But I did take a few nice shots tonight – they may be the last, however.

My argument consisted of a fallacy, the classic “post hoc” fallacy – after this, therefore because of this. I blamed Seattle for most of my problems at the time. I now know this to be completely undeserved, because my problems accompanied me to Austin. It’s not Seattle’s ‘fault’ that I happened to live there during a particularly tough time in my life. After all, a city is not a person. After all, I was born there. It’s as much a hometown as Austin is.

Now that I have the benefit of clarity that comes from hindsight, I’ve been looking at the pictures I took during my time there – I was truly on the edge, and the photos reflect it. Yet they show a remarkable patience that I won’t likely see again.

Half the fun of revisiting these photos is reading the captions I attached to them at the time (they’re all on Flickr – from August 2008 to March 2009, I took 2,240 pictures; 575 in November 2008 alone!) The captions give away little hints as to how I was really feeling at the time.

This little town, between Temple and Waco and about 70 miles from Austin, has the misfortune of having its downtown literally bisected by Interstate 35. It’s bad enough that the towns were so small they had to get hitched in their nomenclature, but what kind of Moses-lite urban planner allowed this one to happen? To be fair, there are towns this size far from freeways that have deader downtowns, and this one is almost 100% inhabited with commerce, so perhaps it’s a maim and a scar but not a fatal blow to this little McLennan County hamlet.

Anyway, I’ve wondered about it since I was a kid, so I finally stopped and bought a candy bar there late last week. Now I can say I’ve seen the sights, I suppose. I feel for towns like this – it could have been the next Round Rock had things aligned ever so slightly askew from where they are now.

This is taken from the overpass (you can see my shadow to the left)

And there’s my car on the main street (Ranch Road 7)