Look over there, it is the deep end.. and then there is another turn

So let’s jump in

So we know that air pollution doesn’t stop Covid19 or it would have never gotten out of Wuhan, now clean air everywhere or....maybe not, just a day or so.

Is this a precursor to an alien invasion? No one can nail down anything specific about this virus, and every day we learn there is something new about this virus that is tearing us up as humans.  (on an honest side note, there is something mentioned about this virus robbing oxygen from blood cells so the organs are being starved, this makes this one vicious disease if anywhere close to being true)

The President of the United States said that we need to find a way to get light under our skin to cure the disease.   No wait I am serious he did say something like that, no, really, yes he did,     how absurd of a statement that in normal times people would laugh you out of the room except we have to deal with the fact he actually was thinking out loud in a national briefing without thinking at all about what he was saying. And then his only defense is he was being sarcastic. How far down the rabbit hole have we fallen?

Okay as I am writing this post, someone just told me something very sad and I must change gears. I didn’t read the article, yet I just heard Threadgill’s is closing permanently. This is the Austin, TX I knew. I do not know how many times I have eaten there. It even has a history of live music and Janis Joplin had ties there. That was before my time, yet we all knew the history, enjoyed going there for years, still can taste the Chicken Fried Steak in my head and so many other memories, and more than a few beers later I hear this news. This is that moment when you say it is the end of an era. The era probably ended years ago, but the demise is today. I can say that thankfully I managed to have eaten there a little over a year ago so even though I do not live in Austin anymore I did have an opportunity to relive a few moments recently. This is truly a sad day for many people who lived in Austin from God knows when to somewhat recently. There were some changes over the years as it went from an after-hours beer joint to a restaurant. And as it evolved or changed people will have different memories based on when they went there. Yet no matter when you went, you cannot forget your experience. Maybe it was the era, or the allure, or the food, or the nostalgia, or whatever, but if you lived for any time in Austin until recently if you said Threadgill’s people would smile. It was Austin like no other place. It had the history, it had the charm, it had the reputation, it was one of those places that made Austin unique. So the next time I visit Austin and if by chance I find myself driving down North Lamar I will look over and probably have to “scratch” my eye as something special is no longer part of the landscape. 

I hate saying this, but the news of Threadgill’s is something I completely understand since it was a restaurant that was no longer catering to the Austin restaurant crowd, it is still hard to accept. I was attempting to post some sarcasm and madness on this wonderfully beautiful Sunday evening here in North Texas, but now I am sitting here feeling a bit lost. Threadgill’s was an institution, part of Austin that honestly died years ago and I have been mad about ever since. The developers took over Austin in the 80′s and made it a big city. Up until then, Austin was unique, warm, inviting, and truly “weird”. Now Keep Austin Weird is a tired marketing cliche, one that I own a t-shirt because one of my children gave it to me as a gift. I wear it with pride even though now it is old and beat up. Money destroyed Austin, South by Southwest helps, but it is its own world, it is not the Austin people reference it to. 

Austin had its own music scene for give or take 10-15 years that included the outlaw cowboys to Stevie Ray Vaughn and much in between. This was probably the heyday of what we all romanticize our feelings about Austin.It was an amazing time and I was blessed to share some of that time in my life. People came to Austin because it was Austin. If you talk about Austin during this time, you must say the “Armadillo” or the “beer garden” or Austin City Limits or even the Coliseum because bands you never heard of to bands that are legends played there. The developers took that away because money is more important than soul or character or life. You wonder why sometimes I am a cynic or a grumpy old man then look no further than Austin in the very early 80′s when the transformation began in earnest. I watched beauty give way to money. 

The landmarks and the parks are all still there in Austin. You can go to Zilker Park or Town Lake or Lake Austin. You cannot go to Austin a sleepy college town that houses the State Capitol. There is Guadalupe Street, but is it “the Drag”?  Bands still play in a club or two in Austin, but going to a street festival of all homegrown bands, hmmm not so much. Austin was unique, now it is another large city that caters to a millennial audience as a “hip” place. It is packaged not free-flowing, plastic not organic, produced not original, it is not Austin, it is Austin the City, nothing more. 

Money is not inherently evil, money can be put to good use, but when making money takes precedence over everything else then money becomes the root of all evil or at least all that is ugly in mankind. Austin in 1978 was something special and unique. Austin in 1988 was just another growing city in the United States, hell-bent on marketing an image than being a place for people to actually live life. People still live there and people still enjoy life there, there is no doubt, but they are people who also dream of a different time. A time when a struggling artist could exist, when camaraderie was as important as a paycheck, where local businesses ruled, where wealth was measured by the number of people you spent your life with even if your bank account was large or small. Am I an idealist, probably so, but you could live it in Austin. 

Threadgill’s closed and that is sad because it represented the time when owning a local business was a good thing, you employed people and your customers loved every minute of going there because it was special in its own right. This pandemic is going to take out many businesses like it unless we can find the leadership either locally or nationally to put local businesses and the people first. If we choose the corporations and the elite again after this recession then the United States will no longer be the United States, it will be a conglomerate of greed and dystopia simultaneously, but it will not be a great country. Money never made us great, our people make us great. Take that away and we will be worse than Austin in 1988 because we will be the decline of even what was Austin in 1988. 

This pandemic is sad enough, yet to let the uniqueness of who we are as a people, the conglomeration of the whole world, die because our leadership is not representing us anymore is more than sad. It is utterly a horrible moment in history. In the 1950′s Threadgill’s was a city limit beer joint that a few customers went to for an evening out during a time when the country was experiencing a growth spurt unprecedented in the history of the world. Yet they were tied together as part of the fabric of our country. The growth, the prosperity, but also the family, the friends the dreams the camaraderie the “good times” and the opportunity, but when opportunity didn’t represent a requirement but a way of life, you enjoyed the fruits of your labor, not the demands of corporate manipulation that encroaches into your very being your soul. Let's find a way to keep Threadgill’s soul alive for eternity and not regulate it to the hell of nothingness, a past that has disappeared so that no young guy named Kenneth can open a small joint and one day people speak fondly of his memory. 

This wasn’t the deep end I originally planned, maybe another day for that one. I wrote the title before I heard the news so I updated the title a bit now. 

Cheers and especially Cheers to Kenneth Threadgill because even though he has been gone for a while, his memory should live on within us forever.