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Denton might have soured my impression of this state, maybe a result of close proximity to meth labs and amateur wrestling nights, cheap but rough and undesirable bars with bad music, overproud and undertalented professors and students and a strident subculture of young hipsters and hippies, small town community college attendees, burnouts and alcoholics. Together though, these parts move in a sort of rhythm I tried to groove on in the last few months of my undergrad, somewhere between fixing boredom and reconciling major difficulties spurned from my five years living here. I was in the cruddy coffeehouse near the art building, polluted by the smoke off thirty 19-year-olds’ marathon Camel Filters, taking notes, writing rough drafts; spending a few weekends photographing keg parties like Ruscha gas stations; making scrupulous records of bad fashion and bad attitudes.
I’ve been looking through the notes in my last couple weeks here before a big move out of state, primarily because Texas feels dead to me, or rather I feel unhooked from my homeland, spoiled by scholarly objectivity.
Somewhere in North Texas under a smoldering alizarin dome, the smoky dusk of Denton shivers on the edge of cosmic inversion. Soon, even as the last lingering wisps still thread out from the ashes, and the muted jet tones find echoes in oblivion, the frail town will tumble indefinitely into night.
Maybe this is the story of how I grew up in Austin, and how all of that emptiness and podunk reality of my undergrad years in Denton was too much, too shocking. When we grow up successfully and enjoyably in cities our senses summarize our surroundings. We could drive all night in Austin and have a particularly “Austin” experience with a very shallow range of focus.
And now I have trouble describing, or deciphering, that transition from city to country in my personal Texan paradigm (whether physical, emotional, infrastructural); the state has such stereotypes that create meaning and affirm themselves in famous ways: that powerful rural identity, creeping in perversely into urban areas, and significantly in Dallas-Fort Worth, with its network of towns as vast as Los Angeles, full of incessant money and power but built upon a scaffold of town squares and rodeos and dance halls. But Denton lies just outside of that web (very close to Oklahoma): all sluggish and old-fashioned, with townies unfazed by a famously disruptive and tiredly liberal community of former students and dropouts from the two large public universities. Here I walk and ride a bicycle; everything — the strip malls, the barber shops, the fast food, the apartment complexes, the ugly university buildings, wildflowers, fields of sunburnt grass — is visible. Rural towns, even ones significantly affected by universities, seem to enlist every item, person, and building in the overarching vision of their space: everything familiar and specific, slowed down, and spaced out, the landscape entirely out there to consume, and constantly; all parts together being just about the maximum amount of information one could extract from a place without a “blur effect” from urban density.
Of all coping devices at my disposal, heavily theorizing over my “country” experience, and ultimately losing my faith in Texas, a jittery, certainly overemotional response to both intense schoolwork and everday local frustrations, was unhealthy in many ways. There is something so negligent and backwards about this part of the state that went hard against my liberal upbringing — dirty and wasteful, often racist, quite obese, completely anti-intellectual and homophobic; a landscape pretty flat and uninteresting made worse by repeated (every ten miles) installations of chain businesses along the interstate with miles of suburbs behind them — but the dystopia of it (the self-created fantasy) was a fairly exciting and inspiring curiosity, at least for the sake of research. But really: pinning up North Texas on the board, holding it in place specimen-like with some good academic apathy, deromanticizes it in the end; the visceral parts drip off. I feel guilty for that perspective.