Day Tripper

Sometimes you wake up in the morning and think to yourself, "You know what? I think I'll just get in my car and go to College Station and see Justin!"

Well, at least sometimes I do.

Justin gave me the grand tour of his neighborhood (historic South College Station, which he modestly demurred is not really all that historic) and the A&M campus, where they're much more progressive than I would have imagined, inasmuch as they are unusually willing to name major buildings after Quentin Tarantino movies. There weren't as many bonfires as I had expected, but we did encounter a knot of twenty or so people cheering, on the sidewalk, for no readily apparent reason besides the sheer joy of being Aggies. We were bemused. A passerby stopped and informed us that he was just down from Manhattan and they were frightening him.

"A heroic panel over the side entrance symbolizes petroleum exploration," reads part of a historic plaque on one of the engineering buildings. How often do you get to read a sentence like that? We felt that it bore repeating, so we went inside and wrote it on one of the chalkboards in an empty lecture arena.

In College Station, people have rhinos as lawn ornaments. That's just the kind of town it is.


Justin took me to dinner at Blue Baker, where they will actually give you free food if you paint yourself blue, reasoning, I suppose, that Blue Man Group lives in a whole nother state and hardly ever comes to College Station on tour. Then he made me put on my sunglasses so I could meet his friend "bigger lenses," who really ought to show up to break one day. Our day complete, I headed back home and he went to start on a paper that's due Monday, which I kept him away from working on by visiting, so wish him luck with it, will you? Something about conflict resolution. I'd help out, but it's probably my worst subject.

I'm ready to go back next weekend.