The Heart Longs For the Crooked Place

We head to Austin one week from today -- my second visit this year, Rita's first ever.

Quite a bit has changed in the twenty years since I left (the Drag now looks kind of like a suburban shopping mall that's been split wide open, and the loss of Les Amis still gives me grief) but it was a great relief to find that not everything I loved is gone.

Perhaps my visit in March was too quick for it to sink in just how much Austin has been, as it is sometimes put, Californicated. But wandering around my old haunts, I found that the place still had that distinctive feel. It left me wanting to move back.

My Austin "to do" list includes:

-- get "lost" Glass Eye album
-- ditto Kathy McCarthy solo release
-- eat at Conan's Pizza
-- show Rita the libraries
-- hang out on West Mall, denounce imperialism, etc.
-- see if any professors I knew back in the day are actually keeping their office hours this semester, which was evidently not the case in in the spring
-- show Rita the place where the Ark Co-op used to be
-- fail to convey what the Ark was like
-- more Conan's
-- visit with friends, if any of them see this and want to do so (for example, at Conan's)