Serazio
