Sunday, March 4, 2012

Austin, Texas: The Capital of Preciousness


Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Austin, the Capital of Preciousness

The democratically-elected city council of Austin, Texas has inhaled the pixie dust.  Effective in March of 2013, retailers who provide customers with a sack for their purchases will be in violation of the awful majesty of the law and the dilated pupils of the Eyes of Texas.

And not a moment too soon, I say, for who, while visiting Austin, has not feared being stalked by a drug-crazed grocery sack in the parking garage late at night?

Grocery sacks are increasingly notorious for their home invasions, and don’t even get me started about the drunken grocery sacks staggering around 6th Street.

Grocery sacks gang up at intersections and at the entrances to stores holding out buckets and demanding money “for the missions.”

You can see grocery sacks lurking in dark alleys making drug deals, and more grocery sacks luring children into lives of crime.

Grocery sacks hang out in the parks playing loud music and smoking cigarettes and stomping the flowers with their carbon feet-prints. 

There are some who presume to defend the capitalist grocery sack.  The humble grocery sack, they say, can be used over and over (in AustinSpeak, “post-consumer recycling”).  A grocery sack can cover the hot-dish for the church luncheon.  A grocery sack makes a pretty good Halloween mask.  The more Occupy-ish among us can use a grocery sack for a facial disguise when holding up a stop-and-rob in order to liberate The People’s goods from the belly of the capitalist beast.  A smaller sack can be popped loudly in order to annoy big sister – maybe the Big Sisters on the Austin City Roost.  Paper bags carry groceries, used dishes from a garage sale, good used clothes to Goodwill, ‘jammies and a toothbrush for a sleepover, and magazines and books for the nursing home. 

And in the end, the brave little grocery sack, its life of humble service at an end, is easily composted with full military honors.  If, for some reason, a beastly Republican disposes of it improperly, the remains of the grocery sack simply fly away into the country, there to biodegrade back into the natural world from whence it came, into the Samsara of life and death, to be reborn as a majestic oak tree or as a happy little petunia.

Well, comrade, that’s reactionary thinking.  Grocery sacks are evil; the Austin city council acting in concert with the will of The People and of the gods has decreed their banishment into the desert.  So let it be written; so let it be done.  Carry those carrots home in your pocket, you fascist.

Someone’s sister-in-law, and you know her, the unemployable thirty-something with the jet-pilot glasses and a master’s degree in fashion design or hospitality, is to be granted a $2 million dollar budget to persuade The People that nuisance and humiliation are somehow good for them.  Thus, subjects of Austin will not only be punished for possession of an illegal grocery sack, they will have to pay for the propaganda – um, teachable moment.

“Keep Austin Weird?”  But Austin no longer possesses a weird to be kept; Austin is now simply another dull, grey provincial town of fearful subjects trudging their grim, grocery-bagless streets with heads bowed in passive obedience to their heavy-handed soviet.

-30-

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