Five minutes into Bayou Billionaires,  I knew its back story.  It’s a very familiar TV premise, structured on the typical ‘fish out of water’ metaphor;  the kind that made us laugh at Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies.   It focuses on Gerald and Kitten Dowden and their family who live in Frierson, a tiny town in northern Louisiana which sits on top of the Haynesville Shale, which is something you  have to understand  to understand Bayou Billionaires.  

It’s essentially a rock formation that underlies large parts of southwestern Arkansas, Louisiana and East Texas.   It lies at various depths  from  10,500 to 13,000 feet below the land extends in an area of  9,000 square miles.   It contains vast quantities of  natural gas known as  “shale gas” produced from  mudstones that are also the source for the natural gas.  Geologists and energy type love shale gas because there’s so much of it and they can access all this gas due to improved technology such as horizontal directional drilling (drilling out, not down) and hydraulic fracturing which uses water, chemicals and extremely high pressure to ‘fracture’ through the ancient mud layers that comprise the shale. 

Gerald and Kitten know a lot about this process and the reward the landowners can reap from it.  They own or owned land on top of a good portion of the shale and from what  I can tell, sold their mineral rights (something I WOULD NEVER have done)  and that made them wealthy….each month, they receive ‘mailbox money” which is what they describe the day when their substantial six figure checks arrive in the mail each month.      After 43 years of marriage that included plenty of scrimping, saving and penny-pinching in a very blue collar world, they’re now wealthy,  as are many other residents in the area.  

All of their kids live on a compound,  of sorts.  (THINK:   The Kennedy’s, just without all that pesky clannish Catholicism)  It’s  nothing more than a few scattered  mobile homes and Jim Walter looking structures, with a small but new  in-ground pool on thee roperty.   One son married a woman who he wrestles with as their infant daughter looks on.   One daughter has that rode hard/hung up wet look.  She gave Kitten and Gerald other grandchildren.  She lives in a mobile home and speaks incessantly in double negatives.    Another daughter says little, but smiles incessantly, I guess that’s to show off “them brand new teeth”  Ma and Pa bought her.  Her burned-out, ex-biker looking boyfriend Albert, has few teeth and that which he still has, kind of  look like candy corn.    I know nothing about him, but he sure looks like he could have worn a baby aspirin orange jump suit and was known by a number at one time in his life.  He references prison from time to time, so one wonders.   He’s definitely rough around they edges, as they say, but he seems affable and in love with his girlfriend whom he  seemingly treats with love and respect.   Oh yeah–Albert  also goes by the names Carl and Jimmy.   Aliases?   Not sure, but he’s interesting.   I understand in one upcoming episodes, he asks Gerald for money to start a catfish business which consists of a jet ski pulling a net on the river…or the lake.  Hell, maybe it’s a bayou.  

There’s another son, but I didn’t watch long enough to see his ‘on screen’ character flaws.     

It’s interesting to watch the process of new-found wealth unfold around people who’ve never had it.   What they buy and where they spend their money is so telling.    Kitten wanted a car.   One would think, she’d buy a Jaguar,  a Mercedes-Benz at the very least.   Nope, she chose to buy a Chrysler Sebring convertible.   Nothing wrong with that, it’s just that one doesn’t associate that particular car with someone who just struck it rich.  Hardly the kind of car tht would reflect oppulance.  Then again, they might be very frugal people.   And in theory, they’d be wise to be careful.   The monthly installments for the sale of their Haynesville mineral rights will end someday.    Everything is finite.

♦

I was born and raised in Karnes County, located about 50 miles southeast of San Antonio.  It’s also where the Eagle Ford Shale was discovered in 2009.   Like the Haynesville Shale and the Barnett Shale almost more about  300 miles north, it produces natural gas and oil.   More oil than gas, actually, and this has made many families in the area, South Texas equivalents of the Dowden’s.    

One of the big investment firms was  summoned to the courthouse in Karnes City (the county seat) for wealth management classes.   After one seminar, a broker said he felt a meek tap on his shoulder.  When he turned around, he saw a shrivelled up little couple in their late 70′s.   The old man reached in his pocket and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper and handed it to the broker asking,”What do we do with this?”

It was a check for well over a million dollars.

Coming into money makes for a very interesting turn of events, especially for those who’ve never had it.    I understand those who covet it….and why.   People think money is the answer to everything.   It isn’t, but I believe there are times when it can offer hints to every question one might have.   

Years ago, I remember having a conversation with a woman who came from a wealthy oil and ranching family in Laredo, a city on the Texas/Mexico border.    Her mother had died years earlier and she and her brother stood to inherit all her father’s money.   She was a single school teacher who lived a fairly meager life.  Her brother and his wife were engineers with the city and at the time they had one young daughter.   We met for drinks one night and the subject of money and wealth came up.   She told me that she knew her life would someday change exponentially and there were times when that was a daunting reality.   It wasn’t like she had never known money–she was raised on a ten thousand acre ranch with a nanny and maids and cooks.  She was sent to an exclusive boarding school in San Antonio and spent her summers either abroad or at ritzy equestrian camps up in the northeast with other rich girls with old monied nicknames like Bitsy and Bunny.   

She came from money but her father wanted to instill in her,  independence.  After college she had to work to support herself.   Daddy only helped when she got in a jam, but only BIG jams.    When she could barely afford to pay rent AND a few credit card bills on her teacher’s salary, she’d plot and plan her wealthy future, but  would always allow  that dream to shatter when she’d realize that it would have to come at the death of her beloved father.   There is a cost, it seems, for everything.

Wealthy people,  especially those who’ve first hand experience what’s it like to  have–AND have not— possess a certain confidence about them.   My Laredo friend had that air about her, even though she couldn’t rub to nickels together.   There’s something about those who have it,  even those who’ve had it and lost it.   For those who have money (and by money I mean more than enough to breathe easy) , they know they can afford  ”it” and whatever  “it” is,  doesn’t matter.   They’re covered for life’s basic emergencies.   They can afford a new tire or two;  they can shell out whatever is needed for that new fuel pump….or pay outright for that foundation issue without contemplating the need to knock over a pawn shop to help cover the costs. 

I’ve known many wealthy people in my life and yes, I’ve envied them.   You know, that “grass is always greener…..” mindset.    I would watch them pass me by looking all well healed while well wheeled–perfectly dressed in their shiny new cars as I sputtered along in a car built during the Carter administration wearing clothes sewn during Nixon’s.  Yes, vintage clkothing, but not in that cool way.  These were just old, hand-me-downs.    Anyway,  I would just sigh and think how lovely it would be to pay off every bill. Or at the very least, be able to make monthly payments on every bill owed and ; these still have a little fiscal breathing room left over. I would envy them, thinking how much better being wealthy had to be, as if having six figures lying around in several different interest bearing accounts could automatically make people kinder and gentler;  could quell heartache or eradicate cancer.

It doesn’t.   Having money offers no protective shield.  It doesn’t make  you impervious to the random cruelties of life.

Does having it then offer a speedier recovery?  

I would imagine that with all its faults, money has  to at least give one options;  ways to make life’s complexities at least  somewhat easier.   It would mean you’d have the means to buy something to compensate your troubles or afford go somewhere to take your mind off things.   But eventually, new toys grow old and get-away vacations end and you have to come back home, right?  You face what you have to face with grit or with greenbacks…both if you’re lucky.   But the reality at its most basic premise is this:   having money really only completely solves one problem: it eliminates the previous need for it.  

So, those old clichés which are so hackneyed, are also correct:  money can’t buy happiness and it can’t rent it, either.  But I suppose Gerald and Kitten Dowden of Northern Louisiana could argue that point.   Having money allowed them to buy their adult daughter a smile with a mouth full of  brand new teeth. 

Sometimes, maybe that’s all it takes.

In 2008, federal health officials urged on by patients who insisted they itched and ached and emitted all kinds of colored fibers from their skin, shelled out 600 thousand dollars to study this freakish condition called Morgellons.  And lo these years later, the White Coats have decided it’s all what most us thought (even us lay people) that it’s a mental thing, with non infectious cause…and that comes from Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team.

Don’t believe me?   Read it for yourself.   The study appears in PLoS One, one of the Public Library of Science journals.

Sufferers of Morgellons (mor-GELL-uns) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sores, crawling sensations on their skin and — perhaps worst of all — mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. Some say they’ve suffered for decades, but the syndrome wasn’t named until 2002, when “Morgellons” was chosen from a 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms.

Afflicted patients have documented their suffering on forums and websites–websites that lacked an incredible amount of credibility.  Morgellons could be found next to  the latest Big Foot sightings and the latest on Bat Boy or the woman with the third breast that has a face.  She named it, “Skeeter”.    

Five years ago when I started this blog, I was more into satire.  I was also much more Conservative politically.  I still am, I’m just much less vocal about it. 

Anyway, I’d read about Morgellons on one of those Art Bell-ish type blogs.    Nestled among the stories about  FEMA work camps in Georgia, I found a Morgellons story and  while my heart goes out to anyone with a psychosis that manifests physically (by neurotically picking at the skin, etc.) I actually had to laugh at some of the people who were writing in to describe what they were feeling . 

I decided to satirize it by writing a blog about Morgellons.

It started out sounding serious.  I described symptoms;  even included a photo of a woman who firmly believed that her  were riddled with  dermatitis brought on by Morgellons.   I don’t remember the website, but it was one dedicated to Morgellon’s sufferers.

Then I went in-depth about the odd blue fibers that so many claim erupt from red, welts on their skin, oddly, strangely located ONLY on places on the body within reach.

Hhhhhhhmmmmmm…  

I also commented how awful it would be t0 feel the tingle of insects crawling all over me….bugs, critters, parasites under my skin.   The possibility would be terribly annoying, right?  

And then I wrote, “but nothing gets under my skin quite like Democrats!!!!”

GOOD LORD!!!!!

It was a joke.  Satire.

Didn’t hear word one from the Democrats, but the Morgellons mob???????   They had and I would guess, still have  an issue with anyone who dares to tell them that their eruptive sores are anything BUT physical.    And because of this, that post got  117 comments, but I chose to allow just 64 to remain for public consume.  Some of the comments came perilously close to threatening me.    And they still send me hate mail and frankly, it’s gotten very old and tiresome.   I would imagine they’re having a great deal of difficulty accepting the results of this definitive  study.

I was convinced then, as I am now that Morgellons is not only a true psychosis,  but a huge  ’fringe thing” and ‘fringe things” are required  illnesses among “fringe people”,  those who live in homes decorated with delusion.   They HAVE to believe  George Bush orchestrated 9/11 with 220 carefully placed bombs on each floor of both World Trade Center towers, that one of the dwarfs in the cast of the Munchkins fed up with this small stature killed himself on the set of “The Wizard of Oz”, right in the middle of filming.   That Clinton (either Hillary or Bill, take your pick)  had JFK Jr’s plane shot down due to political paranoia.    

Fringe people are needy types.    They simply cannot be satisfied with  simple, everyday answers to out-of-the ordinary events.    They need more.    For fringers with Morgellon’s, I equate this with a woman who has  Munchausen Syndrome.   They LIKE the attention a little known issue gives them.   From the letters and emails I’ve gotten, I dare say some enjoy their itchy sores.  They feel special…ordained…annointed by some big petri dish in the sky.  Morgellons makes them feel special;  they need to feel special.

For fringers who don’t go the route of needing to have Morgellons or odd metal tracking bar implanted in their groins after a late night visit by The  Reptilians”,  they simply require a little excitement in their ho-hum, hum-drum lives.   Their “itch” must be scratched with conspiracies.  Take  Princess Diana’s death.    There are many people who refuse to believe that something as mundane as the driver of a speeding car lost control in a tunnel and careened said car head-on into a concrete support pillar.    There are those that can’t handle that a sawed off runt with a Napoleonic complex named Lee Harvey Oswald quite possibly staged a one-man coup d’etat from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building 49-years ago.   

To think anything else troubles our safe, comfy sense that the world  is relatively stable, safe place . It’s in the process of searching for explanations that  some cast their polls of imagination out into the sea of unknown with the hopes of reeling in an explanation that matches the magnitude of whatever event or reality  with which they’re having issues .    For example: cold air colliding with warm, unstable air on a balmy spring day last year didn’t cause those killer tornadoes that decimated Joplin and Tuscaloosa. 

It was a weather machine. 

Silly?   Completely, but for some people who live on that cusp of created normalcy,  it becomes a most comforting  explanation;  nothing else could come close to comfortably justifying  how or why so many died.    

Now, I don’t doubt for one minute that Black Ops exist and covert shit is being done all the time and I don’t doubt the American government stirs a  large shit pot in shittiest of shit holes all over the world;for political gain…..

But…..I also understand fact vs. fiction.   I also understand plausibility–that  ten years ago, 19 “religious” fanatics fueled by skewed arrogance killed almost three thousand people in Manhattan, Washington and a rural field in Pennsylvania one morning vis-a-vie a plan that while horrific, was brilliant in its simplicity.      They used our own naiveté and arrogance as a weapon against us.    

In closing, take heart Morgellons patients:  I will give you what you need to hear: you DO  have something wrong with you–a 15 member panel of experts determined that you do, but it’s not physical.   Do you understand???  IT’S  NOT A PHYSICAL MALADY.    But please seek help. 

Seriously.

 That said, the next blue fibers you should seek out should be those found in the weave of a psychiatrist’s couch.