If Biden Keeps it Up He'll Be Missing Some Tax Revenue!

 

Our alleged president is really working on making Texans mad.  Today his administration announced another critical food shortage. As if baby formula wasn't bad enough, there's a new one on the horizon.

IT'S SALSA!

That's right folks, no more picante sauce, enchilada sauce, salsa, or taco sauce? Salsa et al is expected to be off the shelf and in short supply elsewhere by summer. And as he did with the supplies of Covid treatment meds, expect President Puddinhead Biden to restrict supplies to Texas and Florida first. It's likely he'll ship any loose truckloads of Pace Picante Sauce to the border.

Next up, he's issued an executive order radically increasing the production of ethanol to be used in fuel. Not that it will lower the cost of fuel any. What it will do is mess up internal combustion engines, fail to cut emission and, more importantly, it will cut corn supplies. 

IT COULD LEAD TO A MASSIVE CORN TORTILLA SHORTAGE.

What next?  We've already got a beef and chicken shortage building. Next thing you know it'll be cheese and then where will we be.

SO LONG MEXICAN FOOD!

That will be the point at which Texas and probably Florida will leave the Union. And it will be with the full support of cowboys, Hispanic folks and people everywhere who love Tex-Mex, Whataburger, Dr. Pepper, Chuy's,  Taco Bell and those little authentic Mexican taco stands at the Annual Tomatofest, Black-eyed Pea Festival, State Fair, Yamboree, Onionfest, Azalea Festival, Rose Festival and Fat Stock Show.

And don't forget this China Joe. Lockheed makes fighter planes in Ft. Worth. We know how to build  ships and the know-how to run a navy. We have a SpaceX Launch base in Corpus Christi, another couple of commercial space companies in West Texas, several Army bases, Air bases, Navy Bases, massive oil refineries and reservoirs of untapped oil.  We also make nuclear weapons in Texas and the NASA launch control center is in Houston. We have a massive airline hub in Dallas-Ft. Worth, two NFL teams, three basketball teams, two pro baseball teams, and no income tax.

We also have something like the 5th largest economy in the world and out from under the shackles of Washington's over-regulation, it's liable to rank even higher. With the loss of Texas,  as the United States loses Texas' massive power grid with nuclear power plants which have been forced to supply juice all the way up into the northern states. If those states stop sucking power from Texas, we have plenty of fuel for our gas fired power plants. We've even got our own coal, a massive wind farm facility for when the wind blows, offshore oil fields Biden won't let us drill in, and Gulf Coast ports a plenty. We have Halliburton.and dozens of other large construction companies to keep our infrastructure kept up. Halliburton, by the way builds oil platforms. 

So go ahead Joe. Makes us mad. I'm betting Oklahoma and most of the heartland would go with us along with Alaska much of the South and Southwest including Tennessee. We'd be an oil producing, food producing, hard-working country. Well-armed and ready. The US Army already has a majority of sergeants who curse fluently in Southern and Texas accents. 

We could make Donald Trump the press secretary for the new nation. Just turn him loose on Twitter in case DC isn't paying attention. We also own massive media companies, TV, music and movie production resources. We even have Chuck Norris and the actual Texas Rangers so don't think we're going to put up with Yankee agitators. And we do remember how schools are supposed to be run and what to do with people who commit crimes.

Our national motto could be, "Let's Go Brandon!" Texas already has experience being a stand-alone Republic and we know how to build walls and control borders, so if you Yankees are thinking about swimming the Red River, better check in at the consulate to get permission to enter and a green card because you'll need to work when you get here.

Now all we need is a name.  Any suggestions?

 © 2022 by Tom King

 

 

Life on the Edge: Childhood Adventures of The Flying Dingbat Brothers

My brother Donnie atop the Mizpah Gate at SW Junior College 1969.
Campus security was not amused!

We always liked high places. We lived in the treetops in our yard - big oaks with brittle branches. Mom finally quit looking out the kitchen window. The view must have been worrying for a mother. Her two sons, who seemed to believe they were either Tarzan or Cheetah, would inevitably be swinging from the branches of the brittle old post oaks in our back yard or making like a gibbon, swinging arm over arm from branch to branch of the Chinaberry trees. We were pretty good at it too, though Donnie was somewhat better than me. My mom one day found one neighbor kid dangling from the Chinaberry with a broken bone (leg or arm, I don't remember). He had attemped the arm over arm trip round the Chinaberry that my brother and I used to do, only he was scared so he tied a rope around his leg in case he fell. 

He did!

It's fortunate he didn't tie the rope round his neck. Mom cut him down and called Edward's mom and he went off to the doctor. Nobody got sued for childhood stupidity fortunately. We were safe anyway as we were too poor to sue.

This is pretty much my youthful
self-image back then.

My kid brother, God rest his soul, and I made a ramp by our driveway on a little rise. We would come tearing down the street on our bikes, hit the ramp and go flying. My brother, not the finest bicycle mechanic in the world, followed me over the ramp. He sailed up into the air (we used to get a couple of feet in altitude out of a jump) and as he left the ramp, his front wheel came off. He hit the ground, forks first, and sailed over the handlebars. But gymnast that he was he managed to tuck and roll up to his feet. He looked around and spied the front wheel rolling off across the neighbor's front yard. He sprang to his feet and took off in hot pursuit, managing to catch it before it ran out into the cross street half a block away. 

My brother was the epitome of cool, unlike his awkward older brother. I have two pictures somewhere - one of me and one of him doing a hand spring over a heavy sawhorse we had purloined for the purpose. Donny's image was captured at the peak of the flip, perfect form, toes pointed, back straight headed for a 3 point landing. I was better at photography than gymnastics. The picture of me shows a gangling kid, long torso, short legs, sort of a skinny flying troll look. I looked like someone had flung a bag of loose bones over the sawhorse. I was headed for a -5 point landing and a face plant. I told my brother his looked so much better than mine because I was the better photographer.

 

How Donnie actually looked!

Life back then was high-risk and a ton of fun!

Our friend Leslie Gilley had a great long rope that hung from a huge tree overhanging a usually dry creek bed in the pasture behind his house. I asked him how often he replaced it. Since his older brother had installed it years ago and the knot was above his climbing ceiling when he was 12, he told me, "When it breaks."

We would climb out on another limb that over hung a bend in the creek, grab the rope and swing out over the creek bed, back and forth until it slowed down enough to slide to a stop in the gravel that filled the bed of the creek at that spot. One day I climbed out on the limb with the rope, leaned back and launched myself out into space. As I approached the bottom of the swing where momentum reached its zenith, I heard a crack above as the rope parted. I hit the gravel in the creek bed butt first and at pretty good speed. Fortunately, I've been blessed with very tough bones and nothing was broken.

Leslie's comment was, "Hey man, you broke my rope!"

I answered, "I'd have been happy to let you break it."

My brother, the gymnast, decided he was going to do a triple flip on the trampoline. He finally did it, but got a bunch of bruises and sprained his neck along the way. One day he was late for school on Monday. Mom flipped back the covers on his bed and found him sleeping in his skivvies and covered with bruises. Turns out he'd been motorcycle racing, had run off the track, through a barbed wire fence and crashed in a gully sans bike. I'm not sure Mom knew he'd been doing motocross or that he could ride a motorcycle for that matter.

In the middle on the bottom,
where else would I be?

I thought I'd outgrown being stupid until I became a staff member at Lone Star Camp and was introduced to water skiing. I got to do a lot of stunts in our weekly ski show, I think, mainly because I used to do such spectacular wipe-outs. Remember: not as coordinated as my gymnast brother.

I was once jerked off my skis (on purpose), but then lost my swimsuit while being dragged around the lake (not on purpose). I had worn a Speedo under the suit and managed to catch it on my foot. As I was dragged on my back by the dock where a row of preacher's wives and kids sat watching the ski show. For a bit of comic relief, I stuck my foot up and passed the audience with my swimsuit waving from my leg like a flag. One of the minister's wives asked me afterward if I had done that on purpose. I told them it was part of the show. We all laughed and laughed.

I've got so many stories about my brother and I and the disasters we suffered doing risky things. I once kicked myself in the back of the head while trying to barefoot ski. We did pyramids for ski shows. I was the center guy at the bottom. When the pyramid collapsed at the end, accidentally or on purpose, guess who got fallen on?

The point of the story is that I look back on my misadventures fondly. I've been almost run over by a motorboat, jerked off a lifeguard tower by a ski boat, and was nearly immolated during a campfire skit of Elijah and the Priests of Baal (Donny was in on that one too.) My best friend kicked loose a 500 pound boulder that hit me square in the chest while we were free climbing a 40 foot cliff over the Brazos River. Not sure how, but when the stars cleared up I was hanging from a scrub of a tree 30 feet above a field of rocks as the boulder bounced down to the river, clearing out a path through the saplings..

As a grownup I risked 5 nonprofit startups unpaid, wrote more than one million dollars in grants, became a nonprofit consultant, a freelance commercial writer and am working on publishing a novel (the sixth book I've done). I taught self-defense for staff of a mental facility treating often violent kids from diminutive 3 year olds to 17 year old football players and one powerful 300 pound Samoan kid. I wrangled 20 horses, read a book on how to break horses and trained several to ride. I cut trails with emotionally disturbed kids and rode 5 days a week, 5 hours a day and never lost a kid. I took youth groups camping and led canoe trips down swollen Texas rivers. I taught canoeing and swimming and rescued a drowning steer from the overflowing Trinity River in a canoe with the help of a junior lifesaver girl I'd just graduated the day before. WE SAVED THE COW!

My wrangling days....

We made some memories and took some risks. My Mom had two ADHD boys and she raised us just right. We were allowed to take risks and we took 'em. She didn't hover. We grew up to be good people with the right blend of courage and kindness. My brother and I once extricated the car of a church singer from stuck high centered on a curb with the front wheels dangling in a deep mudhole. After we leveraged his car from the mud, Donny and I then walked home in the freezing rain afterward. And no, he didn't offer us a ride (we were on foot) because we might get mud on his mother's car's upholstery. Walking home, wet and shivering across a pasture waist high in wet grass, my brother and I felt like we'd won a battle against evil. After all, Steve did make it in time to sing for vespers. We made it home to a hot shower.  

I lost my brother his sophomore year in high school, killed by a stupid prank by a friend. Christmas, the night before he died, we sat up late talking about how we would do Christmas when we grew up and had families. He talked about his plans to work on improving his grades so he could go back to church academy with his friends. We used to fight like cats and dogs. I can't remember why we wound up in wrestling matches. We quit doing it when things got too dangerous and chances of hurting each other became too real. 

In that last day, however, my brother and I bonded as we never had before. And when Christ comes to take us home, I'll be looking around for my brother. We're still not done swinging on ropes, skiing, climbing trees and sailing. I never got a chance to take him out on my Hobie Cat and catch a full breeze and tip her up on one pontoon. 

Oh, the things we'll do once we have forever in which to do them.

© 2022 by Tom King

Tom king