Austined

Longbranch Inn: Men's room graffiti

I've never spent more than a couple of days at a spell in Austin, which might be why I've never found time to hate the place. It is, as much to its detriment as its credit, almost exactly the sort of town I'd dream up to live in, except that it's crawling with Texans and positively blighted by burnt orange. We all make sacrifices, I suppose. This bathroom wall I shot in a bar called the Longbranch Inn, an east Austin joint festooned with taxidermy painted various shades of psychedelia, stuffed bobcats with flowers behind their ears, that sort of thing. As I was idling on the street, preparing to leave, I saw a pick-up truck make a surprise U-turn directly into a man crossing the street. It was dark, and so were his clothes and skin; it's likely the driver was tired or tipsy and simply too lazy to look where she was going. He stuck his arms out to keep from getting walloped and caught the bumper. Out of my earshot, he and the driver exchanged words. He walked to the bar. "Did you see that?" he asked me. I said I did. "She hit me! She ran into me!" I said he might consider himself a lucky fellow: Hit by a truck, and here he was walking around just fine. Even people who do wrong by us enrich us, by my silly logic, so long as they don't go so far as to actually harm us.