The Bellman.
sell-out zone
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Travel notes
- Lesson # 1: It takes more than two days for your butt to recover from sixteen hours of sitting in a bucket seat. About an hour into my drive back from Austin my ass hurt so badly that I was afraid it was going to fall off. Luckily, it numbed up by the time I got to Dallas.
- If I ever decide to transport drugs or other contraband across state lines and get stopped by a cop near the state line for (allegedly) failing to promptly signal a lane change and the cop has me come back and sit in his cruiser for a few minutes so that he can take my measure, I'm totally going to tell a story about how I was at my college roommate's wedding and it's about time they got married since they've been living together for so long and boy howdy did he marry up and yeah I was a member of the wedding party and yes the bride did have some cute friends but no I wasn't the guy who was going to jet into town looking to score. They eat that shit up.
- My hotel room in Austin had several stickers on the ceiling. They were round, about the size of a coaster, and each had a picture of a coat hanger with a red line through it. I thought it was very Austin that you could gaze up at pro-choice propaganda while lying flat on your back on the bed, but when I climbed up on a chair to look at the stickers more closely I discovered that they were actually there to warn guests not to hang their clothes from the sprinkler heads.
- Cool kids I hung out with in Austin: Aaron, Alex, Cole, Emily, Evan, Laren, Monk, and Rachel.
- Monk, by the way, is quite good at chess. Most kids his age move more or less at random, but Monk understands the need to follow a plan. His play is a little bit loose, but that will fix itself with experience. I was impressed that he already knew some basic strategic concepts, and hope that he took to heart my comments about the importance of controlling the center of the board.
- Lesson #2: Do not enter Oklahoma on I-44 between the hours of 10pm and 6am unless you already have all of the gas and coffee that you're going to need.
- On the Oklahoma side of the Texas-Oklahoma border there's a huge casino and a shop selling tax-free cigarettes. On the Texas side there's an adult bookstore, a liquor store, and cowboy boot factory outlet.
- You would think that if you happened to be driving through Missouri during an Astros-Cards playoff game then you would have no trouble finding the game on the radio. You'd be wrong.
- My ontology includes perfect days. A perfect day isn't necessarily a day when nothing goes wrong, but it is a day in which everything taken together goes right. Sunday was, for me, a perfect day. Here's an example of something that went wrong in the right sort of way. An old friend of mine who I care about deeply but hadn't seen in a long time (for reasons that I don't really want to get into but which involve a woman making what was clearly the right decision) suffers from a chronic medical condition and was having an episode during the reception. I know it sucked, and I felt for him, but at the same time I hadn't seen him since before the condition took hold and it meant a lot to me to share, just a little bit, that part of his life. I'm sure that sounds self absorbed, but there it is.
- Vegan pumpkin pancakes taste good.
- Round Rock is a whore.
- That last one probably hurt my feminist cred, so let me just say that the Umlauf Sculpture Garden freaked me out with its full on heteronormative mojo.
- Speaking of the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, I was struck by this sculpture, "Icarus", though not because of its artistic merit. No, what I noticed was that Icarus' wings formed the letter 'W' as he plummetted earthward. Somebody could make a pretty good anti-Bush t-shirt out of that.
- Lesson #3: Some radioactive waste smells worse than one of those farts where you would swear that something crawled up into you and died.
