Ladies and Gents, Your Host has left his fair city of Denver in a cloud of dust and now writes to you from the Hill Country of Texas. Yee-haw, son.
Specifically, I am in Austin, the capital of this big state and its liberal enclave. It is so liberal here, in fact, that regular Texans break out in a full-body rash if they stay longer than the duration of a Longhorns football game, thus deterring the kind of predation they would normally pursue in a place like Austin.
In any case, I am settling in after a week and getting used to the marked differences. For example, I can buy a bottle of wine at the gas station here. Yeah. No more arbitrary Colorado blue laws. It’s completely straightforward here: beer and wine at all food merchants from 7 a.m. to midnight, Monday – Thursday, 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. Friday – Saturday, noon to midnight Sunday, and liquor sales at licensed liquor merchants only with valid Texas identification card between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. Monday – Saturday.
Also there are pests here. My right leg is currently pocked by no fewer than twelve (12) mosquito bites, nasty tiny calcified sores that itch like hell and then burst with blood and other humors when you scratch. I have heard tales of tarantulas and scorpions, silverfish and giant earwigs. Every evening before dusk comes the hissing hour, when all the trees everywhere come alive with the sibilating of millions of invisible, menacing crickets. The roads here are littered with corpses of dim-witted possums, armadillos, and nutrias (ROUSes, WTF?!). None of these things exist in the mountain paradise that is Colorado.
I have personally murdered seven cockroaches, and I hope to have accomplished something of a roach genocide by sealing my house in a cordon of boric acid. This stuff is something else. It’s acid, right, so it eats through the filthy bastards like the Wicked Witch of the West. But it doesn’t do the job right away. Rather, it clings to them and slowly festers until they bring it back to their nests, where it gets all over their roach eggs and roach babies and roach moms, and then it eats through and kills them slowly and painfully and stomach-churningly. I take great pleasure in this process. I have been told that the roaches I have are the water roaches, which are ubiquitous here and incorrigible but clean, not a pest like the smaller roaches that infest unclean homes, but still I take great pleasure in this process.
And then there are the similarities to my unsung hometown. There are hipsters, for instance, just like Capitol Hill. Actually, many many more hipsters, since this is where indie rock bands get certified. They have tight pants and ironic mustaches and muttonchops, which is apparently the next thing for me to deride. They have fewer track bikes, however, likely because it is so fucking hot and humid down here that it is actually possible to sweat to death by peddling up so many hills without the ability to gear down.
But there are many wonderful things here too, like the absolute explosion of flora. Driving along the city’s elevated loop freeway at times seems like crossing a bridge over a sea of ancient cypress and oaks and cedars and so many other verdant species. The nights are balmy and vibrant. The topography is stunning, with abrupt and prolific hills eroding over porous limestone cliffs. There are fantastic restaurants everywhere.
And, of course, there is my darling, the protagonist of this new chapter and the reason, hopefully, this journal will take on new life. The same view but from a different perspective, where vapor and cedar fever cloud the eyes.
Until then, have fun doing what you do.
1 Comment
July 14, 2009 at 11:29 am
[...] This hellish offense to God, it turns out, is the nymphal skeleton of a Giant Cicada, the very beast that nearly murdered me dead on Sunday night and the proprietor of the ominous sibilating I wrote about earlier. [...]