Camp Mozart's

Where was I last weekend?

Well, the bills have to be paid, and my quest to pay them broght me to work on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. Why was I given such a schedule...well, the ACL Festival was in town, and a good portion of the workforce at Mozart's coffee roasters (beside, of course, myself), had taken a leave of absence to attention.

And we were busy, quite busy, thanks to tens of thousands of evacuees from
Hurrican Rita crowding in from Houston. The two large groups of people spawned the spontaneous creation of Camp Mozart's...the main schedule consisited of the afore mentioned work shifts that my friend Jim and I shared, then crashing at Jim's place...and a good deal of hanging out during the day on both Saturday and Sunday.

I arrived on Friday, the village idiot circus had begin around Zilker park...thousands of out of town drivers, blending with the usual local traffic, maneuvering their cars in a fashion that suggested the apocalypse was indeed neigh. I decided to drive from the U.T. area over to Thundercloud to grab a sub sandwitch before work. Two miles, twenty minutes and three near accidents later I arrived following behind four rather good looking girls who apparently thought that local ordanances permittied good looking co-eds to walk side by side down the middle of public streets. I wave and smiled in an admittedly sarcastic fashion...they didn't seem to notice but fortuntely I had reached my destination.

I purchased a classic sub and had a good but short conversation with the workers there as we lamented the upcoming weekend and our general distain for large crowds of tourists. Working in the Central Austin area means you generally dread the weeks that most people in Central Texas look forward to. Did I mention it was hot? If the organizers of the Austin City Limits Music Festival were to schedule their even in the middle of January, I'll bet you a pair of overpriced Coldplay tickets that the temperature will still exceed 100 degrees. My car, fortunetly, does not have air conditioning...making driving in unusually bad (and it's usually bad) traffic even more exciting and confortable. Aparently the bonus features of purchasing an A.C.L. wristband included hours of exposure to 101-108 degree heat and the blazing Texas Sun, trading body sweat with a few thousand other people, and inhaling an unhealthy amount of dust that was kicked up by the 70,000 or so attendees on the very dry surface of Zilker Park. But hey, at least the Hurricane didn't affect us, allthough apparently the only way to get the temperature under 100 degrees here in September is a hurricane, which is not something you can just cross your fingers and count on happening.

Camp Mozart's did improve however. After a tiring and long night of work I crashed at Jim's place...and woke up the next day to find that some very awesome friends of mine from other area codes and states had driven into town. We kicked it around the drag for a while, I went with them to Chuy's but then Jim and I left for the second night of work at Camp Mozart's. It happened to be the busiest night I've ever worked. An extremely long line, two of them in fact, out the door all night. Evacs and their families for the first half of the tight, and then hundreds of festival-goers later on, most of whom resembed tomatoes and said that they were having a great time at A.C.L. despite all of the retinal damage and the overall look of "dear God what am I doing in this horrible blazing furnace of a place" look in their eyes.

Sunday was much more of a sublime day. Abel was my one friend in the group that came to town that didn't have a wristband, so I kept him company all day. We got a burrito, did a couple of random errands, then drove around in my car in the 108 (offically) degree heat before realzing what a terrible idea that was and going back to our friend's apartment where I got to watch the Cowboys pull out a startiling come from behind victory over the lousy 49ers. Work was all that was left at this point so I went and made it though one more evening and then returned to San Marcos, signaling the end to Camp Mozart's...not my favorite camp ever, but it was better than going to jail, or something like that.

Oh, did I mention I'm really glad that they don't hold the A.C.L. fest every weekend? Well, I'm really glad...otherwise I would move to Sweden, purchase a team of sled dogs, and drive off to the North Pole where hopefully I would be cryogenically frozen next to Ameila Earhart and Tupac only to be unfrozen in a future void of such mass-tourist corporate dollar driven events, or a future where at the very least I can afford to attend them.