Inside the Rail Texas

Time to stop blogging about blogging

Time to stop blogging about blogging and start blogging about stuff.  I’ll start talking policy soon but today I wanted to share a story I told a small group recently at a dinner celebrating the impending wedding of my good friend Patrick Rose.  

When I first ran for the Legislature, and for the next 6 years, people I didn’t know would often start conversations with me as if they knew me.  Sometimes it took more than 20 minutes of me faking as is if I knew what they were talking about before I figured out that they thought I was Patrick.  At some point in the conversation they would finally mention Dripping Springs, or some bill he was carrying, and I would finally realize that it wasn’t a failure of my memory, I genuinely didn’t know this person.

I proudly admit there is a strong resemblance between us.  I proudly admit it because he’s 11 years younger and a lot better looking than me, so every time people confused me for him I took it as a great compliment.  (For the same reason, I’m pretty sure Patrick found it annoying every time someone confused him for me - though he was always a good sport about it.)

Shortly after I was first elected, a woman introduced herself to me at a reception and told me “All my friends have told me I need to meet you, that you’re the smartest member of the Texas Legislature.”

Easy for me to accept that statement at face value, so, I greedily asked to know who these admirers of mine were.  She threw out some names I’d never heard before.  Then she mentioned someone who really surprised me, because I’d known him for years and we had never liked each other.  At all.  

So I said, “Really?  He said something nice about me?”

And she said, “Oh, yeah, his exact words were:  Patrick Rose is the smartest member of the Texas Legislature.”

So I said, “Well you tell him, from me, Patrick Rose, I said he’s a no-good-S.O.B.”

Profoundly satisfying experience.