All of my life, with the exception of limited periods of exile, I have lived in the Great State of Texas. Texas is big, Texas is good, and all things Texas, even if they make you uncomfortable, are right. We publicly don't question or challenge our mommas, the Bible, or the President. Thats just the way that it is.

It is true that we all carry guns, we all believe that the government screwed it up, whatever IT is, and that pickup ownership is a God-given right that transcends even the fickleness of a living, breathing, two-ply constitution. Women really do live in a prairie twilight zone, where they don't open their own door, they never buy their own drink, and they don't walk to their cars by themselves any later than 30 minutes before dusk. That's because they are too tired from taking care of all those lesser matters, including without limitation: picking up my underwear, bringing me a fresh beer (until the children can be trained to do so), policing up the empty beer bottles, cooking all three meals plus cobbler, keeping gas in her pickup, walking the dog, taking the trash to the curb, cleaning the pool, dressing the children, washing my clothes, interfacing with my ex-wife, making sure the child support gets paid, and still managing to look like the perrienial runner-up in the annual Ms. Peach Festival Beauty and Hog Calling contest, whether we are white-trashing with the wannabe lesbian college coeds, or at the bosses' Christmas and Silent Reproach party. That is just the way that it is.

Despite the infrequent pangs of guilt, or bizzare 3:30 a.m., Jack Daniels induced questioning about whether or not there might be a better way to live, there really has been no reason to live any differently. No need for the South to rise again, the modern South is a virtual cracker's paradise nestled snuggly inside a Pandora's Box.

Then an odd thing happened on the way to the office. A bank made two of the worst mistakes that banks ever make: getting their knickers in a twist over their own bad business decision, and hiring a bunch of Yankee lawyers to do something about it. The ensuing "mine is bigger than your's" match that always follows closely behind any congregation of lawyers numbering more than one, resulted in a little road show spanning from Coast to Coast, and Border to Border. (A taxi driver in Houston, in between rants about "those people" from New Orleans, told me that Canada has never had enough infrastructure to be more than a "prissy little territory of the US", because the Canucks had been waiting for the Mexicans to migrate that far North and build their country for them).

Suddenly, the displaced cracker is left questioning how comfy the Lone Star State's comfy chairs really are. People in the Midwest really are nicer, and more decent than anywhere else in the country. (One possible exception being Oklahoma, which really is nothing more than a prissy little territory of Texas). Suddenly Abu and Stella, who run the Shell station and live bait hut down the street seem a little more bitter than I remember. Indianapolis has a great drag racing event, steeped in just as much history and tradition as that run down Flying Saucer belly-button of a racetrack that runs in circles, and is unfortunately more closely associated with Indianapolis and motor sports. Burning nitro-methane smells just as good in the corn fields as it does in my garage when the wife and kids are gone. All of life is better with nitro-methane.

On the north side of Chicago, where houses the size of Country Clubs are being built, there is a lovely young professional looking blond driving a convertible Mercedes through the cool air of late morning traffic. She gives me hope, and condemns me to failure, all at once. Drive well, and drive fast, sweet lass.

Baltimore and DC are filled with mean, miserable people. Baltimore has a beautiful city, with a vibrant downtown, the U.S. Constellation, and Cal Ripken, Jr. Even with all those things going for it, I think they somehow screwed it all up. Shame.

At the risk of being ex-communicated by Gov. Perry, I fear that Boston has unveiled the Yankee that has always lurked inside my beer-guzzling, gun-toting redneck self. (Clearly here, you read Yankee to mean Yankee as in East of the Mississippi, North of the Mason-Dixon line, colonial style house with picket fences and old, funky looking barns overlooking rolling hills of hay and fresh grass kind of Yankee; and notYankee in the sense of NY Yankee baseball club buying its way into the playoffs every year kind of Yankee). Boston is too big, too bright, too thick of an accent, Too Much in the way Dave Matthews sings about Too Much.

Within 3 minutes of escaping Logan airport, and after paying $314.58 in tolls, I missed the ramp from the Ted Williams Tunnel to I-93 and South Boston. Native Bostonians are undoubtedly shaking their heads in a solemn understanding. It took two hours for me to realize my mistake, find a three foot wide section of missing guardrail to squeeze the rental car off the tollway, fight Dallas size traffic in Opie size hamletts on Highway 16, locate a major highway, and find an active artery back into Boston.

But during those two hours in the Massachusetts countryside (I guess I was in Massachusetts, for some reason no one puts any road signs up in this state), I found some alien yet familiar spot that felt like the wildest departure of imagination knocking at the door of some spot so natural and so much a part of the soul that it felt like returning home. The homes, the trees, the water. I know now why television commercials, whether they be for paint, Pine-sol, or those little blue pecker pep pills, are all set in Eastern sea-board beach front homes with a fragile picket fence hugging the contour of the land and marking the border between grassland and sand. There is something native, something universal to Americans, about this little pocket of the country.

Driving around a sharp bend on a two lane highway, peering into the twilight and the shadows just beyond the grass shoulder of the road, catching a glimpse of a stone chimney among a grove of encroaching trees and shrubs, is a startling reminder of how long white, god-fearing, gun-toting men have lived on this land, having instituted a still peach faced theory of governance. I hope the people who live here pay the right homage and make the right offerings to the ghosts that surely inhabit this place. Even when I snuck back into Boston on highway 9, I noted with some pride that the shopping mall was gracefully hidden behind the landscaping and strategically placed trees. Back home, malls are viewed with a sense of reverence once reserved only for pick-ups and good hunting dogs. Airline pilots use the overbearing lights of the local home-improvement chain store to line up for final approach during storms.

Now, if I can just figure out a way to help the bank get its knickers out a twist, so I can do some real sight-seeing...

Don't be Formerly Living.