My mother once told me that Florida is where people go to wait to die. Well, I decided, Austin is where people go to learn to live. I believe I have found the perfect city. "You really ought to consider moving here," said a new friend of mine, a previous inhabitant of Florida, as well. You know, I think I just might!

On this break before our next tour, I was enticed to relocate to Austin mainly because of the marvels I had heard about the music scene, and I was ecstatic to discover music really is everywhere! Blues melodies trickle out of bars on downtown Sixth Street. The homeless vamp on harmonicas, trash cans, and their own bodies along the sidewalks of Red River and Congress. The radio actually makes me feel things, which a typical top 40 radio based out of any other city struggles to do presently. My new roommate made a clarifying statement yesterday. He said, "Austin is a city of retired 20-somethings. Nobody really does anything." But we are doing things! We are living. We are breathing in humanity. We are feeling alive and doing it just the way we like.

Just yesterday I was invited to a local Tex-Mex joint for breakfast, followed by a dip in Barton Springs' pool. (By the way, this pool is topless. Yet another example of the "free-spirited" Austinites living life to the fullest!) Human beings of all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds gathered to take pleasure in the frigid waters of the natural and man-made spring. Some had tattoos, some tucked literature under their arm, and some proudly displayed their baby-on-the-way-bellies. Everyone came to commune with everybody else, to be surrounded by an inherent creative current. We haven't lost our passion yet. We still have managed to maintain a bit of integrity along with optimism as we all gain insight to an increasingly terrifying and depressing reality.

I am thinking constantly, organizing, analyzing, theorizing about the city and its oddness. At the end of each new day, after my thoughts have settled and just before I retire for the evening, I allow the contorted features of my face to relax after its physical display of the confusion and awe accumulated in my mind and simply allow myself to just be. After all, like the locals profess daily, we're just "keepin' Austin weird!"

'Til next time,
Meg