i grew up in dallas.

i see myself going back one day, maybe soon, and when i say soon, i mean in a matter of years, not imminently, but that's neither here nor there, at least not right this second it's not. i've noticed that i keep up with local happenings there a way more closely than i do out here in long beach, sometimes i wonder if that's any indication of a slack commitment to my citizenship out here as a californian or whatever, or maybe if it's representative of some sort of a deep and real desire to be there. i dunno because i think it took me at least a couple years before i really took ownership of being in the chicago area, at least to the point where i followed local events with the same vigilance as i did ones in dallas.

so the big deal, what's dominating local dialogue, at least from my detached and limited perspective, is the proposal put forward to move the cowboys back inside the city limits. they left, went to irving, around three decades ago, and kept the name "dallas" cowboys, this despite not having really been in dallas in all that time. their departure was actually a pretty prescient move on their part, the area of town their stadium was in, was seeing some early indicators of a decline that's turned out to be pretty precipitous and nearly total. so, like i said, they high-tailed it to irving, where they had a stadium waiting for them, a stadium which, for its day, was state of the art. in fact, it's the only thing irving is known for, other than the stadium is the fact that you pretty much have to drive through it to get to the airport, if it wasn't for those two things, i'd be pretty sure that it's existence was mere rumor.

but now, texas stadium, state of the art thirty years ago, is antiquated and in disrepair, at least that's the party line from the team, which basically means that instead of making totally obscene amounts of money, they're only making ridiculously obscene amounts of money. that being the case, they're scouting locations for a brand new stadium that could net them the aforementioned totally obscene amounts of money, with the focus being on fair park, the very same area they left back in the seventies, in particular. right now, the big point of contention, like it always is whenever a sports franchise wants a stadium, is how much they want to be subsidized by local governments. at this point, the cowboys want $425 million of a $650 million tab from dallas county taxpayers.

this is the part where i tell you that according to forbes magazine, the cowboys made a profit of nearly sixty million dollars just last year and that their owner jerry jones' net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and let you draw your own conclusions.

if that wasn't enough this is where i tell you that they want all that money and all the subsidiary rights to any and all intellectual property, marketing and economic benefits from all the revenue streams.

the ones generated by the taxpayers' $425 million.

feeling: apathetic
thinking of: all the drives back and forth on airport freeway
music: "i wanna race bigfoot trucks" mojo nixon