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Palo Duro Canyon is the second biggest in the United States after the Grand, and yet I didn't know about it until I went to visit my friends at the Academy of Advanced Imagery in Canyon, Texas . "Yes, there is a canyon," I kept telling everybody, because I'd Googled . And then we went there. I'd almost not brought my camera on this trip, because I knew Maz had hers and she's a talented photographer. We have different perspectives, though, so it's a good thing I did. We often took different trails; also, she's got the better telephoto lens. There were times I bade her take the long-distance shots I knew would fail with my camera. This cute yellow flower tried to kill me. I really wanted that shot, so I crouched low and finally lay prone to find my angle, and then I realised how close I was to the edge of the cliff. It was at least twelve feet away, but I was frozen in terror. You see, when I was a teenager my friends thought it was funny to thr...

Hello. My Name is Owen. Please pet me, please. The first day of Big Texas Road Trip was all about Mazzy's family: her baby sister, Asmath; her sister's dogs, Sophie the Crazy-Eyed and Owen; and her mom, Saba. Maz picked me up at the airport in a Volvo SUV that had no CD player, so the hours we'd spent planning, buying, and burning Arabic, hip-hop, and banjo music were wasted. She'd booked the car online, but the location literally did not exist when she went to pick up her rental Friday night. She found a location that did exist, but which didn't have a vehicle for her to rent until the next morning. Maz is incredibly genuine as well as adorable - I'm sure her badassery worked in her favor as the morning rental agent gave her the best SUV on the lot for regular price. We swung past the hotel long enough for me to check in at Hotel Indigo and then we hied to Arlington, looking for a restaurant with a patio so the dogs could join us. We found La Madelein...

Austin, TX, can be a bit Tippi. After Canyon, we headed south toward San Antonio. Maz's sister lives there and said we could stay at her house while she was away. North of Sweetwater, a little before sunset, Maz made a video (which we thought was hilarious) of an Oil Crane Pump Well (which looked like a grasshopper). We didn't make it to my family's ancestral graveyard but stopped at the Ballinger intersection where we could have turned left toward Brownwood. There I picked up a rock that may have touched either foot or hoof belonging to my old settler Ewings. As we passed Paint Rock, I thought about how Southwestern petroglyphs really freak me out. Like cold to the bones and feeling nauseous freak me out. I swept slabs on construction sites in San Antonio during 1983 instead of graduating from high school. My daughter's father's father lived in Universal City, and we landed at his place for a few days before finding a trailer and getting jobs in the booming...

I came home from this road-trip to find my cat Noori hiding, crying, in the closet.  She was so well-entrenched that I couldn't even find her in the closet at first. Finally she came out and hid under the bed, still complaining. By morning she was walking on me and  yelling for breakfast as usual. She went out briefly earlier to eat some trumpet vine, and then I made her come back in.  She's sitting at the front door now, telling me to open it. I want more , she says. "You can't go out there. You're getting too brave. I need you to not be brave," I tell her, and then immediately I re-frame those words as if she were a human-child, and I feel a tinge of something akin to regret. I don't care , she says. "There are things out there that will EAT YOU." Again I flinch; but this time I know I'm telling the truth, not setting up unknown dangers to bind the child's spirit. "There are owls and foxes and stuff." There really...

I've lived in Texas twice: once in San Antonio, and once in what we call Deep East Texas. That's part one of this story. Part two started in 1997 on AOL. There I met my poet-guru, who gives away guy-secrets for free, and also Linda,who made magic out of my attempts at poetry. She squeezed my hand through the ether when life got weird, and reminded me how we'll survive it. Texas women are matriarchal by necessity, says the guru.  In one of life's best surprises, the two of them fell in love while I was away from the internet. My guru, known to some as Doc Blossom, eventually moved to Texas and made it bloom, too, for Linda. Literally and in all ways. I've been trying for the longest to go visit them in person, but logistics have been complicated. I finally went all-in and set a date, and that's when part three happened. Maz is gonna road-trip with me. I also know Maz via internet, through our mutual friend Rolb Coepmann . We talk a Venn diagram of art,...

"You want to go to the beach tonight?" Vickie's Texas drawl was hopeful; we were finally meeting in person after knowing each other through the hotel system for years. The beach south of Port Arthur was suggested by Vickie's friend, her guy friend, the one who (you could tell by the wistfulness in her voice) currently held her heart; the one she said was her best friend. I wouldn't have to drive, she said, because I'd been driving since California. "Sure," I replied.  I'd just left the desert and hadn't seen the Gulf Coast, which holds a piece of my heart, in over a decade. Of course I wanted to go to the beach. The problem was this: I was too old to innately know this was Spring Break, and there would be no beach to be seen. It was joyous mayhem. There were jeeps and Beetles driving up and down the sandy shore, campfires burning, hippies dancing... Around the other side of  Vickie's car a particularly greasy young man was sittin...