Help! I road tripped and I can't get up!: More South First Street shenanigans.

As my circumference has been dismayingly narrow of late (if “narrow” is a word that can be aptly applied to circumferences—if I passed geometry, it wasn’t with distinction, I can tell you that), and my novel has been dismayingly underwritten of late, I found myself here today, looking like one of those pretentious sods who is Writing Her Novel in Public. I of course now know that most in this boat are not in fact Pretentious Sods so much as Holdouts Against Encroaching Shut-In-ism Whose Neighbors Suck and who do not wish to deal with the paperwork that would result were they to act on the whims that said neighbors inspire. Of course, it’s hard to be a pretentious sod when you’re writing what’s shaping up to be genre trash (of which I’m an unapologetic fan, when it’s done well, but alas, I don’t think mine is, and I can’t say I’m having a blast writing it either—but hey, it’s just the first draft! Lighten up already, right?).

And, hey, Self, Austin is a great city, even if you’ve managed to yet again win the lottery in terms of your living situation. So, hey, live a little! Leave your apartment! After all, you moved to this city to, uh, live in this city, right?

So went the speech.

And I’m glad because I got wired on some coffee drink laced with Nutella whose name (which escapes me) was somehow an homage to Austin’s weirdness, and made a dent in the novel, and it was good to brush my fingers against the city’s pulse and stare out onto South First Street, at the steady stream of cars and foot traffic, at an overcast sky rendering the yellow-green trees all the more vividly, and to look around the café and see so many other lives in progress, and to feel deliciously anonymous, and to behold the neon sign in the window of End of an Ear (CDs/Records/DVDs) across the street, the solid wood door opening and closing to ingest and disgorge browsers and customers, and men carrying children on their shoulders, and cacti standing watch over the parking lot. And even the most heinous billboard ever, of which I will only say, it was an advertisement for a Brazilian wax. Ah yes, the land of the living. Join it, Allison, join it. Put it on the to-do list.

To this end, I also had a rematch at Izzoz wherein I successfully obtained a fried avocado taco this time, and should have obtained about six more, because it turns out that frying avocados (and pretty much anything, for that matter) is a really good idea. I also had another plain tostada, which was sadly lackluster this time, probably because this time around they used some sort of soulless orange cheese product and not the pleasantly sharp, salty, crumbly white stuff (Cotija?) they used last time. Oh, well. I also had a Mandarin Jarritos, which tasted as radioactively orange as it looked. And the salsa was pleasantly spicy without overpowering a wuss like me.