big d

Texans have opinions about their cities. I favor living in Austin. San Antonio has its own uniqueness. I cannot deny the cultural pleasures found inside the loop Houston or in Fort Worth.

Dallas is itself easy to poke fun at, so proud and anxious at the same time. I always find myself amazed at its shopping culture, its vast displays of stuff that one can buy, a mercantile capital where some have enough imagination to offer all this stuff, and and so many others have the money to buy it.

This is a place where people don't buy old houses but thirst for the new. It has been, for some time, a place of asymmetrical hip roofs that swallow the brick houses upon which they sit, thousands of them, multiplying each day, spreading out across the prairie, each varied only slightly, but presented as the latest and best version of how one should live.

This Dallas is creeping closer to Oklahoma, and I wonder if all the effort and motion that it takes to create this more than a city but much less than city is now so ingrained, that people just do it (build the houses, market them, buy them, move up quickly to better ones) much the way worker ants create intricate, interconnected work, without question.

But driving along some of its freeways, past the outlets and chain stores, I get a little dizzy and have to remind myself that I am there, not any other American city that exactly replicates these stores along similar roads.