Tag: odessa

Also, he was 21 going to school with seventh graders

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The other day, Jerry Joseph shocked the world outside of Odessa by stepping into district court and admitting he was in fact, Guerdwich Montimer, Permian impostor, basketball cheat, national fraud, sex offender.

While the rest of the country was surprised the 23-year-old, suddenly and with no backsliding allowed, admitted he’d spent the last two-plus years pretending to be a nice, hardworking, churchgoing Haitian orphan born in 1994, Odessa was not so shocked. At this point, who cared anymore?

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And Jim Morrison said, ‘Welcome to the club’

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Amy Winehouse, the 27-year-old British singer-songwriter, died Saturday.

It’s a good age for it, and automatically grants her provisional membership to the 27 Club, of which Jim Morrison, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones are established members, having all died at that age between 1969 and 1971.

Retroactively, the legendary blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson got added in, then Kurt Cobain of the ’90s grunge band Nirvana made it, yet another popular and talented artist cut down in his prime by his own self-destructive behavior.

Whether she’ll get the full membership, who knows? In 10 years, people may look back on her as just a fairly talented person who had two albums, one of them really fantastic, before squandering it all in drink, drug and crazy.

But of course that isn’t the way things work.

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In Luke Bryan’s immortal words, rain is a good thing

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It’s cliche, and the title of a song by ’80s glam metal band Cinderella, to say you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Even in the desert, we never realized how accustomed to getting rain we were, until it stopped coming.

That’s why Tuesday was so astounding, wasn’t it? How familiar all the signs of rain were, but how foreign.

It starts when someone walks outside and says, “It looks like it could rain today.”

And you don’t really believe them, but you want to, and any excuse to step outside is a good one.

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‘Where were you when the Casey Anthony verdict came down?’

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I wonder if one day that’s a question that will seriously be asked.

This was, apparently, a pretty big deal, although I wasn’t really aware of just how much people cared about Casey Anthony till it was nearly over, and I saw people in the office crowd around a TV in mid-afternoon to find out whether the person everyone was looking to be guilty of murder would be found such by the jury.

Alas.

I have said, and will continue to say, that if Caylee Anthony had been Latoya Anthony or Caylee Gonzales, people wouldn’t have cared as much about the death of a not-yet-3-year-old girl in 2008. Some will debate that with me, but it seems indisputable that people only really cared about the mother Casey Anthony because she was smoking hot (and continues to be).

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It’s a good night because I can see out the window

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The other day someone told me that locusts (like the kind you read about in the Bible, not the humming cicada kind) are just grasshoppers, except that when they get together in big numbers, they start to frolic and swarm, and the suddenly there’s many billions of them eating their own weight in a day, in clouds many miles long.

I was frightened, but he said not to worry. All the locusts in this part of the world died off for some reason. And I felt better.

A year or three ago, I was in Grandfalls on the way back from some place, and stopped at the Allsups there for fuel.

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Because we like the appearance but want to stay comfortable

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The other day I was shopping for some new clothes, which is rare.

I’m basically the same size I was as a high school freshman, which in some ways is good because my midsection remains in agreeable proportion to my shoulders, and also because I can still wear my junior high standard attire when I go to work.

But, things do have a way of getting spilt on and threadbared, and it seems that when you go shop to find the first thing that fits and then leave, it often doesn’t fit very well later, and you subsequently don’t much enjoy wearing it, and put it off putting it on until you have a closet hanging only with all the itchy, baggy pants you hate. But they’re all that’s left and the stuff on the floor is too dirty to get by with.

Alas.

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One day, someone will write a book about all of this

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When Larry Neil White died at age 62, it hardly came as a surprise.

It was inevitable he would die, since birth at least. Since March, it was inevitable he would die without going to trial for the deaths of Abel Marquez, Arlie Jones Jr. and Scott Gardner, the three police officers he shot outside his home for no good reason anyone will ever be able to discern, or a jury of his peers will be able to evaluate.

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Just what is wrong with District 5?

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Now, I ought to start out by saying I am not looking to pick a fight with several thousand people in western Odessa, or one woman in particular: Sandra Carrasco. She seems like a lovely person, and the residents of District 5 (generally all lovely people, too, I’m sure) will no doubt be lucky to have her as soon as she’s sworn in and starts to represent them.

I just want to make that clear.

Because in the past few years, there have been two tragic deaths by sitting councilmen in that district, and both times, only one person ended up wanting the job. There is something monumentally troubling about this.

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Freedom isn’t free, and some things may be worth the cost

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This week 38 people were picked up in a white bus with shaded windows and taken out of sight.

We still don’t know where exactly they all went, who exactly they were, or how long exactly they’ll be there.

Now, I almost said “38 illegal immigrants,” but that’s probably not true.

Getting a work visa and leaving it at home is something like going out without your wallet; overstaying it is like driving your car with an inspection sticker out. It’s irresponsible, but let’s not pretend it isn’t commonly done.

“That’s exactly the problem,” you say.

Well.

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