The Visible Woman...February 20, 2004

I give myself leisure about three out of four moments. If you don't count sleep. If you do count sleep, I'm at ease most of the time. I'm easy on myself. Even when I worked, I goofed off a lot, I admit.

FFP is much more driven. So when he agrees to take off a weekday and just do whatever, that's a big deal.

After we drove to Dallas and delivered my dad to his youngest sister, we could have rushed off to a museum (some have been getting good press although the stars are over in Ft. Worth) or historical site. (In Dallas? What would that be? Dealey Plaza? Been there.) FFP felt better just walking and looking in some shops around our hotel. We were staying in The Melrose. I used to live near here. It's now a 'gay district'. Not surprising since we bought the coupon we are using at the hotel at the Austin Gay/Lesbian International Film Festival.

We look for something interesting in the neighborhood. We go in a couple of cool shops, stop in a gay book store for a book and a gay bar for a snack. FFP is enjoying just not doing much, looking around. We walk to a restaurant, look at the menu and make a reservation. We sit in the bar of the hotel and eat and drink.

A friend of ours shows up. We'd planned lunch with he and his wife tomorrow. His wife is working so he has drinks and dinner and wine with us. That's fun.

He walks us back to the hotel and we show him the room. Then we go back to the bar. There is this bad music...a guy with a keyboard and an IPOD-looking thing and he sings a little and blows the sax, badly. Even when he does a tune I like, I don't like. We have a port and go to the room.

We fall into bed, going to sleep pretty early. FFP seems OK kind of 'doing nothing' and he takes so little time off that I'm very cool with it, too.

My old neighborhood seems so foreign. And not because of the sexual orientation of the people who are around here. No, it's because of the razing of whole blocks to put up other buildings. And even where the buildings are not torn down, there are painted and changed and holding something entirely different. The Melrose stands, all renovated however, and there are a few shadowy vestiges of my past that I feel in a particular spot like Adair's Hamburgers (it was this building or this one) and Phil's Deli (I think it was here, across the street from the sign for a restaurant mysteriously left behind when the restaurant itself was destroyed, and the building looks familar but it's now Lucky's Diner). It was as if I took a day off wandering around a completely new place. I don't even remember these churches on Oak Lawn even. One looks as if it must have been here thirty years ago. The other just burned to the ground on Tuesday.