From Austin, with love
Cabbies are the same the world over. I arrived at the Austin airport today to wait in a long cab line in which all the drivers were gesticulating furiously, despite the fact that as cabbies in Austin, their lives were pretty easy with wide roads, multiple lanes, no parked cars, and passengers who aren’t generally trying to kill them.
It was 80 degrees when I got here, balmy, lazy. Every corner outside of downtown has some brush-covered plot of land for sale, and there are huge buildings the size of Costco called “The General Store” complete with a wood facade and front porch. Equestrian paraphernalia is everywhere. I picked up a magazine in my hotel room and flipped to a page peddling “equestrian estates” somewhere outside of Austin. Horseback riding vacations were advertised on virtually every other page. Heaven? I won’t rule it out.
I’m at the Driskill Hotel off 6th Street, which is purportedly the original hotel in Austin, built in 1889, but without 1889 prices (darn). The bar in the hotel has couches with calfskin covered seats, livestock heads on the walls, and a carpet decorated with different branding patterns. The headboard on my bed has an iron-wrought ‘D’ on it and the room is decorated with old time photos and art created from horseshoe nails.
When I finally managed to catch up with the Google crowd, they were at a restaurant called “Moonshine” across from the convention center. There was grease and more grease and large heapings of fried potatoes for dinner, and it was as delectable as oil gets. Coyote regaled us with stories of his youth here in Austin, and of the cloud of bats that would fly over the city from the bridge. “The largest collection of mammals per square foot are the bats that live in San Antonio,” he said. “They eat ten metric tons of bugs each night.” To me, that is imagery scarier than that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where they have to crawl through the cavern full of bugs. Bats are cool though. I think if I had an exotic pet, it would be a bat. I’m sure Jujy will bite me for saying that when I get home.
6th Street is booming at night, with music blaring from almost every venue, upstairs open air bars, neon galore, and a dressed up crowd. The climate is fantastic in the evening, conducive to cute top wearing without the fear of freezing one’s tits off halfway through the night for the sake of fashion. It’s certainly not San Francisco, where I have to don a wool sweater at 10 p.m. in the middle of July.
I don’t think I’ve fully comprehended the magnitude of this conference yet. I’m hoping tomorrow will clue me in. We picked up our registration today and they gave out bags of junk that included a copy of Linux Journal, Component Developer Magazine, Mikon stickers, a tiny red Sharpie on a hook that you can attach to your keyring, a copy of ToyFare magazine (the headline on the front cover is “Transformers: Optimus Prime Rolls Out!”), a sample of nicotine gel (WTF?), and other random, assorted crap. There were actually a couple of fancy design magazines that are lovely to look at but just make you feel bad about yourself in a way that is different from the way Cosmo makes you feel bad about yourself, but is painful nonetheless. As you begin to realize that you are artistically and creatively challenged you think, “Well, maybe I can take up juggling…”
