Oh, man, this is funny.

My wife and I often talk about the fact that I grew up in Texarkana, a town much smaller than San Antonio. She has told me a few times that there was no way she could live in a small town after growing up here. I told her that living in smaller towns never was either good or bad for me, it was just something that well, WAS -- though I will readily admit I love San Antonio. What bugged me about the town I grew up in was that it was not only not that big, but it was so damn far from, well, ANYWHERE. Three hours from Dallas, a good 5 1/2 hours from Houston and about 7 hours from San Antonio. Sure, there were Little Rock (two hours) and Shreveport (1 hour), but there's only so much to do in either of those locales. But I got a huge kick out of this:

Maybe the best apocalyptic novel I can think of is "A Canticle for Leibowitz", by Walter Miller. It is a post-nuclear holocaust novel, where the world slowly slowly recovers, over the centuries, to the point that the realization dawns on the reader that they are going to do it all over again.

And sure enough, they do it again, but apparently for keeps the second time, though it appears a few may escape into space. An amusing side light is that much of the action occurs in a future Texas, where one of the new empires that leads to the second nuclear holocaust is the Texarkanan Empire, with capital city of Texarkana, which apparently escaped the first holocaust due to its obscurity.

Not that I hated living in Texarkana, but this was just too funny. It struck me that in the other Texas metro areas I've lived in (Bryan-College Station and Beaumont-Port Arthur), I'd tell people where I was from and a lot (if not most) of them had no idea where it was. It was...obscure to them. ;-)