It’s the last night (basically) of SXSW 2016, and you know what that means...oh no? Ok well it means i end up walking 30 blocks home starting at 2am wearing medium-heel boots and a dress by myself because lyfts are all busy and i don’t have the uber app out of principle and it’s just awful downtown and my friend and her friend are just all fluffed out and not sure where we want to go, we just know we don’t want to go meet ashley at the white horse emilie, we want to see if some rando drug dealer who my friend sort of knows can get us into a Pandora party and i’m always kind of surprised pandora is still a successful brand. Though from what i’ve heard and read, the playlist algorithm is pretty good. I remember using it in 2009-10.
The weather was pleasant, and the route I took was starting at the end of Red River to 15th to Guadalupe then on Guadalupe toward 34th st. I kept trying to order lyfts, but kept getting word that they were all busy. I admonished a young (YOUNG) man who was trying to relate to me or flirt with me, or who knows, as we were both crossing opposite directions onto 15th st. This is on Red River, and the northbound lights had turned red but the southbounds were still green and he and his dumb friend who should NOT be taking the lead from his drunk friend, presumably EVER, and the drunk one starts to cross and there are still cars coming as it’s two in the morning, they’re probably ALL lyft cars, and it’s dark out folks, and he got real honked at and could easily have been smushed and I held my head in my hands and peeked out through my fingers and was reminded of the time I saw that woman try to jaywalk across ventura blvd in studio city in the middle of an afternoon and get hit by a motorcycle and flip through the air and land on her neck. When the Walk signal did appear, I started across and as we passed one another i fully intended to just keep my mouth shut, but dude’s like, Says something like, “Oh, I love getting honked at (note: sarcasm)” and then i said to him, “They had the green light and you shouldn’t have been crossing! YOU NEED TO CHECK YOURSELF BEFORE YOU literally WRECK YOURSELF-- you need to watch out.” I genuinely hope he made it to wherever he was going ok, unless it was somewhere more horrible than a car accident.
I also decided to take some blurry photos of the capitol (ok blurry was not something i “decided” so much) and as you can see in the photo below a young man in what I believe is referred to as a graphic T wandered into my foreground as he and his friends were walking, and he’s the jovial outgoing one, at least tonight, and he posed for me and I loved it because I love directing people and taking photographs of people, and I said Wow you look almost as big as the dome! And he’s like, “Baby I’m bigger than the dome!” and everyone shared a laugh and THAT, was pleasant.
This is part of a long story that eventually takes a turn when I arrived at the jack in the box. As I was approaching jack in the box, right about when I was walking by the urban outfitters, I was able to order a lyft. The wait time was 8 minutes or something, longer than normal but obviously not very long, and the driver was Adam or something, and I entered the pickup address 2552 guadalupe, it’s one mile from my house. And I took pictures and technically probably trespassed and then I texted Daniel or whoever and said I’m running to 7-11 and then I”ll be in front of jack in the box, and i went to 7-11 and i bought a really gross thing of mac n cheese that really one should just heat in the microwave after cutting slits in the film but i have no microwave so the process would be longer, for sure, and different. And I bought it and I bought a candy bar too and I remembered that I had a topo chico in the fridge (a tall one!) and then the driver got me and i went home and i ignored a call from Alaena (sorry Alaena) because i was so tired from all my wonderful friends visiting and her friend was a little bit mean and I just wanted to sleep and don’t worry they found a place to stay.
I ordered a pizza from the new Via 313 because I spoil myself, my friend gave me a bottle of mead and i’m considering trying it. It went into the ol’’ blackbird and henry location on guad and, the pizza’s ready now i should probably go pick it up but let me finish this story about
the date at blackbird and henry and the time i saw terrence at wheatsville and i had spilled everything outside and two of the workers were helping me and there was liquid everywhere and i had bought paper towels also but the liquid had gotten them all soaked and also all the food, and
i hope the jack in the box never gets filled in, unlike the blackbird and henry/via 313 and supposedly the beautiful old burger king/soon-to-be in n out just up the road at 29th or wherever across from both Taos co-op and also that big white frat house where the boys are ALWAYS playing basketball with loud rap music, and I walk by it every day and I like hearing the rap music. Sometimes it’s 2pac and I think that’s my favorite.
I hope the jack in the box secretly becomes something though, people individually and slowly at first find that the drive thru window still works, and a lady or a man with an artistic heart and nowhere else to go crawls in through the drive-thru. The person, we’ll refer to them as ‘they’ (note: I said this then immediately went back to using HE. Please understand that i don’t mean to exclude women from this fantasy scenario), lives on the street and collects scraps but, he’s also worked as an electrician of some type, and so a lot of what he hauls around is technological refuse from the student union store or best buy dumpsters. (bonus: Best Buy does also sell candy, so maybe once every year when they restock, boom, FREE expired candy--Free! candy doesn’t expire you fools!) And the jack in the box cash register is still there. And the tinkerer starts with his tinkering, and repairing things, and eventually he’ll start to turn the un-fixable scraps into art. He’ll put different parts from different things together and will give them new life. An mp3 player and a toaster and a circuit board come together and now they’re a singing microwave in which expired best buy candy can be microwaved. An old Garmin GPS and a tangle of charging cords become a new friend. And this solo worker will become obsessed, and build and build a world of machines and a robot to operate them, and then this my friends, is the beginning of the creation of our new Godhead who has actually already existed and does exist now and She is a fair god with a vengeful streak and it’s too late, if you werent’ on board from the get-go, she will smite you. She actually already has smote you. And this is why the jack in the box is the portal to the outside part of the matrix, whatever they call that in the movie, I actually only watched part of one of those, even though it’s up my alley philosophically, i just think the whole thing moved a little slow. LOVE keanu tho. Saw his band Dog Star play once in LA, at the Troubadour I think?, and he seemed like a totally normal, nice, bass-playing hottie. My brothers and I used to love the movie, Parenthood, which featured an all-star ensemble cast like Dianne Wiest, Rick Moranis, Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, that one guy with the curly hair who’s not around anymore, Martha Plimpton as a rebellious teen, and her boyfriend as played by Keanu Reeves. It’s Keanu at peak hair-tossing which is saying something, my friends, and he has a line that goes, “You need a license to buy a dog, or drive a car-- Hell, you need a license to catch a fish. But they’ll let any butt-reaming asshole be a father.” Which is a line that still gives me chills today. And his delivery of that line was just really keanu, really on-point. I gotta go.
