dale bridges

(Read Part 2 and/or Part 3)

There are several things you need to know before reading this blawg post.

Number 1 (and this is by far the most important): I am an asshole. I’m not the kind of asshole that wears Ax Body Spray and roofies girls’ drinks at frat parties or the kind that wears wife beaters and refers to vaginas as “hotdog warmers” or the kind that pulls up next to homeless men in BMWs and tells them to get jobs or Ann Coulter. I’m just a cranky, pessimistic bastard who hopes that people will be good but assumes they will suck. It’s a perfectly valid point of view in my opinion. I try to use my powers of assholery to protect the innocent and thwart the evil, but I usually just end up mildly pissing off other assholes and making my friends chuckle.

Number 2: I live by a specific philosophical code. This is not a code that I developed after observing human nature for numerous decades, ruminating on my findings, and then attempting to codify the results of my study into a system of psychological/physiological/behavioral rules. I’m no Plato. No, I developed my philosophy for much less altruistic reasons. After living a relatively selfish lower-class existence for thirty years or so, it dawned on me one day that practically all of the decisions in my life were dictated by my attempts to balance two factors: cheap vs. lazy. Obviously, this has little relevance when I’m making macro decisions, such as voting for the president or plotting to overthrow the world with my super-villain powers, but in the microcosm of my everyday life it is surprisingly consistent. I am profoundly cheap and perversely lazy. And since this is America, where money very often purchases convenience, a person such as myself who does not want to work hard for more money but wishes to remain comfortable in his poverty must constantly seek harmony between the stingy ying and the snoozy yang. (I promise this will be relevant later on in the story.)

Number 3: I recently got engaged to a fellow pessimist, albeit one much less abrasive than myself.

Number 4: Me and the less abrasive pessimist decided to move from Boulder, Colorado to Austin, Texas. In June. To an apartment we’d never seen.

Number 5: Also, neither of us had ever been to Austin. Ever.

Now we can begin…

Hey, boys and girls! Here’s a fun social experiment you can perform with your liberal acquaintances! Tell them that you’re moving and when they ask where say, “Texas!” and then watch their faces melt off like that Nazi dude at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

People have opinions about Texas. Strong opinions. Strange opinions. Long-winded opinions. Opinions they feel the need to share despite the fact that you never asked for said opinions or cared about said opinions or really gave a shit about any opinion the person in front of you is now spouting off concerning the decisions you are making with your life that have nothing whatsoever to do with them. There are various ways to deal with these particular opinion-sharers, but my favorite is to simply yell “YEEEEHAW!”, grab my crotch, spit, and walk away.

If you perform the same experiment but say “Austin!” the person you are talking to will inevitably reply, “You know that’s in Texas, right?” and then laugh hysterically as though they are the first person to ever think of this clever witticism. This happens approximately 72 percent of the time.

We discussed the issue for months, and in the end here’s the short version of why we decided to move to Austin: we hate winter and Austin is fairly cheap for a culturally relevant city.

Also, I’ve never seen an armadillo. (It’s like a dinosaur and a possum made sweet sweet love and then had a baby that’s apparently prone to vehicular suicide.)

It’s hot in Texas.

This is one of the intellectual tidbits the opinion-sharers like to share, as if the temperature south of Oklahoma is some closely kept government secret that only they are privy to. And if you tell them that, yes, you know it’s hot, they will interrupt you and say, “No, you don’t understand. It’s really hot.” Actually, I do understand, Mr. Italics. I’ve traveled and lived in countries all over the world, some of them in the desert, some of them in the tropics. I understand heat. We know that in the summer is going to be uncomfortably hot. We get it. We would simply rather be uncomfortably hot in the summer than uncomfortably cold in the winter. We’re heat people.

The other thing people like to tell you is how far your journey will be. Once again, this is not difficult information to obtain, especially in the age of Google. Just clickety-clack for two seconds on the old computer keyboard and WALLAH! It’s a 16-hour drive from Boulder to Austin.

And this is where my idiotic philosophical code almost ruined our move.

(Read Part 2 and/or Part 3)