Today I worked from Joel’s in San Antonio, the camper tucked safely into the driveway. All the comforts of home are here, including a massive TV, but I find myself wishing more for outdoor time than anything else. It’s been relatively cold in San Antonio since I arrived, with no sun and temps in the mid-50s.
Yesterday we went to a grocery store and I felt a bit overwhelmed by the amount of people there. I’ve been dealing mostly with one or two people at a time for almost two months, though crowds combined with consumerism have always made me feel on edge. Although the grocery store, as a necessity, is definitely consumerism-lite.
Still, for the most part, people at a grocery store don’t really want to be there and aren’t likely enjoying the experience; you can sense that, like there is some tension in the space between us. Places where people want to be are on the whole much better, especially if no one is buying anything. That’s been my experience, anyway.
I was busy with work today, but found time for a 45-minute walk around the neighborhood. Every house seems to have a 6-foot privacy fence, almost all identical, as if the neighbors are doing something super secret, like naked tanning, maybe. The sidewalks in this neighborhood are oddly half the width of what you’d expect them to be, and many of them have mailboxes planted firmly in the middle. I’m not sure what the thinking is there, to go to the trouble of building a sidewalk only to not have the sidewalk function as a sidewalk.
San Antonio, though, does not make a lot of sense to me. In the half-a dozen times or more that I’ve visited, I’ve noticed that the city seems to be a poster-child for what happens with a lack of urban planning. There’s tons of space in Texas, so the city didn’t build up, but built out. Land is cheap, so why not. Houses and businesses are spaced generously, and the resulting sprawl leaves you able to travel on the interstate at 60 miles per hour and still be in the San Antonio city limits 90 minutes later (or at least it seems that way–I haven’t timed it). It takes forever to go anywhere, and if you don’t have a car, good luck to you.
One thing I noticed the first time I visited Texas were the birds. There are grackles here, specifically great-tailed grackles, and though I never thought I’d hate a bird, I think I hate the grackle. They make an absolutely grating, bizarre sound, almost like the sound you’d expect a robot to make as it began to summon the other robots to enact the plan to kill all the humans and take control. It’s more synthetic than animal, and I find it unsettling. I think a good public works project for the city would be to capture and remove the voice boxes of all the grackles. If I ran for office here, that would be my platform. Silent grackles for everyone. Once they clean that up, they can remove the mailboxes from the sidewalks.
Today I guilted Joel into mowing his lawn. It was over a foot tall.
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