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Took off towards Aledo, Texas, a little 'burb directly west of Fort Worth on Interstate 20, after work and hit the Hardcore Texas Ranch House dirt drive and stopped to open the gate. Once inside the gate I stopped again and closed it. Used to be in Texas you'd keep your shit open. Not anymore. Not for a long time.
Anyway, I stopped in to see Hippy Steve and his better half, Beth. We sat outside on the second porch and me and Beth drank her homemade iced tea and Hip poured down Keystone Light's one after the other. I noticed the coozie he had his cold beers wrapped in.
"Cool," I said, looking at it.
So, of course, I pulled out my Nikon D700 and, with the Nikkor AF 50mm f1.8D fixed length lens attached, took a photograph of it.
Well, here it is.
Click on the photo if you want to see it bigger.
We talked about shit for a bit, drinking our drinks and smoking cigarettes and messing a little bit with Beth's cat, Shaboo, before I decided to hit the road back to Fort Worth, back to the hustle and bustle of a city, leaving the nice, quiet country atmosphere I'd rather be.
Here's a photo of Beth holding her cat, Shaboo, on her shoulder:
This classic beer joint, unfortunately long gone with the revamping of West 7th Street into Dallas West, was located a few blocks west of Montgomery Plaza.
Me and my good buddy, William Bryan Massey III, head cook at Fred's Texas Cafe, used to go to it regularly in the late '90s to drink beer and play darts.
The place had six dart boards and people would be playing at 2-3 of them most of the time we were there. It was simply a good time place. The crowd was older folks who enjoyed each other's company and their drinks and the dart games.
I used a Sony Mavica FD-91 1-megapixel camera that stored images on a floppy disk, and a top notch model in its day (the late '90s), to take this photo and because the photo was so shitty upon looking at it again while going through really old photos from days long past I worked my ass off in enlarging and improving its look by using two image editors, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Capture NX.
Went over to Fred's Texas Cafe, for a Fred Burger w/cheese and drank down a 16 .oz "cold ass" schooner of Miller High Life.
Yummy.
Of course, took this shot of what I was about to consume beforehand.
This is Fred Texas Cafe's neon sign. It's located above the bar and visible as soon as you enter the best burger/ice cold beer dive in the city of Fort Worth.
It's Fred Burger w/cheese was voted tops by readers of Cowtown's only independent weekly rag, the FW WEEKLY, in its 2007 Best Of Awards.
It's atmosphere is unique, as you go inside to find yourself walking back into a simpler time, an almost diner-like feel, with booths and stools at the bar.
The high class go there to feel like low class and the low class go there to feel right at home. The mixture of the customers can't be found anywhere else. The wait staff is always hustling and you can actually see the cooks fixing your food. It's an active place, people munching down on their juicy homecooked meals, people laughing, having a good time, drinking beer from huge schooners that are ice cold.
Just a fun place to be.
As I drove up and down East Belknap one morning looking for cool photos with my buddy, Motel Todd, I stopped at Jack Starr Liquors in order to capture this georgeous neon sign.
It just don't get no better than this, pardner.
This IS art, period.
Hell, yeah.
Before there was a Hooters there was The Smoke Pit with it's bikini-topped waitresses taking your orders as you sitting there not being able to help but eye their lovely features --- bulging cleavage and tight behinds --- as you ask for a chopped bbq sandwich and an ice cold beer.
And because the bar-be-que was as good as the waitresses looked you fully enjoyed your meal at this famous Fort Worth landmark, which has been in the same location since 1953.
At lunch time you see so many pickups in the parking lot and along the streets around The Smoke Pit you'd think it was a car lot too.
Inside it's like being at home, everyone's friendly, everyone's talking. A long bar runs along the place's east side so you can come in and drink beer if that's all you intend on doing. This fantastic, beat up old joint is simply a great place to have some good redneck food and look at beautiful women work their butts off.
So, please, go to The Smoke Pit and pass on the blah, blah, blah mainstream corporate franchise nonsense known as Hooters.
(Please click on the photo so you can see all the writing on the front of the building.)
This classic dive bar has been on Bluebonnet Circle in the Texas Christian University area of Fort Worth for almost forever. It's a beer joint straight out of Charles Bukowski's BARFLY movie.
Coincidentally enough, me and my dad, who had his own 2-man carpet installing business (think Sanford & Son) back in the mid-'80s, put in new carpeting there once because my dad was a friend of the owner of the place. In fact, we installed carpet at all of this guy's bars around town.
Let me tell you what, ladies and bastards, that was maybe the nastiest job we ever had and we had some doozies over the years, like the time we installed carpet in a living room in a house in the Como area and when we went to pull up the old shit there wasn't just one layer of carpeting on the floor there were three, one on top of the other.
By God, and I know this since I'd seen it myself, people are fucking crazy, man.
The bar itself @ the Oui Lounge was carpeted on the lower half down of the bar itself down to the floor. I had the job of pulling up said carpet. I soon enough found out that it was soaked, and I mean a gusher from Yellowstone Park soaked, with piss and beer and more piss and whiskey and scotch and more piss and gin and tequila and vodka and more piss. Meaning, the drunk ass loser motherfuckers who got inebriated way beyond any reason whatsoever sat there at bar and pissed their damn pants like they were imitating Niagara Falls, fer chrissakes.
And there I am pulling up all that human scumbag soaked carpet. Yes, I donned gloves. I ain't a genius but I ain't stupid either. Talk about some nasty ass shit. Human beings are decadent, ignorant, slow-witted and downright FUCKED UP if they can't make their way to the bathroom in that place to empty their bladders instead of sitting on a bar stool and peeing their britches like they were six-year-olds swimming in a YMCA pool.
Afterwards, once I had all the nasty shit ripped up and thrown into the Dumpster out back of the place, I also threw those gloves away too knowing they were permanently toxic and hazard to my health.
Fucking hell, man, and I'm not kidding you. Once I got home after that filthy job I had to take one of those nuclear reactor-like sponge bath disinfectant scrub down showers, motherfucker.
Like Bukowski wrote, "Humanity. You never had it from the beginning."
Me and my buddy, Motel Todd, get together on Friday evenings and drink beer and watch movies and political shows and talk and order pizza. For the past couple of months we've been ordering from Dominos. We were doing this because Papa John's stopped delivering to the area of town I live in. Then the Dominos pizza scandal exploded on the Internet Tubes and so I said to myself, and later to Todd, "Screw Dominos! I ain't ordering from Dominos EVER again! I watched a news station report posted on YouTube of those two employees (with the female employee being a registered sex offender on top of it!) farting and boogering up those pizzas. So forget it, man! Never again!"
Todd suggested we get some pizza from Perrotti's Pizza, a long time Fort Worth institution.
I said, "Anything but Dominos, bro."
So we ordered from there and the pizzas were great. Todd, who has diabetes and is adamant about taking care of himself, got a six-item 14-inch veggie pizza and me, who has weighed 230 for the past 5 years at least no matter what I eat, got a six-item 19-inch all meat pizza.
Boy, what can I say. Todd says his was delicious and so was mine.
Now, I'm not a total freakin' pig --- just an average one. So I ate half of my enormous pizza Friday night and ate the rest of it on Saturday 'cause there's nothing better than leftover pizza.
This macro/micro shot, using Nikon's Nikkor AF-S Micro 105mm f2.8G ED VR lens (which I've finally started using after purchasing it two months ago --- it is SUPER good), is of Todd's all veggie pizza, the exact middle of it. Looks good, eh? And, best of all, you can see that there's no snot or butt boogers on it.
Here's a pic of a friend's mom I took back in the mid-'90s during a classic back yard white trash redneck BBQ cookout party at his place.
Yes, she's drinking a 40 of Colt 45. Pat is still kickin' too and, as always, is busily drinking beer and smoking cigs.
The photo was picked up by the website Sorry I Missed Your Party. Click the link and then scroll down to read the hilarious comments.
I took this photo of her using a cheap ass auto focus 35mm camera and, at some point, scanned the print. I was spending a bit of time going back over old, old photos and decided to look them over for ones I could restore to my satisfaction using today's amazing digital darkroom image editors.
I enlarged and improved this one's look by using two photo editors, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Capture NX.
In Photoshop I finished it off by applying the 'poster edges' filter then manipulating it to where it looked good to my eye.
Took off towards Aledo, Texas, a little 'burb directly west of Fort Worth on Interstate 20, after work and hit the Hardcore Texas Ranch House dirt drive and stopped to open the gate. Once inside the gate I stopped again and closed it. Used to be in Texas you'd keep your shit open. Not anymore. Not for a long time.
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