I used to really hate Texas. Despite having family there, and even, on some level, owing my very existence to the state, I had my reasons. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Texas drivers suck hard.

• Texas is full of stupid racist redneck assholes.

• The Texas mythos around ‘bigness’ and independence is fucking stupid.

• Tex-Mex is dog shit.

• The Texas state government is a trash fire.

• King of the Hill.

• Ted Cruz. (Truth be told, I had mostly stopped hating Texas by the time this anthropomorphic wet fart hit the political scene.)

• Unless you have a kid on a high school football team, it’s pretty creepy for you to care so much about high school football.

• For every real cowboy in Texas there are about a hundred bullshit posers.

• Matt from El Paso. He knows why.

Even while I made a sport of hating Texas, I had to concede that there were some really good things about it: Texas longhorn cattle are very cool; I don’t have seasonal allergies in Texas; I’ve always though A&M had a good thing going on; Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is undeniably excellent, and a few other Texas movies I highly recommend include True Stories, Happy, Texas, and Lone Star State of Mind.

I’ve also had mostly good times in Texas every time I’ve gone, and I’ve met some really great people there — maybe more than any other state, in fact, and I’ve been to all of them.

I’ve written about this before, but for the sake of redundancy I’ll repeat myself for the sake of redundancy. After my trip to Panama at the start of the pandemic, I arrived in Houston, where I was acutely aware that I had another day of travel ahead of me before I’d be home. What’s more, I was lucky to have returned when I did, because if my trip had concluded a few weeks later I would have been denied re-entry into Canada, where my flight originated, and where my car was parked…

Relishing the idea of getting to Central America in a few hours instead spending two days in transit, I began to research living in central Texas, and I came up with a long list of pros, including the proximity to multiple, major airports, proximity to Mexico, and access to goods and services that are a bit harder to come by where I live now. The biggest con, besides the ones I listed above, is the entire third of the year when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees.

Or perhaps I should say the heat was the biggest con, that has since been replaced with a new one: that millions of people apparently have had the same idea I did, or have opted to move to Texas for their own reasons. Real estate prices have reached California levels. Affordable farms and ranches are all but gone from the marketplace, thanks to dipshits with too much money driving the prices up.

When poor people spend money, they stimulate the economy and create jobs. When rich people spend money they drive up prices, placing goods, services, and property ever farther out of the reach of those with fewer resources. Like me.

Texas is just the latest place where this has happened, but it has happened to such a degree that I doubt I’ll be able to move there, barring a market crash that manages not to touch my finances. I’ve all but given up on the dream of direct flights to Latin America, or affordable ranchland close to a major city, or warm weather with adequate water for crops and animals.

Arizona and New Mexico still tempt me, though the risk of my dogs contracting Valley Fever worries me. The cheap farms in the Midwest and Northeast have their allure as well, but the cold, and the deer ticks and biting flies, less so.

I’d go directly to Mexico if I could get financing with terms comparable to what I can get in the US. Say what you will about the failed American Dream, predatory lending, and so forth, but there is probably not a nation on earth where it is easier to buy a home. Except in Texas.

It’s looking increasingly likely that my only way forward will be to start a business and generate enough value to borrow against that I can get where I want to go. In the meantime I’m buying a little crypto and the occasional lottery ticket. You can’t win if you don’t play.

Tell me I’m wrong about Texas. Tell me there’s a hundred-acre ranch somewhere between Austin and San Antonio, that I can afford, and that I can get financed, and that’s not in Bastrop, where it appears that for some reason one in every eighty residents is a registered sex offender. Seriously, what the hell is going on there?