Abu Dhouston

Yesterday I ended up walking/hiking for about four or five hours, most of it spent slowly working my way through game trails along the buffalo bayou not far from dad's house. The reserve and parks around it are quite lush and once you get off the regular running and biking tracks, you can imagine yourself deep in backcountry as you approach the bayou waterway.

The waterway itself is kind of nasty. The slow moving water is filled with sediment, and the flatlands near the bayou are swampy and marshy mud. And of course, the opposite bank, not part of the reserve, is invariably the back end of a stucco mansion, restaurant, golf course, or luxury condominium.

There are aspects of Houston which make it feel like Abu Dhabi. Part of this, I'm sure, comes from the neighborhoods where I spend most of my time. Lexuses are a dime a dozen. Audis outnumber Toyotas. Every other car is a BMW. Even the counter service taco shops have valet parking. I have never seen more hand car wash businesses in my life. It feels like a city of multimillionaires and the businesses which cater to them.

I am not St. Francis of Assisi. I enjoy a little luxury. Give me a FourSeasons over the Motel 6 any day of the week. I'll have the real Champagne, please. Valet parking is kind of a kick. It is definitely nice to live it up once in awhile. What gets a bit absurd to me is that there seems to be an endless one-upmanship in terms of luxury here and I can't help but giggle at people trying to shoehorn Paris or New York or Dubai into Houston, Texas.

Oftentimes, there are comical results when the old city meets the new money. Traffic jams at the Starbucks and car wash. Frustrated drivers in sports cars who gun it like a drag race because 99% of the time they're stuck in the thick traffic in the old and narrow streets. Difficulty in maintaining stock of fresh seafood at the upscale grocery, or even finding parking. A dozen squished 4000 square foot French chateaus jammed into subdivided lots which once held four single story bungalows (the density is successful- trying to make it feel like Versailles, not so much).

Anyway, 80% done with The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich. Today, I kind of hit a stumbling block, and had to put the book down a few times. I'm a pretty hardened reader. I tend to stay on top of the news which is usually a litany of the worst things people can do to each other. The section I'm reading now deals with the New Order, specifically life in the conquered lands and the attempted annihilation of all the Jews. It's awful, horrifying reading. I finished a few stomach-turning chapters, looked at the title of the next chapter, "Medical Experiments," and had to go do something else for a few hours before reluctantly picking it up again.

I read Solzhenitzn's weighty The Gulag Archipelago in 10th grade. That's a dark fucking book. This is the darkest thing I've read since then. There is something about regimes like under Stalin and Hitler, where the only thing more horrifying than the injustice, savagery, and horrors inflicted on populations is the suggestion that we are all capable of inflicting them.

Cheerful reading for the start of a new year.