20 Years Back in Austin

Well.  

Twenty years we've been back in Austin.

September 16th, 2006, we made it back to Austin.

September 19th, 2006, we closed on our house.

September 21, 2006, we were in the house.

In the late 90's, I had come to know Jack Kirby's Fourth World, really loving Mister Miracle, super escape artist, and his warrior wife, Big Barda.  And, yes, of course circa 2001 I'd read The Escapist by Michael Chabon (still a favorite) and understood what Chabon was doing.  But for me it was Mister Miracle (and Orion in other circumstances) and King Kirby - that material which no doubt helped inspire Chabon's book.  

And, man, did those Mister Miracle comics feel like an outlet while we were in Phoenix.  Trapped by geography, shackled by circumstance, with everyone certain you'll detonate any moment?  I still consider our return to Austin a great escape.

Our story:  Some will recall the dot-com-bust economy kind of cratered the Austin tech scene in 2001, which led to Jamie losing her job.  In April of 2002, Jamie headed out to the greater Phoenix area for an opportunity and a new life of adventure.  I was trailing behind, spending the next few months closing down my job at UT Austin and packing up our house (down in the 78704 when that area was affordable).  

Jamie had basically picked our house out in a Phoenix suburb, Chandler, and I was fine with that.  I didn't know the city, and was willing to explore.

That said - we learned *a lot* about what our real house needs were from that house (no TV sharing a wall with the master bedroom, for example).  

We swiftly determined Phoenix was not our final stop.  Culturally, we were a bad fit.  Summer was endless and kind of horrible - it's a place where no one should live, but for some reason is one of the most populated places in America.

Jamie's health was shaky from the start of our stay there.  We knew the local hospitals, we knew their wait times in the ER.  We lost at least one New Years and one Halloween to hospital trips.  Missed concerts and walked out of movies and plays because of her condition.  It was a lot.

We'd tried to return to Austin from time-to-time.  However, every interview I'd had on the phone with Austin organizations and companies had taught me that they wanted someone who was already local.  If I wanted to work in Austin, I had to be in Austin.  

After four years in The Valley of the Sun, Chandler and Tempe areas - during which we had zero fun - we pulled up stakes and moved back to Austin.  

Did I like Chandler, our bedroom community, while we were there?  No.  But also, it was boring and it sucked.  

A quick illustration:  We saw a "jazz festival" advertised for downtown Chandler, a strip of shops and restaurants about three blocks long a few miles from our house.  Jazz.  A music where the sets don't usually even start til most people are in bed.  So, knowing Jamie was not going to stay up that late, I thought we'd get dinner and then hit one of the shows.  

We arrived at about 7:00.  Just in time to see the conclusion of "jazz fest", which was a parade of 60-year-olds in golf carts throwing beads at people as they made two loops past the main staging area for whatever had previously occurred. Chandler's Jazz Fest was over.

This was pretty typical of everything in my area.

During the Arizona sojourn, we were of an age where everyone we met was primarily interested in how long it might be until we had babies and became real people.  And when we said "well, we aren't having any kids", people would basically turn on their heel and walk away.  

I am guilty of a bit of hyperbole to make a point, but this literally happened on two occasions.  One of them was the crazy religious zealot who lived across the street who thought Green Lantern was an agent of the devil. So.  But nonetheless.

Because of my middle-management position, I couldn't be too friendly with my reports, and I couldn't be pals with my bosses, which left... no one to meet or hang with.  Add into that Jamie's health, and it did not make for much of a social bonanza.

Plus, I knew I was missing *everything* back in Austin.  

UT Football won the NCAA BCS at the Rose Bowl in January 2006, and that night, running around my front yard in the dark after we won the game, and the following day when I had no one to discuss the game with?  It was the start of the end.

I'd hear what my pals still in Austin were up to, and it was routinely better than what we were doing.  Which was a lot of nothing.

And, since we'd left, Austin had also really gone nuts with The Alamo Drafthouse, and I was a movie guy (and the Phoenix film scene was absolutely miserable, presaging current audience problems).  ACL Fest had really taken off.  SXSW was exploding.

So, sick of dust storms, certain of the coming water crisis, bored as hell when we weren't dealing with personal issues, and tired of Arizona politics, which were worse than Texas, we began plotting.

By July we had our ducks in a row and told our families we were coming back.  

Then it was house-hunting, etc.. 

Had we to do it over again, I would have recommended when we got to Chandler/ Tempe/ wherever, we rent a place for two years.  But, I was not wrong when I said I wanted to get some equity in a house if we were going to move out there.  Fortunately, the boom that followed our arrival in Chandler meant that we made some money on the sale of the house which enabled us to buy our current place.*

Eventually The Dug and KareBear came out, and we left Chandler on September 15th.  Even that was tied to a small crisis as our realtor called to tell me our first floor had flooded.  After the movers took out our fridge, turning the water off, when we turned the water back on, apparently it dripped until the new owners arrived.  Sorry about that, new owners.  But by then the paperwork was signed and it wasn't our house any more.

never could get Jamie into the helmet

Anyway, it's been twenty years!  

These days, I can't even really remember our time in the desert.  I rarely speak to anyone from that period, I've had a few careers since then.  It's been two decades since I was anywhere in Phoenix but the airport.  Most of what I do recall is one catastrophe on top of the next.  

I don't really have any feelings about it anymore other than the certainty that it was not where we should be.

But we left.  Escaped.

Is my cell phone case a Mother Box homage?  Maybe.  ping ping ping

Sure, there have been plenty of rocket sleds and X-Pits since.  But I also know we're in a good spot here.  Steanso lives a few miles away with CardBoard Belts and the Niblings. My folks live 45 minutes away headed north, my father-in-law lives 45 minutes South.  We were living nearby for the last year of Jamie's mother's life when she fell ill.  My cousin lives in North Austin, and my dad's brother moved here last year.

Austin is not the city I left in 2002, and it's not the city I came back to in 2006.  Time moves on, I'm now middle-aged and not as likely to go out on a school night.  Re-reading the posts, I'm keenly aware of how much I came back for has since gone away.  A post for another day, maybe.

But I'll never regret coming back.  That doesn't mean there weren't good people out there.  There certainly will.  One or two, I talk to still, even sharing goofs over Instagram.  But I can say that our return and 20 years have been the right choice.

*And I was also not wrong that the bottom was about to fall out on the Phoenix market, which cratered in 2007 and presaged the 2008 crisis, which was super easy to spot when you heard how real estate was working in Phoenix and Las Vegas at the time.