Across the river the giant Texas flag that flies every day over the state cemetery waves lazily in a breeze I don’t feel here. My immediate audience is the lake/river blowing west and flowing east by southeast, bound for a trip over the dam and a meandering journey to the rice patties of Colorado county, maybe even all the way to Matagorda Bay and the wide brown shores of the gulf. Four points off north, one of the eastside moon towers are flicking to life, my little link to my old ‘hood in Clarksville, the last real Austin neighborhood we lived in. Far to my right, just above my Vodka Tonic, the hulking remnants of the Holly Street Power Plant sits idle,  it’s silence an invitation for developers, real estate speculators and yuppies waiting to pounce on this fertile, flat, non-environmentally-controversial piece of shoreline.  Seventy years of geo-racial division will, I’m sure,  soon be fixed by mixed-use development, condo lofts that no one who grew up here can afford and bistro restaurants who will never understand that the two key ingredients to good migas are ample grease and an abuelita with skills on a flat-top grill.

Pan left, and the bats are following the water to the rice patties, moving not in their swirling cloud as in that painfully hot part of late summer, but as solo travelers hitting the road for some dinner.

From where I sit, to either side there are people, taking the air and dogs. A quick calculation of popped collars, shitty music playing from phones and dochebag haircuts, makes me realize the dogs are supeior company, even the pomeranian, whose hair cut and goofy collar, after all is not his fault.

Really, it’s time to get to work and tick a few things off my list so that tomorrow isn’t a complete clusterfuck. The better choice it seems would be to leave the work to the bats, the river, the doochebags, and the pomeranian with the goofy dew and head back west to the mountains. Take the car, grab the lady and go bum around as the fall colors light up the hillsides, and the fade under snow. Make do.

Seems like a much better plan.