I Spent My Last $2 on a Bike Reflector and Beer

Are you enough of an Austinite to get the reference in the title? Are you enough of an Austinite to have attended the Yellow Bike Project's Ninth Birthday Party tonight?

Austin doesn't get much weirder. Attic Ted was one of four or five bands providing music for the event, so I was there with their cellist, my sister Margie. The event took place at Gallery Lombardi on West 5th Street, just across from Whole Foods, in an old depot building backing up to the railroad tracks. People used the tracks as seating until the trains came. I'm pretty sure one of the passing engineers flipped us off; understandably, since it's got to be pretty scary for them to see a bunch of drunken people leisurely sauntering their way out of imminent danger. It's not as if there's any way the train could possibly avoid them. Oh, but it's a whole new kind of cool to see that huge freight train thundering along within feet of you, so you could reach out and stroke the sides of the boxcars as they pass.

To be brutally honest, it was the kind of event at which you feel a bit out of place if you don't have a Medusa's nest of dreadlocks and body odor potent enough to power a small city for a month. Still, it was fun; the music was good, and you could hardly ask for a better cause. I got a flashing red bike reflector button for $2, and clipped it to the lowest point of the V-neck on my blouse, just so I could indignantly demand to know just what people thought they were looking at, and remind them I'm up here!

Pay no attention to the flashing red cleavage.

Margie didn't want to take me back to her place off E. 5th, where I'd left my car, though I was exhausted; and I didn't appreciate her friend pointing out I should just ride a yellow bike. Through two miles of East Austin at 11:30pm? Yeah, right.

I'm cranky and I'm going to bed. I should have enjoyed that party more; it was very Austin, very weird. I did enjoy the rapper singing to us in the long line for the restroom. He lent a certain panache to the concept of peeing yourself.

(The concept, mind you. I did not actually pee myself, or anyone else for that matter.)

Goodnight, y'all. Life was so much simpler when I was automobile-bound and queer...