Never Have I Ever...
Just wanted to 'clear the air' and talk about something other than politics. Mostly.
Never Have I Ever is a campfire game along the lines of Two Truths and a Lie. I thought I’d run with the format and see what happens. Everything in BOLD is my initial response to the beginning statement — “Never have I ever…”
In case it wasn’t obvious.
Smoked. Anything.
My parents both smoked — like industrial-strength chimneys — in the 60s. During road vacations to the Southeast, Southwest or Texas Hill Country, I spent hours upon hours in the back seat inhaling smoke. I bet I had the lungs of a coal miner during my youth.
As a result, I recoiled from cigarettes — even weed — for my entire existence. Even today, I am repulsed if I have to pick up a cigarette butt with my bare hands. I am comically averse to smoking.
The banning of public smoking, particularly in bars, restaurants and airplanes, may be the greatest thing to ever happen in my lifetime.
Purchased a vehicle fresh off the lot.
I know my thought process on this is irrational given modern-day circumstances, but this is how I think…
My dad purchased the home I grew up in for $16,000. An entire home! Four bedrooms. Two baths. A front yard big enough to accommodate part of a flag football game. (We needed the neighbors to agree to the other part.) A backyard big enough for a tiny home/study and a putting green. The house still stands at 914 Teakwood, Richardson, Texas.
I just can’t bring myself to pay more for a car — that depreciates the moment I drive it off the lot and I begin to neglect it — than for the building I called home from first grade until I graduated high school.
Irrational, I know.
Attended any kind of graduation ceremony.
I’ve never cottoned to pomp and circumstance. It’s not my thing. I’d rather sit all day at a bus stop and people-watch than attend my own graduation. As a result, I have no idea where any of my “paperwork” resides.
So, yes. That means no diplomas hang from my walls.
Skateboarded.
I doubt this is much of a surprise to anyone who knows me. I have the balance of a three-legged water buffalo.
Cat called anyone.
I have whistled at someone I love, but never a stranger. Cat calling and locker room talk are one in the same and neither sit well with me. It irks me to hear someone seeking tolerance by saying it was just ‘locker room’ talk.
As if it were harmless.
Tried fly fishing.
You might be surprised by this. Someone who has spent so much time on and around rivers. Enjoying riparian habitat.
Fishing has no appeal to me. I don’t need the meditative state it might bring because I get that by rowing miles and miles of flat water on rivers.
My last experience fishing was soul-crushing. Eight hours sitting in the middle of a lake with the Texas sun bearing down. Bass fishing with someone acclaimed to be one of the best bass fishermen in Texas at the time. Not a single nibble.
Just a lot of Dr. Pepper and very small talk. No locker room talk, thankfully. It would have been even more unbearable.
Jumped out of a perfectly good airplane.
This should not be a surprise to anyone either. I’m cheap and my adrenaline threshold is small. I find thrills in much less dangerous circumstances. Like throwing a double ringer in horseshoes.
Performed CPR.
Thankful I have not, thankful I — and many others — know how.
CPR is much more effective with water-related accidents. Since I make my living around moving water, I take comfort in knowing guides are trained in CPR.
I also take comfort in knowing a kid in Los Angeles performed successful CPR after only having seen it on his favorite television show.
Seen a UFO.
I thought about UFOs constantly as a kid. I wanted so badly to bear witness to a sighting. War of the Worlds captured my imagination as a child. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was one of my favorite movies.
I’ve been primed throughout my life to be visited by aliens from a ship from outer space. I’ve been seriously disappointed because I’ve never even seen anything I could pretend was unidentified.
I did — however — catch sight of the Marfa lights.
I patiently waited until just after sunset at the designated rest stop several miles down the highway from Marfa, Texas. I sat out my lawn chair, scanned the mountainous horizon and waited while travelers ebbed and flowed.
When I saw them, I was astounded. I am sure they weren’t headlights. There was no explanation for them. Lights hovering about the horizon. Hills silhouetted in relief. Kind of ethereal. Then they’d vanish.
I’d been sitting for quite awhile when they appeared to me.
Meanwhile, weary and impatient travelers would come up, stand for a minute, sigh and walk away. I tried to encourage them to have patience, but to no avail.
Instant gratification, I determined, is not possible with the Marfa lights.
Regretted my decision to avoid being a lifelong churchgoer.
My father was a minister. My mother believed in God. I went to church every Sunday while I lived under their roof. I reluctantly attended a few times when I returned home from college.
I could not bear the hypocrisy I encountered from church members. The back-biting, the status-climbing, the stuffy suits and the vacant stares or hollow smiles.
I understood the desire for community but — for me — there were too many strictures. As my parents grew to understand, my friends and I preferred worshipping nature by being in nature.
We also preferred fewer boundaries.
Licked a flagpole in the dead of winter on a day below freezing.
Smarter than your average Texas Aggie!
Used an online dating app.
Thank the Lord! Though, if I were going to use one, from what I’ve heard, I’d opt for Bumble.
Asked for an autograph.
I see no value in someone’s signature. And I’m not about to pester someone who gets pestered incessantly. In fact, I take great pride in acting as if the celebrity in question is just one of us. I’d like to think they appreciate it.
Intentionally harmed an animal.
Harming animals — as far as I am concerned — is one of the more insidious criminal acts. Those who intentionally harm animals are serial killers, mass shooters or criminals in the making. And, in my biased opinion, ought to be treated as such.
Just in the event.
Shot a gun.
Look. I’m sure it’s empowering. But I’m also sure I’m not going to regret not having done so on my deathbed.
I have considered, however, a machine gun turret mounted to the roof of our house. I doubt I’d need to be very accurate using it and it should come in handy during whatever apocalypse awaits us.
A machine gun turret mounted in every classroom is also my solution to school shootings. Little Johnnys everywhere will get a kick out of their turn to man the machine gun turret each day.
Paid for sex.
Ewwwww. No thank you.
Thought Texas was anything but a backwater. Same with my birth state Mississippi.
Texas has potential. It wasn’t always a bastion of ignorance, stupidity and political toxicity. I’m thinking of Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, Barbara Jordan, Sissy Farenthold, Beto O’Rourke, a majority of my family…
But I sure don’t see an end to the right-wing death-spiral that’s currently happening.
On a lighter note — whether it’s true or not — one of the funniest things I’ve seen online recently was a Texas secessionist asking fellow Facebook friends if Texas were to secede would Social Security checks continue arriving in the mailbox?
This is one of the reasons I fail to see civil war occurring over cultural divides — maybe water, maybe energy.
Too many “opiates” medicating so many masses.
Ever bet on a sports contest — this does not include horse racing.
I’d be terrible at guessing winners and losers in sports contests and I couldn’t imagine a faster way to lose my shirt. I could also see myself getting sucked into thinking I was good at it if I happened to get lucky once or twice.
I did hit it ‘big’ once at a horse track in Louisiana. After having lost all day while trying to decipher whether a horse and jockey were likely to be winners, I decided to change my tack. I followed a Black bettor, dressed to the nines in a white linen suit with a red pocket square and an audacious Panama hat, each of his slender hands bedazzled with rings, to the $100 betting window.
I overheard his choice as he placed a trifecta bet.
I, then scurried quickly to the $10 betting window, followed his lead and won all of my losses back and more.
I never saw the man again.
Drove my Chevy to the levee when the levee was dry.
I didn’t own a Chevy. But I did have a Ford Galaxie 500. My oldest brother, Mike, showed me it could easily reach 100 mph.
Sadly. No levees to drive it to in Dallas, either.
Voted for a Republican.
And I have zero plans to start.
Multiple decades of voting and never has it been more stark of a choice. They’ve showed us who they are. No amount of gaslighting is going to move the needle, or change their spots.
I wrote this to a friend this morning who had forwarded an article about Poland emerging from the ashes of a minority political party — who had been ruling over a decade — and subjugating the will of the majority while making an effort to dismantle democratic ideals:
I contend that abortion rights need to be on every ballot in every state because, whether we like it or not, they are.
I missed the Grammys. I think I would have enjoyed Trevor Noah as Emcee, but I’ve got to be honest, as much as I love how much the MAGA cult is triggered by Taylor Swift, and as much as I actually like Taylor Swift’s music, I’m afraid she has become way too prevalent in my newsfeed. She and Travis Kelce. Overhyped.
But, if you didn’t watch the Grammys, you might have missed Tracy Chapman and country star, Luke Combs, rendition of Fast Car.
Also — being a huge fan of the Highwomen, an article about Maren Morris leaving Nashville behind caught my eye this morning. Apparently she’s through with the misogyny and the blatant race-baiting she sees all over the musical genre — especially since the rise of MAGA. Her last two songs are meant as a going away stab at the world she wanted to call home.
Can’t say I blame her. I read one of the actual physical settings in the music video “Try That in a Small Town” was a lynching tree.
Metaphors matter.
Words matter.
Here’s Maren’s farewell song videos. Hopefully, it will give the native Texan more time to spend with the other Highwomen — Natalie Hemby, Brandi Carlisle and Amanda Shires.
I’m done filling a cup with a hole in the bottom,
and screaming the truth to a liar,
spent ten thousand hours trying to fight it with flowers,
when the tree was already on fire.