You ever wonder why most Texans(R) are crazy?

It's the heat. During my younger years I was forced to leave home to earn $ for cars, tuition and even to support a young family, and, unfortunately, the jobs were in Texas, so I got to experience Texas summers and the peculiar kind of rightwingnuts(R) that infest the god-forsaken state.

Houston — For those of you now trapped under the heat dome in the Northeast, I feel your pain. Temperatures are parked in the 90s, and you don’t need the weatherperson to tell you that the heat index makes it feel like 100-plus.

No matter what you are wearing, the sun still sears through to your skin; and no matter how often you shower, you always feel heat-sticky and never clean. I sometimes wonder whether we should even be driving in this weather, because road rage nowadays seems as much a part of summer as bikinis and beer.

I know all of this because I have survived more Texas summers than I care to count — and worse still, Houston summers, which run from May until after Halloween. There are hotter places on the planet — like Death Valley, Calif., or Dallas — but we have high humidity, too. Ever taken a wet sauna in your good clothes before going to work? We do it every day.

Then there are the bugs. I’m not one of those people who likes to brag that everything is bigger in Texas, but in this case, it’s true. Imagine a flying insect the size and sheen of a chocolate Easter egg; that will help you picture the hideous tree roach infestation I’m currently enjoying. O.K., a smallish chocolate Easter egg. Our fleas aren’t bigger than other people’s fleas, but we have lots because we never had a freeze to kill them off last winter.

And this year, along with the threat of West Nile-virus-carrying mosquitoes, we have Zika to worry about. NBC News called Houston a “Zika Virus Hotspot” last week, thanks to the abundance of abandoned old tires, which, after a heavy rain, serve as perfect breeding grounds for the nasty critters.

“Houston is a perfect place for Zika to take hold and reach a crisis point,” 

Great. On top of all the other charms, Texas now has Zika, that the Pubs have ignored, before going on vacation. The good news? It'll mainly affect Repubs, so it could be worse...