Keep Austin Out of the Insane Asylum

Weirdos.


Okay, remind me again exactly WHY Austinites are so concerned with staying weird? Are we on the edge of conformity? Not from where I'm sitting, which is inside a coffeeshop, facing a window where, just outside, tables and chairs are situated. Should there be anyone sitting at the tables right now? Logically, no. It's raining hard. But there's a crazy girl out there who doesn't appear to be aware of the rain.

I wish I had my camera so I could take a photograph of her on the sly, but I don't, so I'll paint a picture of the scene. There is one large puddle and many small puddles on the table. One huge puddle on the empty chair beside her. A drenched, heavyset girl sporting a 'fro, some glasses, a black shirt, listening to music on her headphones (I hope). Even before it was raining, she was flailing around wildly, singing out loud, scratching her 'fro in a very furious manner. She had journals, books, notebooks, spread out on the table, just scribbling away. So she was scribbling, singing, stopping the scribbling, scratching her 'fro, dancing, going back to the scribbling. I thought she was an eccentric art student or something, but now I think she's crazy. ...She was somewhere else when it started raining. I looked at her table and saw her books getting very wet. I had almost decided to run out and get them and bring them inside when she reappeared, strolling nonchalantly to her table, sitting down, not moving her books. Not moving her books. She just left her books there for a few minutes. (Can you tell this bothered me?) Letting the ink spread into blur on the page. After she finished one of her solos, she finally put her books away and got up to dance in the rain. She's still sitting there, just singin' and shaking out that hair of hers.

Before this, a girl at another table was working on a drawing. The title of it was "Physcology and Art." The title was pretty much the focal point, too. I wondered whether I should go out there and tell her she had misspelled "psychology" (or whatever she meant to spell) before she invested all that time into it. I decided not to. She seemed really into her work. She was sharing a cigarette with her little long-haired friends, so I felt image was probably pretty important to her. I hope that was not a school assignment.

Oh, the girl is gone. Maybe she melted. Man, I don't understand people. I only thought I was strange. Nope. I'm not.

My point is that Austin is weird, and I think it's always going to be that way, and I really think if anything, we should be more concerned with preserving just a smidge of the sanity that's holding over from preceding generations.

* BTW, I have this irrational fear that my new job will prevent me from ever doing anything on my own time ever again, so I'm cramming in as many blogs and e-mails as I can beforehand.