This is going to be my online autobiography, a side project to keep me active, my other side projects being my home, my gardening, college, my bees, and my dear O'Ash, if I’m not around to support her, who ever will?

I initially wanted to do something brief, short, and safe: a professional biography with large white marble columns of my many accomplishments using a GoDaddy template, but I think I’ll do something different with the space and time and use my scaffolding, duct tape, and haywire to see what else emerges: a moat, a boat, a bridge, or something else completely different. So I’ll exercise and clear the cobwebs a little here and there and write about my life and experiences when I get some spare time, maybe an hour or two every week, for therapeutic and memory-restorative purposes so I can keep myself busy with so much else in my life starting to slow and unwind.

Weekly update May 29, 2026, 1500-1600. Cloudy, reminding me of monsoon season, and still not using the evaporative cooler. I don’t want my $50 electricity bills to ever end! I wanted to play the mini mystery million but changed my mind; I’d rather be drinking, sleeping, or saving 550 bucks. 4 more weeks are left in Summer Session 1, and graduating will give me a few more opportunities. I am sad about my palm tree, appearing like I’m not going to be able to save her; the bottom line is communication, and the top is high-voltage electricity. I’ve been pruning, last summer and last night, and not doing a very good job, but I don’t think it’ll be enough, but maybe I can, slow her growth, use tension and keep pruning. Ash is out of the hospital, and she does like her stays there and thanks everybody. Oh yeah. I also had breakfast today at Golden Corral and paid 11 dollars and some change and thought about another one of my friends, Stephanie Joe Harrill, when we ate at The Farmer’s Brother, with the sunlight hitting her face. I was thinking earlier about the lifetime shed on Facebook Marketplace for $200, and it retails for $1,500; I only have to dismantle, transport, and reassemble because I do need the extra space, or I need to start decluttering! But I don’t have the logistics or manpower anymore. 303 Judson, and many years ago, Steph helped put a way smaller shed together and I couldn't have done it without her help. Bees, I had to actually build a dam moat because I’m afraid of the ants doing a nighttime raid after seeing some scouts around the hive. No big plans for June except college and going around the desert to look for some meteorites with my magnet.

So “right now” was last week. Today is May 21, 2026, evening and nice out; still not using the swamp cooler, but when I did last week, the smell, when it started, reminded me of Odessa. I feel a little better, but I’m still mixed, like next week is my birthday, 53 and running out of runway, so I need to hammer down, like those lonely nights on the interstates and two-lane roads, with still lots of miles & possibilities before sunrise. So alongside my autobiography, I’ll think I’ll do weekly updates because if I do it chronologically, it’ll be forever before I thank Lee Roy from Desert Springs again. Thank you for the Cherry Master 91. I don’t know how much I lost in the 90s, tons, but when I won, I got a cab full of beef jerky and snapples! Bees are busy and doing alright, with me seeing some brood today. Ash is alright too with getting her a ghost shrimp and a baby mystery blue snail but she's still getting ornery at times. And I got an A+ on my first assignment, so I’m pumping back up!

So right now, May 11, as are many, I’m under a lot of stress and anxiety, being stuck in a sort of liminal zone, with the climate and landscape changing, and I’m still having PTSD from 2009-2011, when I didn’t exactly thrive but slowly bled out. It's different when you live on the margins but I'm blessed and lucky to have a few more lifelines this time around. You might say my flotation devices are slowly leaking, as they probably are for so many others. I’m preparing to start swimming again and taking advantage of this short liminal period, a calm of sorts, to catch my breath and to write about my O' world as she slowly begins to disappear.

I was born in El Paso, TX, at the Hotel Dieu, which I actually visited before they demolished it without much fanfare around 2005, but I also lived in Odessa, TX, during my childhood and teens, and I consider it my childhood hometown. I’m the oldest of four boys. Mom passed away Thanksgiving week 2013 from an aggressive cancer, but not after the stroke affected her mind several months earlier. And Dad is still alive but hasn’t really prospered or thrived after she left.

I can’t nail down my earliest memory; so many are disjointed and disconnected, like the pennies I find with hard-to-read dates. And a lot of my memories have been compressed and do not have the "just happened yesterday feeling." My memories are like, after a lot of kids have been playing and fishing around a pond and left to go home, like the one at the YMCA we always used to go to, with the sun beginning to set and most of the pond becoming silent and still.

One of the earliest memories is me trying to spin a trompo in the garage on Mardi Gras Street that my parents must have got me on one of their many trips to Juárez. I couldn’t get it to spin. And I finally ordered one online; it should be here next week.

I also lived in Silver City, NM. I’ve seen photographs, but I don’t have any memories of Silver City, NM. Dad still remembered the home and pointed it out last time we drove through, but it could've been a random house for all I know because he didn't seem too confident.

I have many memories of El Paso before we moved to Odessa. One vivid memory is someone buying me a root beer float at Swenson's, and I don’t remember who, but I remember the light filling up the whole room. Other vivid memories were sneaking over to the 7-11 to buy Jolly Ranchers and Wacky Packages with stolen change from Mom's purse. I remember seeing a jackrabbit leaping and jumping for the first time next to the water tank.

I went to Putnam Elementary School and still remember the first day Mom walked me over. I remember the lunch boxes that were all lined up outside and the time my parka jacket disappeared while my mom argued with another parent. I remember the Coca-Cola yo-yo representative; I and only one other kid attended the contest, and I still didn’t win anything. One day after school my parents got angry when I didn’t go straight home because I was waiting to play Pac-Man at the convenience store behind some loud teenagers. The large painted construction tire with sand inside—I still remember the day playing there and getting hurt. Then I went to a magnet school, Zavala, but not exactly because I was gifted or smart. I remember the baby lizards outside the fence of the playground that I tried to catch with the other boys and the bus rides back with one of the girls with heavy makeup dressed up like Madonna from Lucky Star.

I remember the vacation my mom took me and my brother, Justen, to her hometown on the Nazas River, Torreon de San Isidro, to visit her parents and brothers, and I still have dreams about the bridge and being scared to go into the deep and dangerous arroyo on the edge of town with the rest of the kids. And the many trips to visit my dad’s mother in Ruidoso with my brother and seeing the mirages of water on the highway. Grandmother took us fishing, and I never caught one except for the time she took me and my brother to an indoor, swimming pool-sized, tank stocked with many fish. I still remember catching a crayfish with a piece of bacon tied to the end of a string, then putting it in an aluminum tray full of water on the porch and finding it the next day, out and not getting very far.

Then there was visiting my mother's sister on the other side of town every month or so, with Mickey and his two sisters. I remember going into his room and seeing all the computer stuff, along with the thick 80s computer bible. Walking down the street to the Goodtime stores and just realizing recently I wasn’t buying Garbage Pail Kid packs with the stolen change from Mom's piggy bank like I thought I was but Wacky Packages that I've never heard of until now. And I recently found those parachute toys I used to buy back then too on the internet. Silly Dilly Poopa Troopers.

Odessa, where I would stay up late and hear the trains go by outside the living room window; and the crossroads, Dixie and University, where visits are brief and everyone's journeys are different, there was an old Dairy Queen Hamburger Stand on the SW corner, where my brother and I would take the coupons from cereal boxes and get free banana split sundaes.

So yeah, I have good memories of Burnett Elementary, Bonham Middle School, and Permian High School, with Bonham probably being my favorite, with Jody and his collection of Mercedes hood ornaments and the girl from science class, SL. Kerran was the only boy born in Odessa, and I still remember when he arrived from the hospital and, several months later, him getting sunburned at Wet 'n' Wild after we pleaded with our parents to take us after seeing one too many Wet 'n' Wild commercials on TV. Fat Mike and his little brother Charley connected me with one of my best jobs, and they lived on the corner, and their mom worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken on Grandview.

I worked as a paperboy for the Odessa American in summer and winter and barely made any money; more often than not, I owed money. I used to love going to 7-11 and playing Star Wars and Xenophobe after doing the route on my bike, and I still remember the lady near the power lines who gave me candy every time I came by to collect. Deliveries on Sundays were the worst, and Mondays were the best.

One summer, while I was still attending Bonham, I used to ride my bike or walk downtown almost every day. I remember going to the library and getting 49-cent soda refills with the crushed slushy ice, but I forget which chain. There used to be a park in front of the hospital. I would always sit there at the picnic table underneath the tree, with the red sports car parked on the side of the street. I often looked at Google Maps to see whatever happened to that park and at one time thought they only urbanized it with a modern playground, but no, they built medical offices and a parking garage instead.

Another time I rode down Grandview to the interstate and remember seeing big machinery and thought it was the Odessa-Ector Power Plant by looking at recent maps from 2026, but I further learned the power plant was built in 1999 and wasn’t around in the 80s! I must have seen it back in 2007 when I worked at MMH and thought it had always been there? Continuity continues without my consciousness. And memories from two different periods are being rearranged around my current. So yeah, I recently visited, like I mentioned, and went to the H2O reservoir near Albertson's; the walking path they built was nice and full of activity. I used to buy bread and feed the ducks, and I’ve cut the 6-pack rings ever since. I then walked over to UTPB and was amazed by the transformation with the trees and green grass. They call them the duck ponds, I learned from the 2024 maps on the internet. I remember them as three ponds surrounded by red dirt.

The forest and the meadow on the side of the interstate.

The arcade beside Taco Bell and the arcade beside the heavy metal recycler.

The telemarketer's job full of cigarette smoke beside the railroad tracks.

Worms appearing out of nowhere after a heavy rain.

The dollar movie theater with the abandoned putt-putt golf course.

8th Street with the army surplus store and baseball card shop.

"Yep, that was the only 7-11 arcade in town where you could get free Slurpee refills," Isaac showed us one day.

Black Beauty from the house across the alley, who survived getting hit by a Lincoln Continental Town Car on University, and her disappearing without me noticing for weeks many years later in EP during HS. Wrong. Princess and Rocky disappeared, not Beauty, after pulling a photograph from the mid-90s out of the garage last night after looking for an old zine. They both disappeared while I was in high school, and I didn’t notice for weeks. And after I did notice, I’m ashamed to remember not having asked why. Oso, I don’t remember; I'm guessing I was really little. And Lil Maverick, while still attending Putnam, I remember being on the white shed and lifting him up in a bucket with the help of my brother. Beauty19881988 disappeared too in the mid-90s while I was out truck driving; maybe she was gone for a while, weeks or months, and one day I noticed she was gone, and after I noticed, I didn't remember asking why. I don’t like my parents for not giving me a heads-up or a phone call before taking them to the pound.

Mall's Big 5. After passing Luby's, turn left; (1) Walden Books, across, was the (2) pet store, then turn around and walking was (3) KB's, and in the middle of the mall were the (4) fountains with thousands of pennies, and at the end was the (5) arcade.

And how could I forget my other job selling Grit during the wintertime, smoke in the air, and trying to sell expired editions as the sun slowly set, after my mom forced me to go out in the first place, which I couldn't even sell when they were new and hot off the press? Little Michael, who lived next door, with cut-off denim jeans and always barefoot, always came over and played with my brother, Brett. They were best friends. Many evenings were spent playing hide-and-seek, tag, and other games. One summer I remember hundreds of Texas horned toads, the size of a quarter, magically appearing everywhere, along with an old man down the street selling watermelon and cantaloupe from his garage and sometimes giving away free samples. It was fun catching and releasing them. Later I worked at the Red Lobster for a weekend and got fired after being overwhelmed and not keeping up, and Luby's for a whole summer, both as a pot washer, and still remember walking the empty mall to the arcade at the end on my lunch breaks. And how could I forget another summer working at the Golden Corral with Leroy and Miguel? Miguel was the main chef and ran the whole kitchen; his crew tried to throw me in the compacting dumpster one evening, and Leroy invited me to a party after work. I remember it being at some apartments behind the GC, with two big girls. I didn’t stay long but got buzzed with a couple of cans and left and walked home in the rain, with my parents picking me up somewhere on 42nd Street.

We all moved back to El Paso after my parents lost the house in 1989 or 1990, and I graduated from Coronado High School three and a half years later, and then I enlisted. I was actually excited to attend Coronado High School, as I was becoming too static and still, like at the many bus terminals, with everyone moving and jumping on buses but myself, so change was good. But briefly reflecting back on all those Friday Nights, I wasn’t really a part of the Permian Panther football scene while it was happening, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t even realize they were making history the one year I was there. It wasn’t until much later that I learned about the Mojo football teams, etc, being superimposed or parallel. I did try out for the baseball team and couldn’t catch the pop flies that kept sailing past me. The last time I visited, the convenience store I would always go to for lunch had changed to a Subway; the Ghosts 'n Goblins, Fireballs, and the best Nacho Fries ever—I'll always miss alongside 1980s Odessa.

To be continued. . .

Last updated May 29, 2026.