I keep trying to write this post as though it could possibly be amusing or interesting. I wrote a list of the things I wanted to write about SxSW and “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” is the prelude. But the truth is, it’s boring.
Why should you care about the fact that I spent opening night of SxSW Film and Interactive watching the second half of a movie that was pretty much all title (Fuck) as far as I’m concerned by myself, eating chicken sate at Thai Passion by myself, going back to the parking lot that you’ll come to know as the Bad Parking Lot by myself, and meeting up with the Bside Boys by myself.
Because, dear reader, your heroine is clearly out of her element even before the story begins. She has dropped the girls off at their respective sleepovers. Not only is she not late, she has time on her hands because she listened to her husband tell her the time of the big opening night screening, clearly a sign of having taken leave of her senses. She does not like a documentary about swearing. She eats before she gets too hungry. And when she arrives at the parking lot, she’s the experienced Paramount Pusher, the one who handed out 3-D glasses at the Austin Film Festival before she handed out the extras on Halloween. She has the t-shirts in her car (actually, it’s her husband’s car; make a note of this because it will matter as the story proceeds), which is already parked in the pole position of the Bad Parking lot.
Three of the Bside Boys appear in their black shirts and jeans. Everyone takes piles of shirts and begins walking down deadman’s curve towards Brazos. You heroine starts to laugh. She explains to the Bside Boys that if she were to tell her high school friends that, at 41, her Deadhead dreams have finally come true and she is essentially a t-shirt dealer with a crew, well, they wouldn’t really believe her.
Reader, I’m tempted to write, “Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” but that would be a cliche and you know you deserve better than that.
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