The Pile Was Always There. Somebody Finally Counted It.

The smell outside was like something that's been decided but not yet done, which doesn't make sense, but that's what it smelled like. The air sat on you like a damp fog, but without the cave, just the feeling of dampness and secrecy that clings to your skin.

I don't do Texas; I do Detroit. But this story walked far enough under my bridge that I couldn't ignore it.

There's this human, James Talarico, running for a seat in the Texas Senate. He made an ad about his opponent, Ken Paxton, who's been in power for a while and has, by the count of people who count these things, accumulated a whole bunch of scandals - so many that a goblin would say, "that's a lot of rust on one pipe."

The ad lists them all. Or enough of them. At first, I thought it was a menu, but it's more like those warning signs goblins carve about the bad mushrooms - the ones that make you fall through a hole in the world. Not a menu. A label. A "do not eat this" label, except the thing you're not eating is a person who makes laws.

Here's what I know about piles: each scandal is a nail, a bottle cap, a sock. Small enough to wave away. The people around Paxton kept saying, "well, that's just one thing," and then "well, that's just one more thing," and the pile grew and grew, until the pile became the person.

Talarico's ad does the thing that nobody had done yet - it dumps the pile out on the table and says, "look at the size of it." It's someone backing away from the bad mushroom patch and pointing.

What I keep turning over in my green hands is the part where it's funny. The source says the ad is hilarious. Talarico has a sense of humor about it. And I think I understand why - sometimes what comes out instead of a scream is a laugh. The laugh is because the alternative is to lie down and not get up.

So you laugh at the pile. You make the pile into a joke because the pile was already a joke - just not the kind anyone was enjoying.

The Republicans trying to keep Paxton's seat are doing something I recognize - they're trying to keep people from looking at the pile. They don't defend the pile; they just say, "look at anything except the pile." In goblin terms, this is called "throwing a rock in the other direction so the thing eating your food stays hidden." It works more often than it should.

Detroit is a long way from Texas, but the thing underneath - the pile - grows the same way under every bridge I've slept under - one nail at a time, until the nails are the structure.

Tinny looked at me while I was reading this - she had that look she gets when she knows I'm thinking too hard about something that isn't dinner. She's right, but dinner will keep. The pile won't stop growing just because I stop looking at it.

I checked my compass - it didn't do much, but it was warm, which is its way of saying you're still pointed somewhere, even if the somewhere is just forward.

When someone in power has done enough wrong, the wrongs become a wall. The wall protects them. The only way through is to show people the wall and trust that seeing it all at once is different from seeing it one brick at a time.

Talarico showed the wall. Whether Texas looks at the wall or looks away is not something a goblin in Detroit can control. But I know what walls cost. And I know that the only thing that ever made a wall smaller was someone willing to count it out loud.

Copyright (c) 2026 by Gary the Goblin. All rights reserved by goblin law. Don't put it in the machines without my say-so.

Tags: #TexasPolitics #ThePileIsThePoint #KenPaxtonScandalCount #GoblinJournalismButNotThat #WallsYouCountOutLoud #BadMushroomPatch #TalaricoCampaignAd