I want no part o’ this apartment.

So I quit it! I gave my sixty-day notice—which technically qualifies as a lease violation—on Tuesday. Why? Because I hate it! This is a crummy, beige, noise-besotted hellhole in which beasts masquerading as neighbors bare their barracuda teeth at good behavior, sink their serpentine fangs into each peaceful moment, and gore basic human decency, etiquette, and awareness with their bloodstained tusks and angry horns. In light of the fact that if you are miserable and have any say in the matter (First World, whew!) and choose to do nothing, you are choosing to be miserable, this move (upward, downward, or lateral) makes sense.

The thing about doing something like this—taking bold and decisive action when your default mode with respect to decision-making is Mosquito Trapped in Amber—is that it tends to open the floodgates. This is simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.

It raises all sorts of questions, for instance: what now? Why am I here (in this case, I refer to my literal location rather than the Meaning of Life, although if you happen to know the Meaning of Life and are inclined to pass it along, then please, by all means do)? Why would I be anywhere else? What am I doing with my life? Have I allowed the Onus of Responsibility to fetter me unduly? What does responsibility mean, anyway? Responsible to whom? I’m responsible for myself, of course, and my cats. I feel a responsibility to the people who care about me not to give them evitable cause to worry. But perhaps I’ve mistaken stagnation for responsibility. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with being a roving Vagabond Gypsy Cat Lady and running, running, running like something’s on my tail (and I ain’t talking stripes).

It’s entirely possible—and even likely—I will secure something livable in Austin. But right now what sounds ideal is living in a cabin in the Colorado mountains—or in the forest somewhere rainy and chilly—with nary a neighbor in sight. Maybe just go totally Walden for a year—and hyper-document the experience of course—and see how it agrees with me. If I love it, then awesome, and if not then I return to civilization with a fresh perspective on its draws and drawbacks.

Is this the responsible thing to do? Probably not. But maybe it’s what I need right now. And, after all, my primary responsibility is to myself.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep my options open. I’m applying to library school, hatching some writing and self-publishing schemes (or the inklings thereof, at least), and I’ll also look into livable Austin situations too.

Should you care to sort out the bothersome mess of What I Should Do With My Life, suggestions, ultimatums, and exhortations are welcome here. You could of course also share similar experiences and struggles of your own. 

Austin Saturday II: this time it's personal.

So, the original idea was to venture to Esquina Tango to hear Argentine folk music, but I ended up joining forces with Kristina at Threadgill’s (another Austin institution I can check off the bucket list, but alas, why do I keep forgetting to bring dear Shutter Island?), and it was a crisp, brisk neon-lit evening, replete with gravel underneath my shoes and a fire pit, and we invented The Unicorn, destined to be the next dance craze to seize the nation, and I drank too many beers, including a black lager from local brewers Live Oak (which I kept wishing to christen a live lager from Black Oak brewers), and I bought Shakey Graves’ children’s book (which is actually for grown-ups), and we renamed him Shakey Bones, on account of this calls to mind a jaunty, dapper dancing skeleton, which seems apt, and the young and old congregated, the bright blue neon notes of the Threadgill’s sign pulsed in the cold night, and the air crackled with that distinctly Austin energy, and it turns out melancholy can be sublimated with the help of good beer and the Unicorn Dance, and thus another Saturday—this one more successful—came and went and ceded the floor to a bleary-eyed Sunday: too hot, too hazy, and rendered leaden by the heavy ticking of  borrowed time.

In other news, I am now the proud owner of www.thereisnodealsporto.com (go here for the tentative mission statement) because I want to relocate to WordPress, and I need to breathe new life into my blogging, find a theme, a cohesive focus, pull my gaze from my navel and fix it elsewhere, but where, but where? Food, travel, rage, reflection—the themes that have been posited. Not sure what to do with this site, or if it will amount to much, but it’s mine for the year. Who knows? Maybe I’ll buy another domain name and begin collecting them. It would of course help to learn WordPress first. 

Blast from the PWAst.

Much to my surprise, my lighthearted take on grammar addiction (could you be a sufferer?) appears here.

Forewarned is forearmed, people. 

This conversation has been moved to the trash: notes from an unsuccessful Saturday

Charles Bukowski was on to something when he said “Don’t try.” Don’t, for instance, when trying to be a Conspicuous Solo Diner in Public, rely on a venue situated on South Congress and try to make this happen on Saturday night when street parking is more or less the only option and you never learned how to parallel park. I suppose, given my present schedule, this is a project better realized on a Friday afternoon or Sunday evening. To be continued.

Determined to make something of the evening, I ventured back to Black Star, which was of course mayhem on a Saturday night. I ordered the fish and chips, which were alas burnt, which I blame much less on the kitchen than I do on myself for ordering food when the place was overrun, although I was starving when I optimistically left work with the notion I would find parking in proximity to my originally intended South Congress venue and, an impromptu driving tour of Austin later, the situation had not improved.

I then made my meandering way to the Draught House, where I met Carolyn last Sunday, and found the place transformed for the worse on this Saturday evening: namely, it was so overrun with people that it was a challenge to even open the door, let alone order a drink. Having accomplished the former, I abandoned hope of the latter, used the bathroom, and fled, eventually ending up at Ginny’s Little Longhorn with the notion that I would drink Lone Stars and listen to live music and feel like a Real Live Texan. But it was 8:30 p.m., and the 8:00 show was of course nowhere near beginning, and so I drank a lone Lone Star and listened to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash croon their contentious discussion about his imminent trip to Jackson. It did help with the whole feeling like a Real Live Texan thing when a man in a cowboy hat who had momentarily left the bar said “Excuse me, Ma’am” when he made his way back to his spot as I was ordering. And the woman who carded me (Ginny’s daughter, I think?) did a kindly theatrical double take when she caught wind of my actual age.

Oh, the onus of a Saturday night: the great, beckoning promise of possibility, the brightly thrown gauntlet to seize the fleeting hours of freedom, to drink in the neon reprieve from the dull light of stale Sunday-Monday-and-so-on afternoons. Can it ever live up to any of this?

No. If you ask me, no it can’t. I will take a page from dear Henry Charles B. when I say: don’t try. Don’t try to live it up on a Saturday night. Hell, don’t even leave the house. There are so many ways for a house to be vulnerable: house of cards, house of straw, house of sticks, house of leaves, house of glass, house of sand and fog. But at least a house (or apartment) is yours (however temporarily). So—if you’re lucky enough to have one—make your bed and lie in it.

It occurs to me that I should back up and offer some scant illumination on my newfound(ish) preoccupation with Conspicuous Solo Dining. Amy recently brought up this topic, on account that she’s been traveling and having her own adventures on this front. It made me think. My own life has been an exceedingly solitary one; I’m no stranger to going places by myself, and I don’t consider myself to be hung up about it. But there’s something about eating alone at a restaurant—some sort of social stigma, real or imagined—that gives even me pause. I don’t like this, especially since it’s kept me from trying restaurants for want of someone to try them with. I want to try new restaurants and I want to be able to do so alone, with ease and ownership, rather than self-consciousness and trepidation. Shock yourself awake, a book I’m reading about writing (courtesy of Carolyn) advises, and I say, yes indeed. The Table for One project is one in a series of strategies I’d like to employ to this end. And also I like eating in restaurants.

My first attempt was unsuccessful, but you know what they say to do when you fall off the horse. On the bright side, I believe I was the only solo diner at Black Star this Saturday evening. So maybe this was the training wheels. It’s also possible that the bike lacks brakes. Regardless, I will document the trials and triumphs of said endeavor here. I’m aiming to do this once a month, since I plan to eat at the nicer sorts of places where people generally don’t dine alone (cafes and the like—and, alas, Black Star—would feel like cheating).

Stay tuned: whether you lean toward pathos or Schadenfreude, there’s liable to be plenty of both on offer. 

Beer heaven is a place on earth.

Well, I’ve gone and moved into a co-op—more or less. If you’re looking for me, the odds are good these days that you’ll find me at the Black Star Co-op, where the beer selections have names like Recalcitrant Dockhand, High Esteem, Hubris, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—my favorite (in name, anyway), Depths of Despair. The Co-op serves an array of reasonably priced standard pub fare/American comfort food. I am obsessed with the delicious chips and, were it possible, would bathe in the gleaming silver cups of aioli they graciously allow me each time I ask for it, even though it has only been listed on the menu as coming with one of the food items I ordered.

And it comes with an enigmatic location! Upon attempting to locate it for the first time, you will swear you’ve gone astray and found yourself in an apartment complex. But guess what—you’re supposed to be in an apartment complex! Because that’s where Black Star is located. The people who live in that apartment complex are lucky sons-of-guns.

I met Kristina there on a low-key Monday, returned (quite comfortably) by my onesy on a bustling Thursday, and braved a chaotic-but-still-pleasant Friday there with a bevy of library workers. It’s a wide open space replete with an exposed industrial-type ceiling, a red wall, some black chairs, can lighting,  a generally modern laidback vibe, and a back porch where you can shiver on one those rare chilly Austin evenings and watch the trains on the adjacent track go by. You can laugh or cry into your beer, you can come with someone or alone, you can watch people play darts, dress like pirates, wear cool hats, get drunk, dance ridiculously, and—oh, if only—bathe in Black Star’s aioli.

I get the sense that this is a neighborhood bar for a lot of folks—which of course makes sense, given its unassuming apartment complex location—and a destination for a lot of other folks. I hope to come here once a week for inverse happy hour (Monday through Thursday from 9 to 11 p.m.) for as long as it complements my work schedule so nicely, if not my waistline, liver, and wallet (although, as I’ve said, that prices here are astonishingly reasonable).

On Thursday I watched a boy with a skull cap and a copy of the Austin Chronicle tuck into a big, beautiful, six-dollar bowl of macaroni and cheese. I look forward to doing that next time.

Never have I been so tempted to join a co-op—and who knows? I just might.

This refreshing departure from mournful introspection shall soon be derailed by further mournful introspection, no doubt.

Meanwhile, it’s on to further adventures in uncharacteristic beer-drinking (for a wino like me, at least, and I notice that Black Star does also serve wine) at an as-yet unvisited venue tonight!

Also, stay tuned for adventures in Conspicuous Solo Dining at Restaurants Where This is Not Done.

Highway to the Danger Zone.

Look who’s back in time for Valentine’s Day!

http://eatdrinkbesolitary.tumblr.com/

RIP, Whitney.

From The Book of Tragic Heroines, a photo by Dysphoria Jones on Flickr.

Pictured: my tribute to the immortal “My Name is Not Susan,” from The Book of Tragic Heroines