Still talkin' 'bout TX
We finally pulled into our hotel in Austin around 1am. I can’t tell you which hotel.
The sweet fella at the front desk didn’t charge us to have a dog in our room and I don’t want to get him in trouble. He gave us a room by the back door and asked that we keep the dog away from the lobby. As with all lies, not paying the pet deposit led us further-and-further down a path of increasing falsehoods. It all started in St Louis. Our little goober got a scratch on her little goober-nose playing Frisbee, NBD.
The next day we left the hotel. Brewski was occupied destroying her newest stuffed animal.
My husband and I met in ATX and lived there for years before moving to the CLE. Long story short, we had a big day of eating foods we missed since moving. First stop was Donn’s BBQ. It’s a low key joint in a hotel parking lot that doesn’t get the love it deserves. Sure, go ahead and wait in line for that place Thrillist told you about. But unless you are a BBQ competition judge, I guarantee you will not be able to dissect the nuance of Texas BBQ to make a four-hour wait worth it. Plus, Donn’s has the best coleslaw. Side dishes are important!
We were smart. We split a three-meat combo. No need to eat yourself silly on stop one. There is more food to be had!
We still had to hit up Home Slice Pizza, the best pizza outside of New Haven / NYC, if you ask me. Or if you ask Ben who is a pizza purist and hard-core Connecti-cutie. Him even wanting to eat pizza outside of the
New York Tri-State area is kind of a big deal. This pizza is very good and muy legit. *Unlike my use of "muy." We also hit up a P. Terry's Hamburger stand. No pics, sorry, ate them too fast! They are the perfect little hamburger.
This is where I’m
supposed to tell you about how awesome Austin is and how it’s an up and coming city and everyone in it is swimming in tech money.
The Austin you went to years ago is not the Austin that is there now. The Austin you visit next year will not be the Austin you visit five years from now. It’s a city that changes quickly and all the things you love about it will be bulldozed, repainted and repurposed the next time you set foot on 6th st.
But that’s not even why I’m mad about Austin.
I’m angry because all this change comes at a cost. I moved to Austin to escape the high cost of living in Seattle. Rent was climbing in Emerald City and I had already spent nearly two years of my life living out of an ‘84 Ford Tempo.
Being unhoused sucks!
We used to say "homeless" but people without housing are more than a monolith of perceived drunks and beggars. They are actual PEOPLE who happen to not have reliable shelter. At the very least, consider how hard it is to rub one out without privacy.
You'd be angry too if your socks were always wet and you never got to cum.
And it's really difficult to cook food when you don't have a kitchen! Sure, you might have SNAP, formerly food stamps, and can shop at a grocery store but food stamps don't cover prepared foods. Without a fridge you can't keep anything perishable on hand for later. The worst part is some rich douche bag behind you in line is judging your cart for being full of "junk food." Yeah, asshole, Twinkies can survive anything. It's not that I'm too stupid to eat healthy. It's that I'm soooo poor I can't keep nutritious food from going bad.
Austin used to be a place where an artist could live a reasonable existence.
Now, when you arrive in the city, you might notice an unusual amount of self-storage companies. They fill the lots where longhorns used to graze in pastures. That sounds idyllic but the steers are just there to make a corporation's unused land into “farmland” on a technicality. It’s a tax thing. Anyway, there are storage places everywhere. Why? Because Austin is filled with newly unhoused residents and this is where they have to keep their stuff. And no, you can't live in them, I've tried. And no, you can't just move to a new city because moving is expensive. Annnnnd you have to pay for your damn storage unit or all your stuff gets auctioned off on a reality TV show.
Tent cities line the streets of Austin.
Make-shift communities set up camp under off-ramps and in the medians of busy roadways.
What was affordable housing has been given a fresh coat of paint and been renamed to attract newbies and college students.
Funny thing about the renaming, all the apartment complexes when I moved there were named things like “Longhorn Passage” and "The Decatur Arms” etc. After a few years, those places were painted with splashy colors and christened names like “The Social Spot” and “The Meet-Up.” Now everything is painted green and called “The Palms Lofts” or just “TREEHOUSE.” *BARF*
"Our drywall and MDF shelving is all natural, I assure you.", they say.
The average rent in Austin ... has risen 92.6 percent since 2010! NINETY-TWO PERCENT! In 2010 I rented a 1 bedroom apartment for $450 a month. That same unit is now $909 and is just as shitty as it was when I lived there. So fuck Austin.
AND FUCK these jag’offs riding around on scooters!
How many different scooter rental companies does a city need? There were LITERALLY (and I mean literally not just like saying it to be funny) hundreds of discarded electric scooters lying around! It’s like Wall-E out in these streets
Except all the scooter riders are drunk and wearing University of Texas gear from the H-E-B. (No disrespect to Harold E. Butts, your stores are the jam.)
BUTT! BUTT! BUTT!
Enough ranting, I guess. Please keep in mind on your trip to ATX that many of the people you see on the street never imagined they would end up homeless. I always thought that one day if life got bad enough, I would just explode or something.
The reality is that you don't get to explode when you lose your house.
You have to keep on existing and you have to deal with the ultimate trauma that comes with extreme poverty. It changes you and not always for the better. Knowing how little a person can live on is a gift and a curse.
Back at the hotel, Brewski made her own fun.
Remember earlier when I mentioned she was a secret dog? Remember that ol’ scratch on her little snoot? Good. We came into the room to find that she had scratched the scab off her nose and used the crisp white bed linens to clean herself up.
There was dog blood everywhere. Lots of it.
She was fine but the idea of sleeping in a bed full of my sweet baby’s fluids didn’t seem awesome. An easy enough fix - Just go down to the front desk and get new sheets. Calmly explain why there is blood all over the hotel room, easy. Yeah, would have been if we weren’t in a web of lies where we neglected to pay the deposit to cover such occurrences. I took the sheets, blooded and wadded up as best I could, to the lobby. I am not a good liar.
So when the desk gal asked me what happened, I panicked.
“My husband cut himself ... with a knife?”
“Is your husband ok? This is a lot of blood.”
“Yeah, he’s uhh...fine. We have a first aid kit.”
“Do you need me to call 911?”
“No! Can I have some new sheets please? Thank you.”
She gave me the new sheets and promptly tossed the blood stained ones in the trash. Now, you might be thinking, “Nicole, why didn’t you just say you had your period? That’s something that happens.” Yeah, but it doesn’t generally happen ALL over the bedding and all the pillows in the style of a Jackson Pollock painting.
The next morning the woman from the lobby cornered Ben and asked him if he was ok and if he needed help. Like, help, help.
“Excuse me sir, is your wife cutting you with knives in an abusive way? Or are all y’all doing some 90s vampire sexy shit up there?"
He knew to cover for me, making our web more tangled. Crisis averted. Until sweet baby Brewski jumped in a friend's pond the next day. Resulting in our secret dog getting a secret bath in the room.
We’re headed out but not without a stop at Bu-cee’s, the greatest rest stop in the
World!
The bathrooms are clean and private. They also have a wall of candy and beef jerky as far as the eye can see. Do not leave TX without stuffing your face full of kolaches. There’s even an awesome gift shop. It’s the perfect place to spend money while your spouse is in the restroom poopin’.
I bought this dope bathing suit. I don’t even care if this is a thirst trap.
I told y’all I dress like a ho AND sex sells! There has never been a better time to be fat and beautiful!
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