The Houston sun was high and hot. The air was thick and humid. With no electricity to power the air-conditioning it was hard to breathe, let alone move. Having exhausted our back-catalogue of card games and tricks, and with only 4 strings left on the only acoustic guitar available to us, there was now very little to do to pass the time other than to sit on the back porch, sipping warm, unrefrigerated beer and listen to whatever station the battery-powered radio was capable of picking up.
We found the news and the message was the same and repeated frequently. "There is no looting in Texas". As the hours wore by, I could feel the sweat form beneath my hair and my bladder grow large and hard; I faded in and out of sleep as my ears grew numb to the message. "Stores are robbed every day, sometimes at gunpoint. These are called robberies. If it happens after a hurricane, during a city-wide power cut, it is still a robbery and not looting". They stressed, "There is no looting in Texas!"
I'm still not sure how well the message sank in, or if everybody believed it. On the other side of the road, in four-foot tall letters, spray painted on the shutters of the, temporarily closed, tattoo parlour were the words: "YOU LOOT, WE SHOOT!". I guess that's why nobody went looting in Texas.
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