The slideshow featured in this entry consists of photos snapped before and during the 2023 Art Car Parade. It is presented without descriptions, captions, or tedious explanations. Just enjoy what some incredibly creative people and groups can do with vehicles.
Orange Show Art Car Week is a celebration somewhat like Mardi Gras in New Orleans and elsewhere—except that almost everyone knows what Mardi Gras is, and far fewer people know what Art Cars are all about. The culmination of the Art Car celebration is the Parade, which for most of its history has run on Allen Parkway into Downtown and back out. Thanks partly to COVID-19, and partly to the State of Texas scheduling political party conventions on the same weekend as the Parade, until last weekend I had not attended an Art Car Parade since 2019. I didn't realize just how much I'd missed it until I spent Saturday afternoon sweltering in the fickle shade of a sycamore on the median of the Parkway, watching this most H-Town event of all. I loved the entries from school groups (there were about 20 this year), the SLAB cars, the low riders, the non-motorized entries, the trailers with bands playing on them, the Mutant Vehicles...every bit of it. What I loved most was watching it with a friend from the Burner scene, her daughter who's about my son's age, and her five-year-old grandson. The grandson and several preschoolers near us were seeing the Parade for the first time—or perhaps for the first time they might actually be able to make sense of what they were seeing. My friend Angie educated her grandson on the distinction between an Art Car and a Mutant Vehicle: the latter typically has a body that does not resemble that of a standard motor vehicle, like the banana and the Aladdin slipper included in the slideshow. Quite a few of my Burner and Burner-adjacent friends were in the Parade, most of them participating with the Zebra Crew. There are some non-Burner friends and acquaintances as well, such as once-upon-a-time Green Party activist Bev Peters with her car Shep the German Shepherd Rescue Car (a VW Beetle). Bev and Shep have appeared in at least 20 Art Car Parades. Yeah, it's time for another "I sincerely want to start blogging regularly again, because I have a lot to say, but I'll probably end up posting this and then letting the blog go fallow for another few months" post.
I tried posting this or something like it last week, but Weebly crashed on me three times before I just gave up. That was in Safari; I'm trying Chrome now, hoping that it's more stable. Post-Bootcamp Blues Just to catch readers up as briefly as possible: After my six-month web development bootcamp through Codeup, I'm still not hired. Also, I didn't fulfill the necessary requirements to be entitled to the tuition refund during the six-month period, so at age 60 I'm on the hook for a hefty student loan. I'm worse off than when I started. My credit score has tanked due to the additional balance. I'm still Ubering to survive; at least that income combined with my wife's modest salary keeps us (mostly) afloat. My parents are helping make up the difference. The only "consolation" regarding my lack of success in landing a job is that others in my cohort, including a couple of very talented coders, are in the same boat. Since October, there have been no reports of anyone in our cohort being hired. Most of us who didn't get jobs have given up. In my case, it's not that I've entirely given up; it's that in January I had a mental health crisis that has left me afraid even to open the laptop on which I have written and committed a lot of code and on which I would apply for jobs. I don't even look at LinkedIn or Glassdoor any more. It's not worth the risk of being reduced to a curled-up, screaming, howling wreck who can't hold a knife steady long enough to end it all. Yes, the pressure of the pursuit of stable employment has left me unstable. At least since that day, having decided to take time away from the pursuit, I've had no similar episodes. Reviving HCGP So even though I'm in no position to do so, with limited time and resources and dodgy organizational skills, I'm trying to revive the Harris County Green Party, with a little help from some longtime Party stalwarts and some fresh blood. On the plus side, I've long believed that mental illness is an important ingredient in political activism, especially on the left. This mental illness results mostly from the cognitive dissonance of seeing people in power who know various ways in which the world is fucked up, and who know solutions to that fucked-upness, but who are unable or unwilling to implement those solutions. To paraphrase Jidda Krishnamurthi, we live in a profoundly sick society, and we are either unable or unwilling to adapt our values to that society's expectations. Our media-industrial complex constantly reinforces the narrative that the sensible, responsible position to support one of the corporate parties, shut up about war and injustice and the horrors of capitalism, and keep on shopping. The one who dies with the most and coolest shit scored from Amazon wins. Thus ends the rant. We're having a reorganizational meetup this Sunday the 23rd at Midtown Bar & Grill, starting at 6:30 pm. Bring your ideas and your appetite. Hell, bring your mental illness too. Well, shit. Weebly hasn't crashed in Chrome, but Chrome didn't allow me to attach a link to a block of selected text, so voila, the whole paragraph is a link. This is how I feel after learning all that web development stuff: I fucking hate the Internet. |
Blogging Sporadically since 2014Here you will find political campaign-related entries, as well as some about my literature, Houston underground arts, peace & justice, urban cycling, soccer, alt-religion, and other topics. Categories
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