For those of you you who don’t know Texas or have never visited or traveled in Texas, my latest story is up at Texas Monthly Online. It's a reworking of a post here at The Agonist from last week. Some parts have been added and other parts removed. Hopefully for the better.

I hope, in the coming months, to spend some more time visiting portions of the state I have not seen in recent years, notably Big Bend, the more isolated parts of the Hill Country, the North Texas Plains and Canyon Lands and so much more.

Texas is a curious place. Some of it isn't very pretty, as I was reminded on my recent trip south to the Coastal Plains. Parts of the state have been devastated by drought, or even worse, the modern plague of locusts known as Wal-Mart. Even in some of the most remote portions of the state, industrial blight remains in the form of oil derricks, some of them seventy, eighty years old languishing in the fields, surrounded by grasses and stickers and thistles. All empty. Smote down by an inexorable economic god.

To say I have a complicated relationship with home is an understatement. The people, the sounds, the smells and the memories. All of it.

And yet, there is a bond, one that will never disappear no matter if I make my home in Istanbul or Iowa.