Didn't You Learn Anything from "A Bug's Life?"

You'd think, wouldn't you, that you'd be able to experience a perfect Austin afternoon without importing someone from Georgetown?

Well, you'd be wrong.

Robbie was kind enough to make the long, arduous journey south today, to drag me out of the house and rescue me from a sad and self-absorbed funk (PMS for short). We went to Dominican Joe for coffee.

Ah, Dominican Joe. Do you know, the place gets quite crowded on a bright sunny Sunday afternoon, and fills up with the sort of people who saunter lazily up and down South Congress - until so recently the undisputed dominion of drug addicts and $10 whores - the trendy, the happy, who wear sundresses and cowboy boots, and spend more money on a pair of artistically pre-tattered jeans than I did on my first car.

Robbie ordered a smoothie and I a frozen mocha frojoe, with whipped cream (why do anything by half?). We sat in the shade on the patio and talked about urban planning and deviant sex practices. But there wasn't a table available, and it did just cross my mind to suggest moving across the street to our work campus and our old break spot, two picnic tables under a pavilion. I was afraid that might be dorky.

"Hey, do you want to go to the break spot?" asked Robbie, who is one of my best friends ever for a reason.

So we did; we sat at the Official Three-Martini Break Spot for a good 45 minutes, sipping sublimely unhealthful nonalcoholic beverages, enjoying the magnificent weather and the inappropriate behavior of grackles in the spring sunshine. One of the tables sports a heavy chain and large padlock, but not the other - a fact I had never noticed, but Robbie said he'd always found curious. "What's this table chained to, anyway?" he asked.

Long story short, if you go to the corner of Congress and Riverside looking for a picnic table, you can pick up a free chain and padlock as well.

From there we moved to the new park complex across Riverside from Auditorium Shores, next to the Palmer Events Centeer and the newly-opened Long Center, where they built that spiral-pathed hill overlooking the skyline. Robbie and I have been there once before, under slightly sketchy circumstances. The whole area was under construction, and presumably meant to be shut off to the public. But we were on our lunch hour, and so apparently were the gaggle of construction workers bivouaced nearby; and the gate to the construction zone was slightly ajar. "There's not a sign saying we can't go in," Robbie had pointed out, reasonably enough. The workers, being off the clock, were hardly going to confront intruders on their own time. We had the run of the place.

Today it was different. The hill is seeded with grass and the occasional bluebonnet, and ringed with benches. Two ponds, one near the hill, and one in front of the Palmer Events Center, are well-stocked with laconic turtles, who sploop right into the water when people approach them with high-pitched voices (what's with this urge to use baby talk on reptiles?!), but have a hilarious amount of difficulty climbing back out again once the danger has passed. Fortunately turtles don't mind being laughed at. Or maybe they do, I don't know. What are they going to do - chase me down?

The view of the skyline from atop the man-made hill is fairly spectacular, though it'll be nicer once all the cranes are gone. And Tony will agree it's a great pity that all these beautiful downtown condos are destined to be filled with Californians, especially inasmuch as they have no idea how to drive. People! When you cut in front of someone, you wave! That's how you know you're in Texas, dammit.

And from the park, we meandered our way to El Arroyo to enjoy a frozen margarita in the midst of yet another construction zone. There's not much getting away from that.

It was Austin. It was perfect. And an outraged young mother demanded of her toddler, in angry tones, the timeless line I've used as the subject of this post, just as we were passing. What more could anyone ask for?

Cap'n's Log Arrr-dditional

Black Robbie’s creditors complete our fears;
They've seized him bodily to pay arrears.
“Pirates’ worth,” snarled they, “be down!
Ye’ll fetch more booty in Georgetown.”
Now Bess sails lonely on this sea o’ tears, arrr!

I guess that means I'm the captain, then. But dammit! When I said I'd be interested in going down, I didn't mean with the ship!

Rats.

So, speaking of things that desert sinking ships, Robbie gave notice today; his last day is the 19th, and everyone is invited to the happy hour. I don’t know where it will be yet. Either I’ll notify everyone of the location, or you can just drive around to different bars and listen for double entendres, shouts of "Arrrrrr," and the occasional cry of, “Urban planning! Woohoo!!!”

I'll be the one in the corner, crying into my grog.

Extreme Makeover: Civic Edition, or Make Corpus Weird

Let's take on a project. Let's make Corpus Christi into the next Austin!

Why not? Austin has lost some of its wonderful Austinness over the last couple of decades. It started to go downhill with the closure of the Armadillo World Headquarters back in the 70s. Then there was the high-tech boom, bringing Californians, Dumb Growth™, miserable traffic, and high housing prices. Then there was the dot com bust, bringing a strained local economy and the removal of Danny Johnson from the leadership of the UT Early Music Ensemble. Finally, dealing the coup de grace, my family left Austin to settle in this benighted burg. What does Austin have left??*

So I've decided we need to reinvent Corpus into a new, improved Austin. Corpus has a lot of potential.

It's a strange place, if you've never been here. Although the population numbers around 300K, it feels like a small town. When I go to the store or out to dinner, I'll often bump into someone I know. It's more intelligently laid out than Austin, with the streets in a nice even grid; it's hard to get lost, road construction projects typically get finished during the lifetime of people born before the projects were even begun, traffic is generally light, the weather is very nice (if on the warmish side), there are beaches, and folks are friendly. As an interesting side note, this town has the highest number of boob jobs per capita that I've ever seen. My sister and I went to a F.U.N. party with a woman from work once, and we were the only two women in the room not packing plastic.

On the minus side, the job market is dismal, wages are low, it's flat as a pancake, the sides of people's fences that face major streets are covered with grammatically incorrect religious billboards, there's no symphony orchestra or opera, the bayfront is kind of smelly, downtown is largely vacant, and there's not a whole lot to do on a Monday night. (Or a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Sunday, for that matter; Friday and Saturday have a few limited options.) So it's perhaps not the ideal place for a displaced Austin pinko liberal intellectual agnostic with a penchant for cultural activities and wild parties.

So let's make it over! All we need to do is get rid of about 3/4 of the current population. We'll start with whoever it is that owns the car in my parking garage with the "Visualize No Liberals" bumper sticker on it. That always cheeses me off. Then we'll import a couple hundred thousand stoners, freaks, musicians, programmers, dreamers, independent filmmakers, and other assorted riffraff. We'll tear down the Selena memorial and put up an Oat Willie statue in its place. We'll fill downtown with blues clubs and independent coffeehouses. We'll start an underground weekly. We'll run Starbucks out of town on a rail! And for God's sake let's erect a few hills over on the west side of town.

Ambitious? Perhaps. But a girl's gotta dream.

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*Well, aside from the Austin Chronicle, Eeyore's Birthday Party, gingerbread pancakes at Magnolia Cafe, Sixth Street, Barton Springs, Zilker Park (and spinning around under the Zilker Christmas Tree, and taking in the summer musical at the Zilker Hillside Theater), KUT, Threadgill's, the Capitol building, hike & bike trails along Town Lake, the University of Texas, Hippie Hollow, Hole in the Wall, Mrs. Johnson's doughnuts, Flightpath Coffeehouse, the Texas Chili Parlor, the Renaissance Market, Alamo Drafthouse, peppered onion rings at Hut's Hamburgers, Amy's Ice Cream, Christmas lights on 37th Street, plus festivals for spam, puns, hot sauce, and more, flourishing head shops, live music of every imaginable flavor, and maybe one or two other things that don't spring to mind just at the moment. But other than that? Not much.