Vanishing Texas?

Texas is big.

801 miles tip to tip, 773 miles end to end, 267,000 square miles of everything from deserts to oceans, mountains to tabletop-flat plains; rolling hills to piney woods and sandy beaches to soggy marshland.
Name something and we probably have a version of it specific to the great state of Texas: birds, rocks, brands of soup, nuts; we're always looking to put our names on shit. Texas is like the KISS of the American states;we're shameless self-promoters who are very proud of where we live and by God are not afraid to let you know about it.

And for good reason, I suppose; history has been kind to the Lone Star State. When the economy took a cannonball off the high dive in '08 we stayed remarkably stable; people have been flocking from all over (who am I kidding; Californians have been flocking) to hungrily snap up our jobs and clog our highways and streets, spreading the love for all things vegan from Amarillo to Zapata (okay, they've been coming to Austin; I just couldn't resist the cheesy A-Z thing. My blog; you can do better, start your own). A list of the fastest growing cities and metro areas in the US reads like a Texas road map; tiny once unremarkable places like Frisco, Kyle, Allen and McKinney are experiencing explosive growth and the Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin-Round Rock and Houston-Sugar Land megalomaniopolises (yes, I made that word up) are spreading like cancerous tumors, swallowing every small, quaint community in their paths and infecting them with strip malls and WalMarts faster than infrastructure can keep up. It's truly an irony; people move to these so-called "exurbs" to get away from the city, and then proceed to bring the city with them. Yet another reason why people get on my nerves so badly, but I'm getting ahead of myself; more on that later.

The economic history of Texas is a wild and varied one; before the advent of the microchip and all it hat wrought (for better and worse), Texas' money was largely of the agriculture and petrochemical variety. In the early 20th Century, when oil was discovered throughout the state, towns either sprang up out of nothing or doubled (even tripled) in population seemingly overnight bursting at the seams with people looking to make a buck. Naturally, this business is cyclical and with every boom there is the inevitable bust and what goes up fast, well, it comes down really goddamned hard. Sleepy communities burst into flaming badassness as rollicking boomtowns only to become half-empty ghosts only a few years later, with nothing remaining of the glory days but crumbling buildings and forgotten names and faces, fading into the past with the dreams of yesterday's opportunists.

That's the Texas I'm interested in.

Not the glitzy glamour of Dallas or the "Cowboy-Up!" grit of Fort Worth; no Austin hobobhemian hipsters (or whatever they call themselves) or Tejano kick in San Antonio; and, well, whatever the hell is in Houston; none of that. Texans love to show our pretty side, but there is an ugly one just on the other buttcheek. No, I'm not talking about the urban blight or suburban decay; I'm talking about the places that time simply forgot. Places that still try to hang on in spite of the fact that their best days are long past. Not ghost towns, mind you (even though I find those pretty badass as well and will likely post about a few now and then); I mean the places and things who are still dying, the ones that still serve some sort of purpose yet have all long since burned all the quality gas in the tank and are coughing along on the varnish that's pooled at the bottom. To a crazy person like me, it's all a reminder that no matter what it looks like on the outside, nothing is permanent; everything you see around you, from the monitor on your desk to the roof over your head, will someday be just as much of a memory as cheap gas and self-respect.

So here we go...let's watch something die, shall we?