The worst place in the world is Houston Hell-fer-Sartain Texas, where I had the displeasure of spending a miserable year in 1984-85. If you count trips out of the state at Christmas and spring break, it's actually only seven and a half months, or 210 days.
That's 5040 hours, or 302,400 minutes, or 18,144,000 seconds.
I didn't actually live in Houston. I lived in someplace even worse: Aldine, a far northern suburb 20 miles from Houston's gay neighborhood, which means an hour's drive on the sweltering, pothole-ridden parking lot they call Interstate 45.
I don't remember my street address: it was a horrible apartment on a narrow road with no sidewalks surrounded by mud and trees, with construction sites on both ends, so you were constantly getting flat tires from running over nails.
Today about 16,000 people are unlucky enough to live in the Worst Place in the Worst Place in the world. Median household income $32,000. 43% of the population below the poverty level. Yikes!
I was at my first full-time job, teaching bonehead English at Bonehead University (now Lone Star College ---North Harris Coutny), 10 miles north of my horrible apartment, so about 45 minutes down a horrible country road through scrub grass, past nothing but auto repair places and construction sites. I didn't realize at the time that it was right next to the Houston Airport. It was very hot, treeless, with Brutopian concrete buildings.
I see they added a tree.
During the winter, the coldest in in Houston history, I spent a lot of my spare time at the Greenspoint Mall, the only place in town that was heated (my apartment wasn't -- who installs a heater in the Deep South?) It was rundown and gross, but there was a theater where I could escape to the light comedies (from my point of view) of
The Terminator, Nightmare on Elm Street, Silent Night Deadly Night, Ghoulies, and Rambo. There was also a horrible bookstore (Waldenbooks, mundane general interest).
Today the mall is in the news as "a dead mall" and as one of top 5 malls in with the most crime reports.
Double yikes.
I didn't go to church during my horrible year in Hell-fer-Sartain: you don't really need religion when you are in hell. But current residents have the choice of Grace Restoration, Assembly Pentecostal Bethel, The Vine Apostolic, Lifestream, In His Image Covenant, Ebenezer Bretheren.
Triple yikes! Haven't you people ever heard of the Baptists? And what's with the Brutopian architecture?
For food, I depended on the Chinese Wok, a hole-in-the wall in a horrible Brutopian galleria next to a nail place. Tasteless over-fried goop, but the only Chinese restaurant in town. It's still there, or you can go to Burger King, Papa John's, Jack in the Box, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or the Brisket Joint. Quadrupule yikes!
Gay Anything: Nope. I wasn't out to anybody, ever. Someone did write an antigay slur on the chalkboard in my classroom, and one of my students wrote his "classification" assignment on types of bars: sports bars, dive bars, fag bars. and so on.
Gay Anything today: Some news articles: Former football star and high school Mr. Aldine set to die for the murder of a gay man in Houston.
University of Houston student found dead in Aldine a year after being reported missing; killers were targeting gay or Asian men (someone else).
Aldine High School agrees to unblock the LGBT filters on school computers, so students can look up information on gay topics.
Yikes again (I've lost count)
Beefcake: I checked Lone Star and Aldine High School, and then just Aldine, and came up with only women and little kids, Plus stories about an Aldine high school boy killed by a machete, and a teacher accused of giving a middle-school boy a "lap dance."
Infinite yikes.
And the top photo. But I think he's someone with the last name "Aldine."
What do you expect in the Worst Place in the Worst Place in the World?
