The Phalanx of Houston

This ain't Dickens. But maybe you will like it. In this dark confessional comedy/light blowhard drama (though probably more sad than anything), our main guy and struggling lunatic Bjorn - American drifter with his G. E. D., sometimes bartender, recreational poet, terrible Buddhist - tells his short-sweet story from a quiet Colorado mountain town. Looking back to a few shit days the summer before, Bjorn unearths how his good friend, a professional soccer player who sat on the bench with glory and a crap haircut, has died. A story of why, during these few shit days, this weekend plus overtime, Bjorn, as he spouts it, had to return to his home city of Houston, Texas: to reconnect, to see if his memories match up - with his alcoholic father and everything else. Bjorn's return to associated bizarro hellishness is not Dante's Inferno, but this is Houston after all: the country's fourth-largest city that, in recent memory, has been designated the nation's most obese, most polluted, and with the worst traffic - a convoluted mess of a sometimes nightmarish concrete and sinstrewn sprawl, denigrated by the constant wet hot humid piss of a Texas beast . . . loooooong ways from perfection . . . yet, Bjorn, in his Return to Houston, has to reconcile this confusion. He has to forgive his return. Along the way he learns some things. And along the way he chooses to let it go. Breathe it out. You can go home again, and it fucking blows . . . mostly . . . but, as he comes to realize, beatitude and mercy are in the blow.