(Phaysis)

Ten years ago this week, with $600 in my pocket, no sleep in 24 hours, a carload of stuff, and a headful of hope, I waved goodbye to my hometown and moved to Austin. The urge was long in the making, but the plan came suddenly. I was to move to Austin to chase the dotcom dream and push my life into new directions. I’ve recounted this story time and again, but now a decade has passed. It is at this ten year point that I officially declare myself an honorary townie, an Austinite. Sure, unlike the students who breeze through this town, I’m here to stay, so technically I’ve been a townie since I moved. But I need to say it, make it official. For good or ill, I am an Austinite.

So. A decade, all in one place. That breaks all of my prior records. Most of my life has been spent in Texarkana, yes, but it’s all split up between 2 years after birth, 8 years growing up, a year after college, 2 years after Greensboro, etc. It definitely beats my 5.5 years in Arkadelphia and 5 years in Lubbock. So yeah.

But has it been a good ten years? Has the whole Austin experience been all I’d hoped? It is with equal parts shame and reality that I have no choice but to say “No, no it hasn’t.”

After moving here, those first six months were heavily influenced by Serendipity. She had her hand in everything I did, every new relationship I started, every accidental decision I made. Those were heady times, and everything was new and sudden. Horizons stretched out beyond my vision. Every wrong turn showed me something new. Every wander around town gave me a new vista to take in the wonder and spectacle of this ever-growing land of a million souls. So much possibility was at the end of my hands.

And then Serendipity left me stranded like an unprepared fool. The dotcom boom went to bust and pulled the rug out from under us all; party over. The thrill turned into survival, but there was an immediacy in it; it was either sink or swim. I had to wonder where my next meal was coming from. For an unsteady while, it really was ramen daily. It was donated coffee. It was two smokes a day. It was burning through meager savings. It was sweating the rent. It was five dollars in gas. It was day labor. It was 7-Eleven. It was data entry. It was pizza delivery. It was shitty joe-jobs where I could find them.

But as beat dead as I felt, I was still alive. When finally the stable work appeared again, when finally I nursed my economic wounds and regained stability, even though I felt dead inside, I held onto the stability like my life depended on it. I learned that I demand stability; I can’t hustle and work it job to job, game to game. I’m not that kind of person; that’s not my personality. It’s not in my skillset to move from gamble to gamble and roll with the punches. I’m a factory floor kind of guy.

So in that respect, in seeking stability, I grew up quite a bit. It’s what adults do over time, I guess: turn in their chaos for a piece of stasis. There’s no risk in the weekly fourty, and it provides me with the opportunity to do stuff that I wouldn’t have done if I, for instance, were working three part-times and relying on selling art to make rent and a car payment. Stuff like, I dunno, buy a house, plan a vacation, raise kids, support a wife, save for retirement. Stuff the stable people do.

But I’m not doing any of that stuff. I feel like I should be, but I’m not. My state in life allows me, but I’m still longing for the random, the accidental, the non-static. Or at least I’m waiting for it. I’ve grown up enough to afford my toys, but I still haven’t matured into something dependable. I have no dependents, nor do I want them. At 38, I think it’s rather late in my life to push for kids; that clock unwound years ago. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a partner, a Significant Other, right?

Funny, that, because when I first moved here, my gregarity was in overdrive. I met people, exchanged contacts, introduced myself even if the encounter never went beyond the first conversation. But when everything fell down around me, I closed up and became the man I used to be. Solitary, a loner, alone. And moreso now than ever, I’m still alone. Sometimes blissfully, but usually painfully. So in that respect, this has been a decade of decline. I’m still surrounded by over a million souls, and all I have to do is reach out again. It should be that easy, right?

There has to be a way to balance the stability I demand with the immediacy I miss. I’m dreaming while snoozing at the controls, and it’s as if I need a pinch to wake me up to take a breath. I really, really don’t want to jinx myself and end up living on the dole and the lam, but I need something to shake me up again. I look back and all I see is the sad dream of squandered potential.

So this is my life, the big experiment that is moving to Austin. It’s funny that the grand design, among my group of friends back home, was that we would all pick a date and use that as the “Great Mass Exodus to Austin.” One by one, though, they dropped out as life threw them curveballs, and I alone made the run to first base. Fitting that this play would echo my time here, that the walk around the diamond would be mine to walk on my own. You’d think that I’d be at the home base by now, but if the Pitcher isn’t paying attention, if the shortstop doesn’t care, if the outfield isn’t watching, why should I even bother stealing bases?

Serendipity has left the ballpark.

Been too long to try and hide it
I no longer want to fight it
Why do I feel so slighted?
My love for Austin’s unrequited.

She lead me on in hopeful lust
Move my heart to future trust
Laughing now, boom went to bust
Hope broken crumbled to dust

Forgotten that she knew me
Forgotten that I bleed
Foregone her love divided
For all my inner need

Got lost along the greenbelt
Lost hope for my own place
Lost chance for lifting myself
To stick it in her face

She
Gave me
Less than three.

Ten the count of withered years
Hope is turned to angry tears
No clarity in private fears
Or charity in public jeers

Why do I feel so exposed?
Million eyes to me are closed
Respect isn’t how I am posed
Friendless now I am disposed

Can’t sit alone and feel numb
Can’t wallow and frustrate
Can’t worry if I sound dumb
Can’t stifle the create

Won’t live this life alone now
Won’t crush under this weight
Won’t stop until I know how
To carry my own fate

I
Deserve
More than that.

Woke up early this morning without an alarm clock; I guess I’m getting trained, which makes it all that more important, I suppose, to get to bed on time even on weekend nights. That happens, mostly, since I tend to turn into a pumpkin after midnight. I blame the post-coffee fatigue.

I’m heading up a posse to go see “The Watchmen” tonight at the Drafthouse. More like a double date. I’ve written about the Watchmen movie before, and that underscores how excited I am to be watching it tonight. I really, really hope it lives up to the book and does it justice. The ending better be intact; that’s what hit me the hardest about the book, and if they change that, or shift one small bit on the premise, so help me I’ll just…I’ll just fucking blog about it.

Had a thought yesterday on the road home. I was zooming past all of the new construction that’s going up everywhere. As I descended into the river valley, I could see 10 cranes in the sky; new condos going up where there used to be decay. Most would call that progress. I call it a travesty, and there are quite a few of you out there who would agree. This isn’t the town I moved to. But, in actuality, the town I moved to never really existed. It’s true that Austin has changed immensely during the 8 1/2 years I’ve been here; I’d expect no less than change…but not at the cost of the soul of this town.

The buildings and shopping centers and strip malls that pop up all over the hillsides…they multiply like bacteria across the landscape, like an E. coli bloom in the fertile petri dish of central Texas. And they lay to waste the precious resource of space, materials, community. And even though they try to buy the appearance of being “local”, they all look the same: large parking lot broken up with a handful of native, transplanted trees; planters lined in local limestone bricks; and the buildings are all made with steel beams, steel studs, and clad in stucco or thin limestone “bricks” for the façade. The shops that inhabit these places have no root here; they are chains, and they have no stake in the health, heart, or soul of this community. There is no soul to be found in them. It’s all money.

I’ve considered all of this before, but what’s unique about my train of thought yesterday is this: those of us who cry about and bemoan the loss of Our Olde Towne, we’re holding onto a stylized memory. When I think of old Austin, I think of a time that existed before I moved here, when abandoned auto dealerships were converted into coffeeshops, when punk-rock dive bars existed in converted garages, when people met in the marketplace instead of the marketplace moving out to the people. And people walked everywhere because everything was local, and people my age listened to indie rock and punk and blues and country. And the vegetation in the hidden spaces downtown felt a little wilder, the landscape was greener. The cold days felt warmer, the summer sun was brighter, the beer was cheaper, and the soul of this place was alive. The halcyon times. And that’s all the halcyon times are…warm fuzzy feelings on top of a communal memory.

Those places and scenes may have existed and flourished to the extent that we remember them, that’s a possibility. Or maybe it’s no more than an extension of our innate ability to artificially remember an idealized past that didn’t truly exist, to feel melancholy for what could have been, to feel nostalgia for the brief times that things were all right. Life was still tough then. The long-term memory of The Drag still had a four year timespan, and then everything’s forgotten. Everything is forgotten still, and all we have are the pictures, videos, movies to help us remember the warmer, happier times.

That Austin doesn’t exist anymore, and just like any other history of any other place, it’s an ideal. The same things happen now that happen then. People hang out, and the spaces they inhabit gain a bit of soul. People move on, soul dies. It happens. New spaces were built then, and those buildings are an integral part of our current environment. New construction today will be integral tomorrow. It’s the change that hurts. It’s the painful lesson that everything is temporal, and that what we cherish today will at one point die. That happens with life, and to some degree that happens to places. You can’t expect Mojo’s or Les Amís or Sound Exchange to exist and flourish forever. You just can’t.

But what you can do is get involved in something, some place, some scene, bring a bit of soul to the party, wherever it happens to be. Accept the change and be the change.

Today is being spent in recovery mode. I’m tired, sore, sunburned, blitzed. Yesterday was a big expense on me. It was…busy. Nothing of any lasting importance, mostly. Just a large expenditure of energy, and I’m not accustomed to that. Aside from a few bright spots, it feels more like a waste of energy.

I went to Eeyore’s Birthday.

I wanted to do it all up right, so I played the part of Joe Pedestrian. I opted to leave the car at home and catch the number 5 southbound from my apartment down to where it transfers to 338 southbound. Got to the park at 1pm. The busride home was an abject failure; sat in the sun for 40 minutes waiting on the 338 northbound, then when I got to the transfer point, I saw on the schedule that I’d have to wait another 25 minutes for the 5 northbound. Fuck that. Thirty minutes later, the number 5 whizzed past me as I was walking back home. Capmet inefficiency in action.

I only stayed at the festival for an hour and half. It’s not my scene anymore. I’m not sure it ever was. I saw three people I recognized, and not one of them was a friend of mine. There was the World’s Tallest Hippy, the dude who rides his bicycle wearing a thong on his ass and a fluffy cat on his shoulders (he was wearing shorts), and The Silver Man. I saw no one else that I knew, not even the people I expected to show up.

There was only one drum circle this year, and it was rather pale. Maybe I was there too early for it to really cook, but there it was: lame. No viceral throngs jumping and grinding. Just an open space where the few who felt like dancing threw themselves around among the four disorganized clumps of drummers getting drunk on their own rhythms and five-hundred onlookers standing there with their cameras held high.

Beating a drum does not make you a drummer.

It’s not quite the free-thinking and self-expression rite of spring that it used to be. It’s family-friendly now. Not so many people dressed up in costumes or flopping around toplessly or passing the douchie on the left-hand side. The festival seems to attract people (like me) who are there because it’s “uniquely Austin”, and that by going we can make a tenuous grasp at some slim claim on being “open minded” and so very bohemian.

It’s not my scene anymore. My season for free expression is over. I’m no longer a 20-something. I can’t look into a crowd like that and say, “ooh, fresh opportunity!” I don’t see the throngs as people I could potentially interact with; I see them as that which gets in my way. I’m thirty-something; I need some people I know there with me, not strangers. My opportunity comes from traversing the bonds I have with others, and since I went alone (my fault), and since I left alone (my fault), I can’t totally fault the festival for my poor experience. It’s just not my scene. So I vent here.

Perhaps Eeyore and I do have something in common: we hate being happy.

I realized yesterday that last week on July 27th (or somewhere thereabouts), my life in Austin is four years old. I wish I would’ve thought to look into it on the day of the anniversary instead of yesterday. But the fact that I remembered counts for something, yeah?

Wow. Four years. This is getting close to challenging my record time living in a town that’s not Texarkana. I spent 5 1/2 years in Arkadelphia, Arkansas during my time in school. Contrast this with the eight straight years living in Texarkana from the summer after 3rd grade to the summer after my senior year in 1990. My time in North Carolina, though it burned brightly, angrily, quietly and blessedly, was a mere 15 months. A small portion of my time in Austin. And to this day, I still draw parallels between my time in Greensboro, NC, and my time here. I still take lessons from that first post-college foray into big-life. I still tell stories.

So, yeah, it’s been a long trip, and I’m still on it. Austin. I’m at a fragile spot wherein I’m having to balance the fact that Texarkana is my home town, and thanks to my family and few remaining friends, I still hold some odd sort of allegiance to the place, and the fact that Austin is my home. I live here. This is my home. For good or ill, it’s my home.

I think every time I visit Texarkana, I come away with a small piece of knowledge that I could never live there again. The town has potential, yes, sure, it’s growing, of course, but I could never live there again. It’s too small. For me, it is too small. The people there are too small. The vast swaths of empty and decaying brick architecture versus the burgeoning masses of steel-beam and siding buildings. The sign companies that use the same 10 fonts. The lack of good bars. The plethora of shit-kicking “cowboys”. I just don’t fit there. Once I left that town to go to college, I no longer fit. I saw too much of the world at large, met too many varied people. It’s too small. Too simple.

And no visit was as illuminating of this fact more than the last time I went for a few days around July 4th. I spent only three days, but on that monday morning I was itching to return to Austin. That weekend, man. I don’t want to offend my friends who still live there, nor my family, but it’s just, bleh. Things are going wrong. It’s not visible to those who see the changes as they happen; it’s only when you look after a span of time, you see the changes, the railroading, the herding. As I drove around, I saw more instances where the people of Texarkana are being offered a seemingly larger but actually smaller number of choices on where to eat, where to shop, where to bank, where to worship, and so on. It’s just, I dunno, wrong.

If I left Austin and came back after some time, sure I’d see changes. The thing is that I see the changes — and I haven’t left. Acknowledgably, things are not at all what they had potential to be back in 2000 when I moved here. I’m nowhere near my dream tech job. Things aren’t the utopia that was envisioned. The money isn’t flowing, the bars and restaurants aren’t buzzing with ideas and activities. It’s just not what we had imagined. The changes didn’t meet expectations, but they’re still livable. The town actually is a city, and not the converse. Things are still happening here, there are still choices.

Over these four years, I’ve come to several realizations, many crossroads. I’ve come to understand a lot of things about life, change, growing older, moving on. I may not be the guy I was in 2000, but I’m still me. My health has downgraded somewhat, but I’m still alive. I’ve managed to make small changes towards my future; I quit smoking in February (a big change, actually), I bought a bicycle, I pay more attention to my diet and activity, I’ve left the daily grind behind in the push to shake up my habits, disrupt them so I could get some lifestyle agility back. Small changes, small life, big town.

So, yeah, it’s been a hell of a ride. I plan on living here for a long time. I know my family misses me. I miss my family. I wish I could bring them all down here. But they won’t fit. This isn’t their place. This is my place. I hate thinking about the whole “prodigal son” symbolism, but it’s there. I can’t deny it. But this is my home.

Four years. Damn.