Deer Park!

I am moving on from my job in "Houston" which was technically in the Houston, Texas border town of Deer Park. I had lived in Houston once before (actually in the Houston part of Houston) for two and a half years straddling the turn of the millennium. Houston is the biggest, in terms of both sprawl and population, city I have ever lived in. It is both modern and thriving and run down and ghetto. The other time I lived there I read something that compared Houston to Hollywood insofar as that it is an industry capital. Movies are made all over the world, but the contracts are drawn up in L.A. and it is L.A. where the major companies are headquartered. This is stealing from the thing I read whose source/author I cannot recall. Anyhow, Houston is the same thing for oil and gas. I once saw a made-for-TV movie called "Oil Storm" that suggested that all of the oil that comes into the United States on tankers for processing comes in at either Port Fourchon, Louisiana or the Houston Ship Channel, so Houston is pretty significant machine performing a specific and crucial role. There were factories everywhere on the Southeast side of Houston where Deer Park is. On my way into work in the mornings I could often see a flare or two burning. Coworkers teased me that I shouldn't actually live in Deer Park where the job was as I might get cancer from the air and water, but I was already there leasing an apartment. Notably, there are no deer in Deer Park. This is a city like Grand Prairie, Texas swallowed up and surrounded by strip malls and cement whose name now just seems sad. Ugly signage with digital displays is a little too common in Deer Park. The people are really friendly though. Even the ridiculously large police force which will pull you over in the middle of the night for nothing and then let you go with a warning is pretty polite. The code I wrote for work was of a recruiting workflow lining warm bodies up with nonpermanent flux work at factories. On rare occasions, I'd let the talent into the lobby before anyone else had showed up at work and they always seemed pretty cool. Similar talent could be seen all about Deer Park on lunch outings. There were always characters running around in jumpsuits on weekdays. I can remember seeing three guys in red jumpsuits sitting at a circular table-and-benches ensemble that was attached directly to the pavement (unmovable) outside of maybe a Jimmy John's or something like that and it looked just like a scene from a movie with prisoners in a prison yard. There is a Subway Sandwiches in town that is open 24 hours. That's another surreal thing. You can go there instead of Denny's or IHOP in the middle of the night. Another noteworthy restaurant is in a building on the grounds of the token golf course. The golf course is probably the only reason you'd have to be in Deer Park if you didn't live or work there. It is the one attraction. Its namesake winks at Deer Park's tagline "Birthplace of Texas" which seems a bit odd to me as the San Jacinto monument is technically in neighboring La Porte, Texas. Whatever. Anyhow it is at this locus that Santa Anna turned into Santa Claus, albeit at gunpoint, and gave Sam Houston the Texas territory which became its own nation for a while and then eventually one of the states in the United States. (Hawaii and Vermont are the only other states to have once been their own countries.) In seeing the San Jacinto monument I felt the need to bone up on Texas history and, as I was already driving between Austin and Deer Park anyways in the name of making a change of apartments, I thought I'd swing by Gonzales, Texas and see the "Come and Take It" cannon. That cannon is tiny. It's like two feet long and six inches in diameter. Also, the museum where the cannon is kept, a goofy state museum, is the most Mickey Mouse museum I have ever been to. There was one attendant and no security guards. Anyone with the skills to rob a 7ELEVEN could just go there and take the "Come and Take It" cannon. Remember in the first season of "Narcos" when those communists break into that museum and steal the sword of a long dead Columbian hero because of what it symbolizes? Well, the equivalent to that sword in contemporary Texas would be the "Come and Take It" cannon. Evil thoughts! I digress. I thought of one more thing to say about Deer Park. There is a 1970s-style roller disco there called "Skate World" which means there are two attractions in total.