Another Austin Interim

I found a renewed joy in the city of Austin by bike, bus, and foot. I loved the late night rides and the absence of cars on a dark road, unwinding after nine hours in a bar. I liked the rides at dusk too, speeding along a bike path blissfully as impatient faces inched ahead during rush hour. I enjoyed sitting down on a city bus alone, reading my kindle while a paid Capitol Metro employee did the driving. And I loved walking to Congress and Ceasar Chavez for a coffee, looking up at the skyline from a different angle, comparing the Frost Tower to the Giralda and a high rise set of condos to that strange phallic shaped building in Barcelona. This time, the pace of Austin was slower and it reminded me of times in my life where I walked through a city and loved it because it was new, and how you can also walk through a city and remember you love it though it is old.

But Austin wasn't what I wanted really. I came back unemployed, carless, and bar work looking hopelessly inevitable for an unknown amount of time. I worked five days straight around Thanksgiving, and it was one of the loneliest times I can remember, not because it was Thanksgiving or because I sat alone by a gate checking the identification cards of drunks young and old, but because I was surrounded be people who were much lonelier than me. Bars are terrible places, like they have been for centuries, and you see a lot by walking through them sober and picking up a dirty glass. I joked as I left this time (I have left and come back more than once now), but if I find myself there again it is for the wrong reasons and I have not done something I should have somewhere along the way.