Everybody Thinks Their Austin Was the Real Austin
So, in Austin, there’s a part of Guadalupe Street by campus called the Drag. It runs from about 19th Street, which is MLK, to, call it, maybe 29th Street.
Anyway, lots of student foot traffic, lots of action, people bumming around, and now at the very top of it there’s kind of a vintage area, which is absolutely cool.
So, this is all to say, I’ve spent a large part of my life out there.
I’ve been talking about it on Instagram, and it’s been interesting to people, which is new to me—to be interesting on social media.
And my next kind of phase of this Instagram BS is going through and talking about the different stages of when Austin was cool, because everybody seems to own theirs and think that was the real Austin, and now it’s the fake Austin.
Although no one says that. It’s always the implication.
Which is dumb.
Old hippies die hard.
I think this stuff needs to be memorialized, because there’s a lot of stuff that I have personal knowledge about that I haven’t seen put out there.
So why not get this stuff out there?
It’s not a book. It’s not an article. But it’s enough to be a social media post, so I will happily prop up the bottom of the stack.
One of the things I was telling somebody was that the Hole in the Wall menu used to, at the top, read:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
Which I found nothing but hilarious.
And no one gets it because no one reads those books anymore.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe—super popular. Part two, I believe, of Douglas Adams’ original Hitchhiker’s trilogy.
But I would say if you’re a Dungeon Crawler Carl person, that guy read those books. I know it by reading his books. For sure.
But there are a thousand little things, and they come out when you kind of start rolling tape. You have a general idea, and then you start going, and these things come out.
So hopefully we can resuscitate some of those.
Austin was great when.
But I would say that for a hundred different reasons, or more, Austin is great now.
I’ve watched my kids grow up here, and they don’t give a shit about my antiquated ideas of what was cool back then, because they’ve got their own cool.
And you know what?
It’s probably cooler.