In the context of an Introduction to Information Systems, I told my students this morning, at the branch campus down on the border, that about the time they were born, my job title was:

Webmaster.

They laughed at the sound of it

One guy told me afterwards that it sounded like some kind of warlock guy from a video game. I asked him if he’d ever heard the word ‘webmaster’ before, and he said no.

I think that might be true of the whole class, or very nearly so.

I confess it did make me feel old, but just for a second.

I got in the car and glided down to the coolest of the cool towns, the one that styles itself as:

Mayberry on Acid.

And it’s true. There are plenty of places that will proudly and somewhat ironically imply that they suffer from mental derangement. "Keep Austin Weird" and all.

But this one is truly and unironcially mentally ill by most objective measures.

Not in a violent way at all.

In a truly and beautifully broken way.

This was my view while I sipped my exquisite java and waited an interminably long time for my breakfast bagel.

It’s a picture that needs to be taken again, maybe many times, to better capture certain details.

That IS a bathtub with a mirror in it.

But you can’t really see the reflection in the mirror.

Nor can you easily tell that the window across the street used to be real, but then was boarded up, and finally painted over to look just like a real window again.

There’s a dimensionality to this view that is very rare and precious. Acidic, maybe.

You can almost and pretty much tell what the word in the closer window says, right? So it’s got that going for it too.

Mostly though it’s the meta-message that speaks to me.

Saying: Poor, and broken a little for real in the head, but committed to excellence of dubious sorts, and very, very cool.

It’s a view that resonates, to put it mildly. On acid, you might say that this is a picture of my soul.

I believe I’ll be trying to make this image again, and I’ll do a better job next time, and I’ll keep doing it until I get it right, or until my time in this landscape that I conditionally but genuinely love comes to a close.