I don’t doubt that Austin Texas is many things to many people. Yet, I can only speak to what it is to me based on my whirlwind experience last week. I hope my travels bring me back to this circus of the south so I can see all of it’s sideshows. Until then I offer this assessment:
Austin is a party on a Thursday afternoon. It’s a warm stroll having touched down from a chilly town far, far away. It’s a pirate greeting you at the threshold of a bar, but not a Disney World/Pirates of the Carribean kind of pirate, but an ironic one, as only Austin could produce. He’s just dedicated enough to the role to grow an outlandish beard and riddle his body with tattoos, don a pirate tee-shirt (think tuxedo tee-shirt, but a pirate.), but not serious enough to run an attraction at any major theme park…thank God. Austin is that same pirate insisting you pop in and the first round’s on him. It’s the subsequent and inevitable rounds you gladly pay for after, because the fun colonizes. It’s the music pulsing your ears at all times. It’s the strangers that fast become friends for just that moment in time. You hop in a photo booth together. You share a shot. You talk sports. You hop on the bar and dance and suddenly, it is over. The clock has struck midnight. The bar is a pumpkin and you must move on, but the ball – the brief snippet of time where chaos and kindred spirits collided; that was Austin.