T. Boone Pickens was right to push his Pickens Plan if for one key reason alone: Texas is the capital for gas and wind. Can I hear an amen? I mean we Texans understand how to generate seemingly endless gas and wind. Y’all know I’m right.
Now here in Texas most of us have already concluded that the coincidence of T. Boone owning lots of natural gas and steadily increasing his production of wind while promoting his plan of powering America with said resources is a bit too fortunate for T. Boone’s bottom to be completely altruistic. (Did I just leave “line” off of “bottom?” Whoops.) Altruism aside, Pickens may actually be right.
(Continued from previous post)
In the movie, Easy Rider, two motorcycle buddies drive from California to New Orleans. Their path that goes right across the great state of Texas where I was born and raised. As crazy as Dennis Hopper was in his insistence of using real rednecks in the filming he refused to ride and film through Texas declaring it suicide and “just too damn crazy.” Instead they drove around and then filmed the critical diner scene in Louisiana. Here they found locals and simply prompted them to say whatever they were thinking. The locals did an excellent job and had no trouble coming up with slurs and insults to hurl at Hopper and Fonda while the tape rolled.
Five years before my birth, was it really that dangerous for someone with long hair to ride a motorcycle cross the state? A guy as insane and as baked as Dennis Hopper finds the thought of riding a motorcycle through Texas inconceivable? Wow. In the late eighties, growing up in small town Texas, I wanted nothing more than to have long hair (although I never wanted a motorcycle). I couldn’t believe how narrowly removed I had grown up from such radical hatred, fear and bigotry. Jasper, Texas wasn’t that far away.
I knew that Texans where mocked and reviled on the ski slopes of Colorado and that most people in general dubbed us as loud-mouthed rednecks. But that was all O.K. with me.
It may not have been as much of an acid-induced experience of enlightenment for me as it was for the characters played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, but Easy Rider was a moment of reckoning in my personal development. It was also the final spark of inspiration that started me working on my first novel, Gris-Gris Daughter.
Some credit should be given to Netflix. Without the impulse movie picking implicit with going to the movie store my wife and I filled our Netflix queue with more intelligent movie choices. One otherwise nondescript Friday, the U.S. postal service delivered Easy Rider for our evening’s entertainment. Being a gen-x-er born in 1974 I had very little idea what to expect from the movie other than a couple of dudes on motorcycles taking some drugs. I mean, how can you go wrong with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson? A bad-boy heartthrob and two of the craziest character actors to hit the screen? But I digress.
