As if a Million People Were Silent, Then Suddenly Cried Out in Terror

So I took a couple of years' break from my blog. You might have noticed, except that assuming you were one of my three regular readers, you stopped checking for updates by early spring of 2012.

This was all part of my master plan.

Writing is a wonderful thing, very therapeutic, not to mention that organizing one's thoughts (or attempting to, anyway) to the point where they are not only comprehensible, but maybe even interesting, to complete strangers, is excellent mental exercise. And God only knows I need it. I've been watching too much TV.

But having an audience adds pressure. That being said, I guess it isn't clear why I don't just keep a paper diary or take advantage of one of many available software programs which process words, which are what I produce by typing, assuming I lay off the wine.

Yeah right!

The topics on my mind seem off-limits tonight. A man I never met, but consider a kindred spirit because he was a fellow bicycle commuter, blogger, parent, and 44-year-old, was killed yesterday on the frontage road of I-35 in Round Rock on his way to the office.

His poor family. Those poor kids. I am so terribly sorry. God bless and keep you.

To spare a little pity for the driver who hit him, as well: We live in a society deeply entrenched in the premise that driving is safe - that, if you slip up a little, the worst anybody is likely to suffer is a little property damage and maybe a stiff neck. This mindset is in the process of changing, but there's a sense that, behind the wheel, drivers are almost entitled not to have to worry about these things. Well, I never did when I was driving, not until I really got out there and felt the vulnerability of knowing that a momentary lapse of attention on someone else's part might kill me. They'd feel shitty about it, and I'd actually feel really sorry for them having to go through that, except I'd be dead.

My daily danger zone is my daughter's middle school. I walk with her there each morning, through our quiet residential neighborhood, walking the bike I ride to work after dropping her off. She's in seventh grade now, so at some point fairly recently, she stopped holding my hand (though when I occasionally take hers, she doesn't yet pull away).

Everything is fine until we get to the school itself, where we walk across the narrow neighborhood street where the cars pull out of the school driveway after dropping off kids. That place is a hellish free-for-all slice of mayhem.

The people waiting to turn out of the driveway rarely signal, so you have to guess if it's safe to cross in front of where they'll be pulling out if they're turning left. Meanwhile, cars are approaching from both directions in the street, sometimes to pass through, sometimes to pull up to the curb and drop off a kid, again not often signaling. Many of the cars departing the school are trying to get the hell out of Dodge via the cross street on which my daughter and I are approaching. Signaling? Whatever. It's like fucking Frogger.

The school, neighborhood, and surrounding streets largely predate cars. Traffic control at the school consists of one extremely nice and patient lady trying to keep kids (and the occasional irresponsible bike-walking parent) from getting run over. And the car horns? It sounds like Manhattan up in there. Everybody is PISSED.

I think I've seen one other family that walks their child to school there. It's sad, because our walk is about 1/2 mile across the park and up a steep hill (by Austin standards) and is a pretty nice start to the day, up until we get to the street bordering the school and it gets fugly. And it's a neighborhood school, you know, so not many of the students live more than a few blocks away.

These are things we've lost sight of, as a society. It's not anyone's fault, it just naturally happens when you get in the habit, as pretty much all of us do, of never traveling further on foot than from your front door to your car, your car to your office, your car - in the parking space you've found, after circling the parking lot for 10 minutes looking for a close-in spot, near your grocery store or shopping mall or gym. We all admit this, and it's not your fault or my fault or anybody's individual fault, but maybe we can make a little change and all our little changes together can make something better. We all crave the invincibility and anonymity that cars, or online comment forums, give us. Who wouldn't? It's safe, you can do what you want, and nobody has to know who you are.

I don't have a master plan. I just want us all to be well and happy and not get run over.

Good Neighbors

A couple of weeks ago I tried to be a responsible house person and started taking down the Christmas lights. This seemed like a good idea at the time. But some of them are pinned up quite high, and I have my doubts about our ladder, and I ended up leaving a couple of strings of them just dangling there.

Meanwhile, all the neighbors are still turning theirs on every night. That's Travis Heights for you. To hell with the season: Christmas lights are sparkly!

Maybe if the rain lets up a little this weekend, I'll put the lights back up.

I love this neighborhood; this is one of the reasons why. I've lived plenty of places where people just let stuff go, and have on occasion been one of those people - though, for the record, I would never park in the yard, never! But this is different. It's not even a matter of marching to a different drummer. It's more that, while the drummer is joyfully encouraged to explore his or her own musical experience, no one would expect the marchers to adjust their personal ideals of tempo to match.

We had a neighbor a few years ago - I shall call him "Hank" (for 'twas his name), who hated us because we were such lousy, irresponsible house people. Cats everywhere, for starters. Hank kept his yard tidy, his lawn manicured, and his trees and bushes pruned. He had no pets. Oddly, he seemed to like my kids, but I always knew we were not good enough for him. God knows I used to try. I studied the Reader's Digest New Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual, but to no avail. Someone gave us a second copy as a gift, and as a gesture of goodwill, I gave it to Hank, who pretended to be grateful. Once, a limb from one of our trees (the entire neighborhood was a hackberry forest) came down and felled the fence between our backyards. It sagged for a week before I hauled the fencepost up and lashed it to the tree trunk. Hank informed me that the angle at which I'd done this would pull down all the rest of the fenceposts; so I went out and bought some quick-set cement, dug out the fencepost, and set it in place. Hank grudgingly admitted that this worked, but it took me much too long to get around to. I tried edging the front yard, but couldn't find the sidewalk, so left big, uneven ripples in the edges of the lawn, overlapping the concrete. Hank watched, waves of 60-something-responsible-house-person disapproval radiating from him. Occasionally he'd trap one of my cats and I'd have to go bail it out from the pound. It got to where I just avoided going outside at all, but this only made things worse.

But I feel like I belong in Travis Heights: relaxed; offbeat; a little messy; full of congenial, well-fed dogs and cats; and above all else, happy.

Because in Travis Heights, it's always Christmas!

Differing Points of View

If you're walking through Stacy Park, and you see a guy with a backpack sitting on a bench a ways ahead of you on the trail, writing in a notebook, and as you get closer you notice that he's also writing on a piece of cardboard, and as you are passing by you see out of the corner of your eye that his left hand and arm are likewise covered with writing, and he speaks up, saying, "Hey, do you want to hear something interesting?"

You might want to just keep walking.

Though if you do, you'll miss out on a great deal of information. Electrical utility boxes, did you know, are full of nitrogen, because this can be used to bring up the groundwater and throw off a perc test, which is performed up north prior to construction to determine if a basement will be prone to flooding. Also, there is apparently a conspiracy of realtors to accelerate sales by poisoning all the trees to bring down housing values. Did you know that for each tree that dies on a piece of property, the value of that property goes down by $10-20K? So if a $250,000 house has five trees on its lot, and you sneak up and kill off those trees, you may end up actually being able to buy that house for $150,000; or presumably you could get a $100,000 house for free. "Look at that house across the street, there, being remodeled," he said, pointing to a larval McMansion on Eastside Drive, cocooned in Tyvek. "See how all the trees in the yard are dead? I'm seeing trees like that all over town!"

I wasn't asking a lot of questions, and I also didn't know if it would be a good idea to point out, as he went on at great length about how many dead trees seem to be about lately, that it's winter.

Various aspects of his speech brought him to the subject of the airport; of Watertown, New York; of downtown Austin and Treaty Oak; of the water quality here; of leaning telephone poles; of the crack-dealing and money-laundering operations of police officers (or possibly realtors - I wasn't quite clear on this) in South Austin; of churches and gas stations; of geology; of the racial segregation of neighborhoods; and of the Del Valle schools. At Travis High, you see, the school sits in the midst of businesses, so the students are able to learn about commerce and enterprise. But Del Valle High School has been moved - ostensibly due to the airport, but they're still in the flightpath! They're still in the flightpath! - way out in the middle of nowhere, and there are no businesses nearby, so the kids will never learn about the real world, and what's more important, anyway - the life of a child, just starting out, or the life of some FedEx employee?

Here he stopped and pressed for an actual answer, so I stammered that I didn't feel I could really assign a comparative value to the lives of complete strangers. "Exactly!" he said, very pleased. Apparently I had just made his point for him.

Finally it became clear that he was going to keep on talking just as long as I kept on standing there, and my iPod had already cycled through "Rock the Casbah" twice, so I said, "I really have to go..."

"Take it easy," he said, immediately sitting down and resuming writing in his notebook. I felt kind of silly. I could have walked away twenty minutes earlier.

I was really only out to try and send a picture from my cell phone, which doesn't work very well at my house (probably a realtors' conspiracy of some kind). At my brother-in-law's Elvis' birthday party last night, we got a very cute picture of the newly blonde Katie and me, and I want to send it to people. I haven't been able to figure any way to get it out of my phone, because attempting to send it as a message keeps failing. So I walked up Travis Heights Blvd. to the highest point and stood there, holding my phone aloft and turning slowly in circles, right there in the street, trying to get a good signal, but accomplished nothing.

Nothing except for all the neighbors to glance out their windows, witness this bizarre behavior, and go and lock their doors. Look out! There's a crazy person loose in Travis Heights!

Rainy Day

What better way to spend a rainy day than wandering around the neighborhood with a camera?