These pictures have been collecting in my harddrive. None is really worth a blog entry in of themselves, and they don’t really fit any particular themes. But I’m too cheap with my data to just file them away without doing anything with them, so I saved them for a rainy blog day like today.
I took this photo at one of the apartment complexes on Manor Rd. The building is a series of efficiencies inhabited almost exclusively by 20-something hipsters.
It’s interesting because every door has ten pounds of plastic-wrapped phonebook leaning against it, phonebooks that had already been sitting there for several days by the time I took the pictue. No one in complex has any particular use for the things. It’s been years since I’ve used a phonebook myself (or owned a phone serviced by a local phone company). I suspect we won’t be seeing sights like this for much longer.
Here’s Julia at the Larry Craig bathroom in the Minneapolis airport.
I used the stall immediately next to the one where Senator Larry Craig was arrested (which was occupied). I would have hung around for a while to see if the guy next door poked my feet, but I got cold feet (so to speak).
It was over a year that FEMA was renting out the old JC Penny at the Highland Mall, doing continued relief work or something related to hurricane Ike. They’re gone now, leaving an empty department store and a failing mall.
This is a backyard addition on the East Side.
When I lived out there I saw it go from an incongruous tower of cinder blocks to this somewhat neat pink thing. I was thinking of featuring it in an article about Austin folly houses, but I couldn’t find many other examples of preposterous architecture.
Walnut Creek is about twice as long as any other creek in the Austin area. It seems to have water flowing even in the peak of summer. And when it rains, the flood waters leave all the litter and crap of the East Side on trees next to the creek.
The Aquadome is a concrete hemisphere stuffed with tropical and marine fish.
In their back lot there’s a series of overgrown water features, filled with turtles, goldfish, and aquatic plants.
The Round Rock Outlet Mall. A place that I would never visit voluntarily. At night, its concrete avenues echo eerily with muzak and the distant screaming of children.
This donut shop sits in the shadow of an elevated highway.
Under a picnic table umbrella, men gather to play Chinese chess. At the counter inside you can see the regulars, four or more men sitting nursing their coffee and a fifty-cent donut. Each is of a different ethnicity and cultural background. At any one time there isn’t a single shared language across the group. But they are happy and converse together as equals. The one thing they have in common is they are all retired. This is why they lived. To spend their last days at the corner donut shop with their neighbors.
I often wish I was a regular there.
