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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nI asked Jonah if she wanted to come to Austin with me for work. I wasn’t being all that serious about it, but she was. Until she checked the weather and discovered that the temperature was mid-80s. That was weeks ago. This week, the week that I’m here, the high is at least 95 every day. Humans apparently voluntarily decide to live here. I told her it was no big deal–they have air conditioning. Joke’s on me, my employer hosted the welcome happy hour on a rooftop bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the work thing, I wandered around the streets of Austin by myself. I passed the Floppy Disk Repair Company on my way to a promising place with live music called Shiner. It stopped being promising when I got to the door and was greeted with rap. I was going to just go back to my hotel, when I decided that the Floppy Disk Repair Company must be a bar, since even in the days when it was relevant, there wasn’t much in the way of repairing floppy disks. The well-groomed guy outside told me I couldn’t go in without the code, and gestured at a numeric keypad. I shrugged and kept walking… “BUT!” he said, and I stopped and turned around. “If you tell me a joke, I’ll let you in.” I thought for a minute, pretty sure that I had absolutely no interest in going in, and decided to tell him my best joke. “What’s purple and commutes?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. “An Abelian grape!” He actually did a good job pretending to laugh, then let me in. I wondered if he’d have had the same reaction to the dead baby varient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was only one couple inside a very dark bar. The music was some sort of innocuous ska, and the bar stool reasonably comfortable. I was presented with a menu of very fancy cocktails but ordered a scotch. The bartender with his shirt unbuttoned to the navel poured me a Laphroaig, noticed that there wasn’t really a whole second pour left in the bottle and poured me the rest. I thanked him and spent the next hour watching fairly normal bar things happen and walked back to my hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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