Sometime in the near future I will be making a move. We have a home in the Salt Lake Area with a studio and office that will just about replace what we lost in Berry Creek. Beautiful views of the mountains, within reach of Vegas and LA, and not so blasted hot! Of course, we will maintain a place here in Texas. I am NOT deserting the Texas movement and will commute to Austin when necessary to rile up the natives.
In Berry Creek we had three very large homes on the same street, the main one built in the style of Graceland. One of the living areas was a sound stage where we filmed videos. Then, there was a studio upstairs in the media room, where we recorded several albums and even audio books. We remixed all this mess in a large office on the first floor, and reviewed the rushes on a deck overlooking the tenth green of an Arnold Palmer golf course. The other two homes on the same street were filled with guests and artists who came by to work with us. Frankly, it took all this to create the web presence needed to generate income. We also sold Real Estate from there. Well, as my close friends all know this environment was not conducive to raising children so the CPS came along and fixed all that and before it was all over I was publishing out of the "Hotel Cartel" in beautiful downtown Killeen, Texas!
But, you know what? When you have put together something like that you tend to be able to do it again. In fact it's a little like having a garage that you always meant to clean up, and never found the time, and then one day the house burns down. There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind who come home to see the firemen, find a shopping cart and hit the streets, and then there are people like me who say, "That'll work! Let's build it bigger and better." It's what's within YOU that makes it, not circumstances, and this ain't no self help crap, this is the TRUTH!
Fact is I had a hard time seeing the forest for the trees from the Berry Creek Country Club, but sitting in the patio of a crack hotel in Killeen, listening to Bob Dylan gave me a vision. I'd sit there with a bottle of Jim Beam and contemplate. I really couldn't write much because every time I'd go to sleep the crack heads would steal my computer and sell it for a rock. I bought a gun to shoot 'em, and they stole that TOO! So, I saw very clearly I had two choices. Get on crack, or figure this out. Now, I'm not saying I can put away a lot of Jim Beam, but the month after I switched to beer Jim Beam sold out to the Japanese. And I'd love to tell you I cleaned up, saw the light, and became an inspiration to girl scouts everywhere but that just didn't happen. I've been in music production at the publishing level from Austin to Nashville for over forty years and I threw those rose colored glasses in the trash can years ago!
With the help of folks like Doc Greene, and Tom Hagen I moved into political writing. I didn't know it, but over the years I'd developed a fairly profound political stance and I was LITERATE, and god knows where THAT came from. My attitude was all the little girly-men running around with their half baked ideas on society were all very fine, but I LIKE a steak and egg breakfast at a country club and i know that those ideas won't buy it! So, I began to boil complex social issues down to basic components. I became "A Simple Ol' Boy From Austin!" My brother gave me a lecture a year ago about my having never LIVED in Austin, but I've stayed in hotels there so the name stays. I also realized my mother obviously picked up the wrong baby at the hospital so I haven't spoke to him since. Haven't spoke to my sister either 'cause she sided with him!
My good buddy, Ted Clevenger, who is a psychologist, worked with me for a couple of years because after all the nonsense I'd been through I was fairly crazy, and after he cured all my homicidal leanings a style began to emerge. When we had to spirit the kids out of Texas because the CPS didn't like their haircuts we ended up with a very large place up in Utah. Big office, view of the mountains, studio, calm people all around, it was great. I resisted going there because I WAS from the Austin area and I was very enthralled with the Texas Nationalist Movement. Well, frankly folks, sitting on a ten by ten porch with an iPad ain't gonna make it. In order to generate the volume of material needed to make the Republic of Texas happen one has to write, and one has to write LOTS! You have to generate something great every day with the full knowledge that tomorrow what you wrote today will be fish paper, so you have to do better. If you can't do that then you're just a talking dog, do NOT quit your day job!
And, in the long run I'm not really leaving Texas. When we win the Republic of Texas will include what is now Utah AND California. (How's THAT for ego?) I'm gathering friends and associates from all over Texas and California, not to mention Utah, and I'm going to form a publishing company that I'll call the "Butcher Shop" in line with my nick name, "Bill the Butcher" which the Texas CPS has so lovingly bestowed upon me, and in the words that I listened to at the Hotel Cartel years ago, "We'll soon shake your windows, and rattle your walls because times they are a changing!"
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