The delicious irony of Baytown, Texas
Baytown, where ExxonMobil's largest refinery sits, will vote on whether to enact a more stringent ban on smoking in restaurants and bars.
The goal is "to give everyone the right to breathe clean air in public places and workplaces and to protect the health of our community" a doc tells the Baytown daily in a Page 1 story.
ExxonMobil will pay $20,000 for unauthorized emissions at its Baytown refinery under an "agreed order" made public* last week. This didn't make Page 1, or anywhere else in the paper.
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7 comments:
I spent some time in Baytown a few years back. Some town. What I discerned was a certain sort of mordant fatalism, everybody, it seemed, being concerned with geometrical matters - jobs, alcohol, marriage and the naturally comcomitant joblessness, drunkenness, infidelity. What I said to myself as I drove out of town that year was this: Perhaps all true children of Protestanism are victims of such self-help - the notion of the Law of Life involving steps, paths, guideposts, ladders. I sort of called it a lost year, largely because it was the one time in my life that I couldn't think about women. To this day, I wonder what Baytown is all about, why it exists, why it just doesn't die gracefully.
i don't know why you couldn't think about women in Baytown. i lived there for 18 years and i thought about women just about anytime i wanted. oh well.
Well, I thought about women. It was women from Baytown that I meant. It is a strange thing seeing defeatism in a woman's face. Forlorn does not cover it. It could be something gentic, or maybe even the oppressive weather of the region. Yet, it also struck me that Baytown women seemed to carry the world on their shoulders. Perhaps it was the doing of their men. The only other egion where I've noticed this is in the West Virginia mining towns.
Did you, Banjo, marry a Baytown lass?
Difficult though it was I think I have translated anonymous' twenty-five dollar pronouncement of a penny ante thought: He was once down and out in Baytown for a year and could not lower himself to screwing the poor common folk that lived there alongside him.
Having been raised in some kind of strict Protestant environment, the pitiful self loathing brought on by whatever circumstances landed him in that underarm of a different place, he now projects onto the entire city of Baytown, wishing it to "die gracefully"
If I were going to write the entire year off anyway, I'd a gone ahead and nailed me a few of them miserable, no-working, drunk, cheating-assed wretches. But that's just me.
I have a certain amount of pride, but it only goes so far.
-D
I agree a bunch, D. "I like my women a little on the trashy side".
D & jd,
I am Hispanic, and not Protestant. Banjo knows me well. We worked together a few years back for The Houston Post. I've never had trouble with women. My use of Baytown here was really more a metaphor for everything in that "armpit" of Texas. But I loved Kemah. Its seafood joints are unrivaled. And, yes, I took a local woman or two there during those halcyon days. I never said the women of your lands were "trashy." But so what if they are? Women wear "trashy" quite well, and some of them morph into "professionals" by day. I just wasn't partial to the high-necked ones. The ones I had were thin and lovely, as Banjo also knows...
D & jd,
I am Hispanic, and not Protestant. Banjo knows me well. We worked together a few years back for The Houston Post. I've never had trouble with women. My use of Baytown here was really more a metaphor for everything in that "armpit" of Texas. But I loved Kemah. Its seafood joints are unrivaled. And, yes, I took a local woman or two there during those halcyon days. I never said the women of your lands were "trashy." But so what if they are? Women wear "trashy" quite well, and some of them morph into "professionals" by day. I just wasn't partial to the high-necked ones. The ones I had were thin and lovely, as Banjo also knows...
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