In a little valley in Cockrell Hill is a creek. It’s looped by a street. My sense of distance is forever influenced by knowing that three trips around this road is about a mile. The creek periodically floods to the street. Even more rare is an epic flood that, in theory, will rise to everyone’s doorsteps. Much of my childhood was spent in that creek. I explored its lengths alone, with dog, or friends. The banks were modified with shovels. Water was dammed with stones. Crayfish were forever harassed. Pond-skippers scattered as trees were felled to make bridges. Fish were caught with hooks baited with ham. Mud balls (sometimes with rocks) were flung at friends. Impetigo was caught swimming in the summer. I knew that creek like the back of my hand.

Looking at the creek now, it seems so small. Since I grew up, no other children continued the “landscaping” and now the creek is overgrown with saplings and weeds. Its shape has changed in a few places too. Some deep parts are now shallow, a few bends have become sharper as others have softened. The perception of distance has lessened too. The ends of the creek used to be a scary frontier. Now they seem so close. What felt like an epic bike journey around the road is now a modest stroll.

There used to be a shed in the woods where a friend and I found a few naughty magazines. That shed and its magazines are no longer there. Not that I was looking for them.

This is the neighborhood I spent most of my childhood in. Despite how modest it is by current standards, it gave me a taste for the outdoors and solitary adventure.

The road around the creek.

One of a few horses at the far side of the neighborhood.

Father leaning on hay bale and looking at horse.

The clearing cut through the scraggly woods to accommodate a natural gas pipeline. The pipe cuts through the neighborhood on the west side, crosses the creek and up the hill into the woods again. It’s marked with warning signs along the way.

Investigating the woods in search of a mushroom.

Tree infested with mistletoe.

There was no mushroom to be found, but circling hawks had freaked out this squirrel.

A curious dog.

A large potbellied pig breaks free.

Tree branch with pods.

Our neighbor’s ride.

The remains of wisteria vines I cut off the power and phone lines leading to the house.

Vines were cut off the hoop and a new, patriotic, net was installed. Court is now in session. All rise for b-ball action!

The remaining vines that swallow the mulberry tree by my bedroom window.

Cow skull and NJ plate in the vines.

My father’s slightly masculine looking black truck.

Pine cones on an old planted Christmas tree.

Muffler man in front of an oak tree I planted as an acorn.

The seating area near the bird feeders.

Looking up into the oak tree.

Cutlery chimes.

Despite all his rage, he’s still just a gnome in a cage.

Shakespearian/Darwinian moment.

Trough of goldfish, pink flamingo.

Horse shoe on fence.

Milo

The phone outside the front door, non working.

The well maintained woodwork of the eaves, now functioning as the doorway to an attic rat hotel.

The house is old, built in the 40s. It’s also poorly maintained. For much of childhood, there was the embarrassment of living in a home with lots of ceilings missing due to water damage. Two notable ceiling stories: 1) The ceiling in the kitchen became engorged with water like a balloon. Eventually, it popped in a wet crumbly mess. 2) My mother was in the restroom and looked up to the rafters to see a raccoon staring down at her from the attic.

The house is built on a mild hill. The downward force of earth has slowly pushed the foundation out of whack. Water has intermittently flooded the basement. The foundation problem is dire, but seemingly unfixable. In the past few years, the Austin stone has started separating from the frame and massive cracks have appeared outside and in. The door frames are off, the floor is rippling like wooden waves. At some point in the near future, the whole place is going to collapse. It will be epic.

My parents are not maintainers. I understand this now: cars, homes, and possessions are ran into the ground. My only form of rebellion is to take care of my possessions. Neither way is better, just different.

The inside of the family home is packed: folk art, trinkets, books, papers, vases, jars, plants and cat hair. Trying to move around almost guarantees knocking something over. Every horizontal surface is totally covered in crap. Tables, desks, floor? They are there, somewhere.
Despite three walls of counter space in the kitchen, there isn’t an inch free. Trying to microwave a cup of water involves moving spices and miscellany away from the door so it can open. Cutting vegetables is done by placing the cutting board on the stovetop. Drying dishes are knocked off the counter by cats commuting to the kitchen window. All the cabinets are packed with jars and things that are never used but are somehow not worth getting rid off. Almost all of the drawers in the kitchen have over time been converted to junk drawers.

On returning visits, the house seems to get more clutter. It’s like I’m walking into an ever clogging artery.

Christmas morning.

Lantern and picture window.

Wooden deer of the dining room.

Fireplace.

The cactus garden blocking the back door.

Angel and sad dog.

Solving a puzzle.

The stockings were stuffed with coins, candy, rose pedals, and dirt.

Wall sized abstract painting in the living room.

Large nude paintings behind the TV. Oddly enough, these are paintings of the parents of an ex-girlfriend from my college years.

Father makes a move in Settlers of Catan.

Window beads.

Window flowers.

Plants in my sister’s old room.

Crown of thorns, sitting frog, and raku vase with stick on my old bedroom windowsill.

China cabinet with an insane amount of weird dolls and toys. My favorites are the talking Pee Wee and Ernest.

My bedroom has been turned into a little black velvet museum. Here’s Bruce Lee.

Bouncy salt shaker lady and toothbrush near the kitchen window.

The stuff above the refrigerator.

Stay-puff Marshmallow Man guards the kitchen from above.

The wall of mirrors in the bathroom.

Humorous sign above the toilet.

Stuff on the bedroom wall.

Icon city.

A portrait of my mother and I.

Deluxe Scrabble.

Another highlight of being home has been the food. My mother is an excellent cook. Between us, we’ve made some great fare: a full Thanksgiving style feast, chinese steamed buns and green beans, omelets, biscuits, apple crisp, apple bread, chicken soup, fish, yellow curry turkey salad, Thai style boiled chicken, and more. I’m well on my way to gaining my weight back.

J. and I made Thai boiled chicken with ginger sauce and vinegar cucumbers. Awesome.

Apple crisp for my birthday.

Mom-made, whole wheat biscuits.

Christmas dinner in the Thanksgiving style.

When I was a child, the basement wasn’t a scary place. There was an office and a den with TV down there. I used to rollerblade on the smooth, spacious floor. But it’s a different story now. The area is a festering, dark, dank mess of mildewing garbage. It’s creepy. In theory, stuff it brought to the basement for storage. But it’s really more a temporary place for an object to live out its declining years before falling apart from neglect. Nothing brought down there is ever used again before eventually being hauled to the dumpster.

The gate to the basement.

Bowling pins outside the basement.

Looking out a basement window.

The secure file storage and mildewing facility.

The scary floor by the wet dry vac.

It was scary to stumble across this scene in an abandoned corner of the basement. What is this? Some kind of interrogation room?

Wheelbarrow full of crumbling antique cameras. What a waste.

The really creepy area is near the unused stairs. The whole area is full of spider webs. I’ve never seen anything like it. The room beyond is entirely empty. It used to have moldy piles of cat poop all over the floor. During rains it floods.

The ghost defense or interrogation irons kept at the bottom of the stairs.

Looking up the haunted staircase.

This New Year’s Eve was a mellow one between two friends and I. Our tradition involves destroying things from the basement with bowling pins. As you can imagine, a thrown pin is hardy enough to bash through furniture and obsolete electronics. Once the bullets stopped falling from being shot into the air from around the neighborhood, we got to destruction.

Our target this year was an old HP laser printer and keyboard set on an aging metal chair.

B. readies two pins.

Me having sent a pin flying towards target.

Contact! Boom, smash, shatter!

Target destroyed.

Dallas is many things, but one thing it’s not is beautiful. The four basic views possible in town are: 1) Generic suburbs and strip malls, 2) Clean, but mostly abandoned city center, 3) Sparse, crumbling and littered lower income neighborhoods, 4) Yet un-bulldozed woods and fields. There isn’t compelling natural beauty or any must-see focal point.

In the winter and summer, the entire town is in earth tones. The grass is yellow. The trees are dead. The buildings are built with dust/dirt colored bricks. It is a drab and desolate looking place. But it’s not all gloom.

The “OK” sitting at the top of my parents’ driveway. The working theory is that they are letters from an old Coke sign, though they could have spelled all sorts of words like “Locksmith”, “Bookstore”, “Cock-rings”, etc.

Male Cardinal outside the living room window.

Dove outside the window.

Trees near the creek.

I’m likely influenced by the general weirdness of my family and the low income barrio I spent my childhood in, but most of Dallas is boring to me, particularly the vast tracts of suburbs in North Dallas. Where it’s at for me is to the south, the west. It’s like another country here, really. Almost another Mexico. Everything is modest and in disrepair. The streets are potholed. There is Mexican food galore, as well as auto shops. The streets are wide and often without gutters. There is still a lot of undeveloped land. This is the stomping ground of the Mexicans and Blacks, the part of town that the others are scared to tread yet are slowly gentrifying.

One of the main contrasts to Dallas brown are the signs on this side of town. They are beautiful, colorful, and hand painted. I went on two short drives with my mother to take another look at these signs and the neighborhoods that helped shape my aesthetics.

I could take a thousand photos and never do the area justice, so I don’t claim to have captured the charm. But here are a few photos:

El Tiburon (”The Shark”) restaurant on Jefferson Blvd. in Cockrell Hill.

Yellow-loving mechanic shop.

An unfortunate name for a used car lot.

Good advise offered by a brick wall near Sunset High School on Jefferson.

Chevy truck with gull-wing doors.

Sign for Raven Pharmacy.

Retro neon sign.

Oak Cliff Barber College.

Man crossing street.

Hand painted window sign.

The red, white and blue of clear skies above Famsa.

For all your MFG needs, trust DEMCO!

The general abandonment of Ross St. downtown.

Father pointing out the future to J.

The new sign for my remodeled old high school: BTWHSPVA.

Man applies panel.

The prison like new building of BTWHSPVA.

Despite the fancy building, the temporary address is looking particularly ghetto.

Davis Street in Oak Cliff.

The parking lot for the botanica.

Permanently parked moving trailer on Davis.

The wall of a small tortilla bakery.

Happy corn man.

Man swallowed by moon bounce.

Abandoned shopping center.

Barn like radiator shop.

MOSELEY Furniture.

I don’t know what this bear is selling, but I want it.

Abandoned building of unknown purpose.

Candy Shop auto detailing and wash.

Mai’s dreary looking, but good Vietnamese restaurant near downtown.

Loghorn.

Old warehouses on the southwest side of downtown that were made to look like Baghdad for a film. The area is abandoned and intact.

Abandoned.

Homeless man and garbage bag.

Old gas station sign.

Citrus getting sold from a massive truck on Ft. Worth Ave.

Rims, rims, rims!

Old El Dorado Cadillac in front of barber shop.

Graffito on abandoned building.

The abandoned Murmur factory on Westmoreland. Note the KFC bucket trapped in the window.

Razor wire doesn’t do much good if you leave the gate open.

The inky blackness where murmurs were made.

Approaching downtown on Singleton.

The men of Singleton.

Abandoned school.

Ray’s gun shop. Packed.

Singleton Bridge with a view of new residential towers.

Hot Latino night club on Industrial Blvd. The dancers may be amputees, but they make up for it in racks.

Upholsterer.

Central Expressway in light traffic.

Steinway Pianos seen from Central.

Sunset driving into downtown on Ross.

It’s great to be home. The next post will try to document the house I grew up in. But, now that the holidays are over, my life feels even more in limbo. I am waiting to hear about a life changing job opportunity, but until then I’m content to relax. I am homeless but home. There may be rats infesting the attic and kitchen, but I try to stay out of their races. And I’m not in any particular rush to join the human one either.

I am back in America. Our plane touched down in Dallas after a long, sleepless journey from Hong Kong via Los Angeles. I’m sad that what now seems like a short 6 month Asian adventure is over. While overseas, time seemed to slow down to an acceptable rate. While the rats raced at home, they appeared to crawl in Asia. Maybe it was because the rats looked different. Our may because they raced towards different cheeses. Regardless, this analogy is spinning out of control.

This lost soul isn’t happy about being home, but is happy about seeing family again. There’s nothing more comforting than setting foot inside the crumbling and dander filled halls of the family home. My parents, as I, have aged horribly in the last six months. We are the Button family in reverse; curiously, my name in now Benjamin.

My sleeping is out of whack. I went to bed at 10PM and woke up at 3AM. It 4AM as I write this post. I have a bowl of carrots and fudge at my side.

Here are ten things I’ve noticed on my return:

1. LAX Airport is an embarrassment.
After all the sparkling new and organized airports we saw in Asia, it was shocking how aged and sad the Los Angeles airport looked. It seemed almost third world in comparison. Half finished construction, convoluted organization, stale hamburger and exhaust smelling air, cramped. I felt sorry that this was the point of entry for all the excited foreign visitors on our flight. It seemed like a slap in the face of their expectations.

2. Americans are largely impatient babies.
When our flight arrived in Dallas, there was mechanical trouble moving the walkway to the plane. People were annoyed and confused, talking on their phones and explaining the problem to whoever was on the other end. They acted like it was the biggest problem since the Holocaust. People were joking about lawsuits and all sorts of things they deserved for being inconvenienced. Seriously, people?

Eventually, the crew opened up the rear of plane and revealed built-in emergency stairs. People were led across the wet tarmac through the hidden basement of the terminal and into normalcy. The delay was 30 minutes at most. Why was everyone freaking out about 30 freaking minutes? I guarantee at least half of them were going straight home to watch goddamn television.

3. People don’t look happy and healthy here, especially in the airport.
I had forgotten that much of the population looks like sad, pasty hippopotamuses. Weight isn’t an issue in itself, but combined with sullen eyes, blemished skin, and airport lighting, the whole package is frightening indeed.

4. Dallas is sparse and ugly.
So ugly that it’s beautiful, really. There are pretty parts sure, but compared to some of the things I’ve seen recently, this city feels comically bland.

5. There is a wide variety of food to be had.
Despite being less fresh in general, there is a ton of varied food to be eaten back home. The Thai food sucks, but the problem was in reverse over there. The grocery stores have a wide variety of produce, the restaurants are of all nationalities. It’s expensive to eat out, even something basic, but not entirely unappealing.

6. I’m allergic to cats.
My body reminds me of this every time I come home and nuzzle my beloved Milo.

7. I lost weight while away.
I’m a good ten pounds lighter than 6 months ago, tipping the scales at a healthier 105 pounds (plus 60 extra pounds for Thai foot fungus).

8. I don’t like riding in cars.
This applies everywhere. I’d much rather take a train or walk somewhere.

9. It’s good to be back to copious amounts of hot, safe water everywhere.
Hot water in the public sinks. Hot, long-lasting showers. Water that’s “safe” to drink and brush your teeth with. That’s progress I can live with.

10. It feels gloomy over here.
All the economic issues have created an even more somber mood than before. Around town, there is little evidence that people are actually enjoying life. There are not the same numbers of smiling old men, laughing kids, and people just sitting outside and watching the street. There is less eye contact and certainly fewer smiles. Lame.

In other news:

I’m a little burnt out on blogging. I posted 73 fairly involved entries while on the trip and want to give my documenting mind a break from blogging until the start of the year.

If anyone reading this gives me a compelling enough reason to do so, I’ll forgo the break. After-all, I’m blogging as much for you, whoever you are, as I am for me. Just keep clicking on the ads. I want to buy a new computer.

Until later.