he looks at the post below, the one in italics, and he says, what a piece a crap, i sure have turned into a lousy writer. going back through the autobiography, which is called just passing through by the way, and in need of a central piece but this is not even a lousy start. it might be of some use if it's rewritten over and over but hey who's got the time. taken up poetry again, you don't have to slave over every sentence or organize which i do for a living.

then the tech team goes up into oklahoma, and apparently t.-boone pickens gave them a few hundred million, a few hundred million for their football team and another few hundred million for their school, and they spent their football money recruiting texans, and doing a few other bawdy things for their visitors which they got caught doing but which someone said, hey, every football team does this kind of stuff they're just the dumb suckers who got caught. so they got their wrists slapped but they got to go ahead and play football and now they beat us every year apparently. and not only that, but they injured our quarterback.

now i should mention that as a lifelong cleveland browns fan all of football has now become a cruel parody to me, a kind of vaudeville entertainment where people who should know better fall into genuine rooting for this team or that team, meanwhile the players fall injured, or get a lot of concussions, or beat their girlfriends or wives, or whatever. we're lucky, in that sense, that we're losing to the big guys because if we were winning them all, then somebody would care too much about the kind of stuff we're getting away with. coach is getting three mil but he's a single guy. girls are trying to figure out how to trip him and land beneath him.

saw a truck waving huge confederate flags as it drove triumphantly down university avenue. but they were paving university avenue and it was all gravel dust and torn up asphalt. this truck, it had been in the mud, obviously. i guess that's a sign of something, the boys like that, when the truck has a fair spattering of red texas clay all over it. it was a victory lap, i'm sure. on the way to town for a friday night.

now i must say, i myself got a ticket the other day, went south out of the cvs on memphis and nineteenth, went past four stop signs in a row, and came to a sign that said, school zone, 20 when flashing, but it was not flashing, so i kept going about 30 which is what it is if it is not flashing. got pulled over for doing 31 in a 20. didn't see it, i told the guy, which was true, because it was broken, so of course i didn't see it. but in the end i went downtown to protest the ticket and got out of the van, and all of a sudden i was tipsy, kind of drunk-feeling, the world spinning beneath me like i could hardly walk. here i am downtown trying to find the municipal court, and i know i'm walking like a drunk, on account of being so dizzy. now it so happened that i'd eaten some fu-fu salad, really nice, with pasta and everything fancy on it, and when i got home i got sick and that salad ended up all over my kitchen floor, but at the time all i knew was that i was about to keel over and when i got to the court, i decided not to fight the ticket, but rather just pay it, since my days might be numbered, and agree to take that drivers safety course that teaches you to follow the speed limit, which i will take and report right here in this spot. i'm beginning to feel like an old duffer. i follow the speed limit now, i don't even do illegal u-turns, and if people have a problem with that, i just flash my ancient white beard at them and let them curse me out.

waited all month to go out to the golf club on the far north part of town, where all the old duffers play bluegrass on the last friday of every month. they were missing a few people this month, but nevertheless played a pretty hot panhandle rag and washington and lee somethingorother. could have been washington and lee swing, but it's kind of bluegrassy, and i'm not sure it's the same song. nevertheless it was good n' hot. unfortunately they won't play in october, inasmuch as everyone goes to amarillo for halloween, then november and december are shot because of the holidays, so it's no more of that until january.

taken to wearing my sandals to work, it's of some concern that when it rains barely an inch there is sometimes as much as a foot of water at the crossing, the one place i need to transverse to get across nineteenth street and into work. i can either walk down nineteenth, cross dangerously at a place where people can't see too well and where i have to get across at least five soggy lanes and even then jump possibly into another pool of water but at least into very wet grass, OR and this one's obviously better, just wear sandals and take my shoes off, and roll up my pans, and walk straight across. this protects me also, if it rains while i'm on campus. in this rainy time anything can happen. i clearly can't read the sky. it can come form anywhere and it can be a deluge, can and often will be.

the other day woke up and there was a wall of trouble off to the west and i thought, here we go, but as the day wore on it drifted around to the north and by soccer practice time it had sprinkled but it didn't really look too bad, i was afraid i'd have to take the girlies to soccer and finally i did. but at soccer we're all standing out in this open field as one kid is playing soccer and the others are doing the bars, and this wall of clouds hooks around up in the northeast and starts trucking on down toward us with lightning in front of it and bearing down pretty hard. we got in the car and went straight home whereupon it rained quarters and flooded down flint, the basement got a few inches in spts, and everyone took a pounding. some cars got stranded in the marsha sharp where a few feet of water just stood down there until it drained, this is the main highway through town, you'd think there'd be drainiage, but no. a couple inches in a couple hours, and it's more than the city can take, and things are going bonkers all over the place. whole cars are being sogged out, pulled over and forced to dry out for a few days.

couple days later, the basement's dried out, the ragweed's a poppin' all over town, things have bloomed and grown, we didn't even know was there. a whole crop of mushrooms for starters. the ragweed is killing me, i've never seen so much of it bloom all at once in one single place in my life. whole lawns overtaken with it, and it's all blooming, going bonkers, and when i tried to pull some out around my own garage, the hay fever got worse. worse, maybe, than any i've ever had, though iowa was especially bad in that regard. iowa had it from an exact time, august 15, to another exact time, october 15, whereas southern illinois had it gradually over a period of four or five months, popping all the time. texas, though, didn't have it at all for my first two years, but this year, had it all in one week, and had it more than the others had it combined.

came out of the grocery store the other day and a new country song was on the radio. it had a boy and a girl falling in love in the back seat of a "cop car." Had a whole story line, where they had this complex relationship with each other and with the law, but i didn't catch that so much, so i turned up the radio. had the window open too, though it occurred to me that's how i got my ticket earlier, driving around with a window open like it's party time. but i came up to this intersection, where i turn onto my own road, and there's the police again, and this time they have this guy in a black pickup, and he's in handcuffs, sitting outside his truck, and they're doing some kind of negotiation with the other passengers in the truck, maybe they're searching the thing. i turned off that radio right away, and turned very gently onto my own street, and went my way, glad to be an old duffer, hoping for a few more rounds of good music.