OK–it was just a long weekend at Netroots Nation, but I don’t have any other good excuse for not posting for so long. I was a spousal tagalong at the conference, which is just in its third year and still could use a little more direction and a little less homogeneity, but there’s a distinct electric swell of hopefulness, a sense of plugged-in progressives really coming together after eight years in the wilderness. Best panel hands down: a lively, supersmart discussion about Gitmo and the legal horizons going forward, with special props to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill and Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick, both fantastic speakers.
Austin was hot, mellow and pleasant; even with a car I spent most of my time downtown, a baking grid of low-rise Alamo-style brick buildings lately giving way to 10-20 story high-rise condo and office buildings, giant cranes swinging this way and that. Even a gritty old one-story diner called Las Meninas, a triumph of Mexican home-cooking (the least savory breakfast thing on the menu being granola, clearly a grudging nod to the hippies) owned by sisters who’d stayed afloat on the lunchtime money of the construction workers yet now have to move down the block to make way for a developer; one or both of them had been savvy enough to buy a nearby, probably landmarked corner building. But everyone else, well, they’re screwed.
Ate way too much barbecue, including a 40-mile drive out to a Wall-Drug sized joint called Salt Lick, and went tubing, which sounds athletic, but really just means driving another 40 miles to pick up a few six-packs of Lone Star and float down a river in individual black rubber tires, one reserved for the beer cooler. You just drift amiably around clots of college students hooked to each other’s tubes with their feet, amoebalike, and spill your cans on the mild rapids downstream; it’s mighty fine. Swam at Barton Springs, the legendary limestone-cavern-natural-spring-turned-public-pool in Zilker Park. It looks unremarkable at first, a huge no-food-allowed Olympic-esque pool with a few low limestone ridges at the south end, a cyclone fence blocking off the dam outlet and adorably dog-accessible river at the north end, and a single low diving board framed with two duck decoys, but it’s nifty and democratic: sloping grass to lay out towels, a refreshing 70 degrees year-round, ranging from quarried pebbles to weedy, algae-slickened-raw-stone to poured-concrete bottom allowing all ages to float and chat, laid-back yet watchful lifeguards.
Beautiful bungalow neighborhoods nestled in greenbelts around small tributaries dumping into the Colorado — which cuts right across downtown and hosts a nightly summer spectacle of thousands of Mexican fruit bats pouring from under the Congress Avenue bridge. Crowds literally line up along the river and the railing at sunset to see this — from the bridge they look like spawning fish, spilling out in a squeaking mass and then ducking back under the arch before soaring up into black insect-gobbling clots above the river. Nice time all around. Haven’t had that much fun at a conference I wasn’t officially working since…I guess that’d be the National Lesbian/Gay Journalists’ Conference in Minneapolis in the 90s, the one where my now-ex and I bought a raffle ticket at a bar and won a crazy vacation to Puerto Vallarta, just 200 gay men and us….but that’s a story for another time, kids…
