Downtown Seattle from Beacon Avenue. This is what you might call the “long way home”.

This was a self-portrait I took with my tripod above Interstate 5 between Pike and Pine Street, at the dog run.  I had been crying, and for some reason I thought I should capture that on film.

February: My favorite camera broke after I slipped on the ice outside my house, leaving most of the month uncaptured.  But once I sold my computer and bought a cheaper netbook, I found enough money for a new camera and managed to document my last few weeks of living in Seattle.

I always loved hiking up to this viewpoint – in the Mount Baker neighborhood, high above the tunnels that carried Interstate 90 to downtown.  This is facing Mercer Island and points eastward in late afternoon.

I loved the double meaning of this place.  I also loved that I was one of the few people who actually walked through my neighborhood on foot.  People used to talk about how ghetto Rainier Valley was, but I loved it.  I may have not liked living in Seattle, but I adored the city itself, who is defenseless and held captive by its largely annoying citizens.

March: A major transitional month, as I moved from Seattle on the 1st and visited San Francisco before moving back to Austin.  I met a very special old friend there and fell in love with San Francisco’s cheerfully painted depravity.

Goodbye Seattle.  At the time I would have laughed at the thought of missing the city, but somehow I do.

The people and the buildings of San Francisco are so inviting and too pretty, even if they remain largely unkempt.

April: Getting used to the reality of having to live in Austin.  I didn’t have a car yet so I managed to capture a fair amount of the city at street level.  I was still in denial about the terrible, terrible summer that would soon be coming.

It might be exciting to see all these new buildings sprouting up in Austin, but I only photographed them out of lack of anything else interesting in the city.

May: More of the same.  I was about to sink into a deep depression that coincided with the extremely hot weather that began in the middle of month (and lasted through September.)  I also lost my camera on a bus (these were from a borrowed camera).

June: I got a new car and a new camera, but the heat and the loneliness make it perhaps the most depressing month of my life.   (And that’s not exaggeration or hyperbole, it’s the truth.  I cried almost daily.)

July: another terrible month spent in hell (temperature-wise, employment-wise, and in a number of other ways).  I was beginning to wonder if my life was in a tailspin that I would never be able to overtake.  It was over 100 degrees most days.  I spent most of my time doing very irresponsible, harmful things.  But I also did a few harmless things, like drove around the hill country and photographed the dry nothingness.

August: Everything had come to a head.  The weather, my personal situation, the direction of my life.  I had to get out of town to think things through.

September: became suddenly unemployed, had to sell my camera that I had just bought.  But I moved in with my aunt and that lifted my spirits somewhat.  The drought was still terrible.

October: The drought subsided, I had a birthday and began to get desperate for money. My love for photography decreased dramatically, but only out of necessity and the austerity of the moment.

November: Started working part-time to make ends meet, applied for food stamps multiple times but received no response, gained probably 8 pounds. Went to Houston. (Woo!)

December: the first hint at financial solvency comes in the form of a phase I clinical trial. My passion for almost everything has been stunted, but I’m saving it for a place that I can really belong to instead of simply exist in. 2010 has to get better, it just has to. Because I can’t do another 2009, I just can’t.

Best wishes to you in the next decade.

View The Main Line of Oklahoma in a larger map

Anyway, it was a lovely surprise and a nice buffer between the very flat Dallas and very flatter Oklahoma City.

Truth be told, I am more historically Oklahoman than I am Texan by far. And that right there is the essence of today’s Oklahoma City – it is more Texan than Texas. It is what Texas was, before the era of mass suburbia, mass immigration, corporate relocations, and office parks. OKC’s skyline had its adolescence in the pre-war period, and has been stuck a marvelous jello suspension since the 1970’s. It’s a delight to be able to walk around a central business district as if it were a museum exhibit, with nobody there to bother you, the buildings sequestered figuratively behind an imaginary velvet rope.

Oklahoma City is sadly one of the most conservative cities of its size in the United States, but my cousin Carrie showed me that there’s still a bit of a deviant, almost hipster like quality to some of its attractions – it certainly blows the pants off of Austin in terms of architecture, vernacular architecture at least. If you want a hundred year old house with dumbwaiter and quirky paint job, you can take your pick, and pick it up for a song.

I will hopefully be back in November for my cousin Carrie’s wedding. But for now, I have to head back down to Texas, where I live but not where I love to live. Before I go, I’ll pull down the roof on the convertible and enjoy the 89 degree dryness that slides though the gaps in the six-lane roads with impossibly wide rights of way. Just like Texas, it’s one of the few places that seems sad and gloomy when it’s sunny. I could go for a thunderstorm right about now, but in the absence of rain, a song about gloomy sundays will have to suffice. I’ll be sure to share all my photos when I get back.

• The Associates – Gloomy Sunday

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• Big Star – Kangaroo

Other cities boundaries end where Loop 610 is located, thus allowing them to be judged based solely on their pre-war contents, which are, as you know, very hip things these days. To put it in geographical perspective, pretend to start talking about how great Williamsburg is, and mention that it’s on Long Island, and you start to see how large boundaries tend to obfuscate the good and bad that is present in any metropolitan area. To play reverse psychology, we would have to start saying “Webster, We Have A Problem.” Compton would be judged as a neighborhood of LA and not as an independent bedroom community. So why do we judge Houston on that which is really not “Houston” but Cinco Ranch, Kashmere Heights, Greenspoint, South Park, and Klein? We look at the Houston area’s smog, its menacing freeways leading to freeway spurs and limited-access parkways, we look at its religious nutbags, we look at its poverty-stricken industrial neighborhoods, and we insist we can’t see the Menil Collection, the joggers in Memorial Park, the universities, the theatres, the housing, the bayous, and we do ourselves a disservice.

If one is to look at the sense of ‘place’ and ignore the political sharpie maneuvers that make up American suburbanization, Houston stands on its own. It’s not the BEST city in the US, and most of what everyone accepts as truth is in fact truth. But what’s also true is that Houston has neat stuff, too, not “neat for Texas” but unique.

To be fair, Houston is a live and let live city. If you can handle the flat terrain, checkerboard development, and if you can handle a city that repeats its own basic recipe over and over in 8 directions, then you can enjoy the fruits thereof – affordability, flexibility, mobility. It’s laughable to say that Houston resists urbanization, true urbanization, when Houston’s generally eager to please and let itself be the largest test grounds for suburbia. Big lots, small lots, McMansions, tax abatements, great rooms and phase III’s, they form a type of classification all their own – suburbia’s sub-suburbs.

But Houston loves skyscrapers, and puts them wherever it can fit them. If you want a 40-story tower, Houston assumes you must need one if you’re asking to build one. If you want a rowhouse downtown, or a high-rise with a view of another downtown, Houston has a place for you. It’s not picky, and it has one of everything just in case.

It is a place of Southern gentility, of art deco chutzpah, of black families between railroad tracks and power lines, of black families in colonials, of Republican businesswomen who dine with their gay “best friends” at a restaurant that allows you to park in front.

I like Houston, and I don’t know why more people don’t. You won’t find a catchy disco theme song with TV’s Patrick Duffy in the credits, and you might be hard pressed to catch Renee Zellweger proudly professing her nostalgia for Katy.

But I’ll profess my nostalgia for the Katy Freeway, the now 26-lane-wide freeway that makes straight lines and cruise control seem like a conveyor belt to a suburban death squad, priced from the 180’s. This is Houston’s Champs-Elysees to many who reach Houston from a western approach. It is ugly, but it is also AMAZING. You drive it wondering what was below the main lanes before they were added; was it a frontage road, a pine tree, a warehouse, or was it just an empty lot like all the other empty lots in Houston? It is a driving tour of what America sometimes feels like to the old-world provincial – bewildering, seemingly unncessary, brash, brutal and overly functional, but serving a perverse function at that, evacuating middle class money as far away from downtown as possible.

But then you look at the other side of Katy Freeway and you see people in smaller cars, people with Obama stickers, people with parking garage tags to places between traditional downtown and traditional exurbia, places with phase numbers and building numbers and small, discreet corporate logos on the top right margin. It works both ways in Houston, including rush hour, commuting, new money and old money. People get to go where they want to go in Houston – they can live downtown and work downtown, or live downtown and work in the Woodlands, or they can live in the Woodlands and work in Conroe. If you want a 15 minute commute, you can have one. If you want a huge huge huge house, you can have one (but you might not have a 15 minute commute.) You may escape blacks and Latinos, once living in Sharpstown, but then the blacks and Latinos move up too, and then someone else takes over. Houston reinvents parts of itself in a modest way that is never showy.

Houston is nothing if not daring for carrying a speculative and deregulated environment to its most literal conclusion. I like Houston despite its blatantly ugly appendages, and despite its curried favor by Republicans with duallys and minivan-driving Vietnamese women who hiss at you under their breath.

I feel like I fell in love with the only one who’d accept the ring when I say that I like Houston and might consider moving there. I do know that I could take my pick of high-rise, low-rise, garden apartment, or loft and work in the energy industry, in the shipping industry, in the tech industry, in the puppy boutique industry, in the French business magazine industry, in the widget industry, or in the heroin trafficking industry. I can take my pick in Houston.

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I don’t know about you, but I need to get out of town; I am getting so tired of photographing the same things over and over!

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