Is it March yet?

Right now, I'm listening to my mom feign interest and wonder at one of Junior's friend's ear gauges. See, we're in Lodi for Christmas, and because he can't spend time being bored and misses his friends, he is going to spend the night at his other friend's house.

Now, I know how being at home with your parents during holidays is boring when you're nineteen, but we hadn't been back from the airport a whole hour when he boosted off to go hang out with his friends last night, and now this is an extended stay tonight.

I can't really blame him, but this is one of the core differences between he and I. For instance, when I lived at home, I made a point of keeping all my chemical misadventures under very tight and out-of-town wraps; he left coke straws and other paraphernalia in his pockets for my mom to uncover. I rarely brought a girl over for dinner; he got caught banging one in his bedroom. When I came home for the holidays, I stayed home until about the middle of the visit. He goes out the proverbial minute he walks through the door. And what's worse, he premeditates little niceties with my parents in order to buy himself a do-whatever-the-fuck-I-want card for later. It's not that my parents are stupid, it's that Junior is stupid in that he believes no one can see through his bullshit. He's a peculiar mix of sloppy indiscretion and cagey scheming. While he is ultimately self-serving, he is also a total follower. I'm looking forward to his report-for-duty-date in March.

I have also listened to Junior make the following sweeping statements in the time between touching down at SMF and right now:

"I don't turn the heat on EVER!" Yet somehow, we have an electric bill that is nearly $170, due January 7th. Maybe he's right; maybe he never turns the heat on, but he also never turns the TV off.

"In Texas, everybody drives like idiots." This from the kid who got three speeding tickets while living in California, never mind an unreported accident in Fort Worth where he sideswiped some lady in a minivan. I don't know about everybody in Texas driving like idiots, but I do know one person who does.

"They honk a lot in Texas." This was news to me; apparently Fort Worth is similar to a movie about New York City traffic. He later explained that his friends honk all the time, which I suppose gives superficial credence to the statement directly above.

You'll notice also that his generalizations frequently feature the prepositional phrase "in Texas." He justifies this because his experience in Texas is limited exclusively to Fort Worth (though as of the past two weeks, it includes now downtown Dallas and Weatherford), and therefore, he has nothing else to base it on. For Junior, Fort Worth is Texas. Granted, this actually makes a lot of sense, and I do recall seeing a Fort Worth tourism brochure that referred to Cowtown as the "most Texan of Texas cities." But man, I can think of few people in Austin who would beg to differ. And a couple in Houston. And now that I think about it, there are probably some people I know in San Antonio that would take offense to that. I don't know about Dallas, because I hate Dallas.

I'm just saying is all.

--The Robo-Pirate