People are always asking me, Roxanne, why did you decide to move to Austin for six weeks, and I am glad they are always asking that, because I have an answer.
For everything.
The decision to live in Austin for six weeks hinged on the amazing house we found while daydreaming of living in sunnier places. See, Dan and I both have a quality where we like the sunshine and feel deprived of vitamin D when it is gone, a unique quality, and one I am sure is shared by no one else. We deliberated on what we would do when there was an inevitable resurgence Winter COVID, which we knew would somehow be worse than its more whimsical cousin, Summer COVID, even though Summer COVID is the more murdery of the pair. Worse because at least with Summer COVID, the sun is out, and you can go outside, and for about ten minutes a day you can imagine that the world isn't burning, and worse because even in the best of times, I succumb hard to the winter blues, doing absolutely nothing to prevent them and in fact inviting in the dearth of vitamin D which then manifests as intense anxiety and depression, welcoming it into my home every year like a shitty parent who comes to stay for the holidays and makes terrible suggestions about how you should run your life, like maybe you should just give up doing anything forever because you're bad at all things, and look how pale you are, garbage child, have you considered no one ever seeing your face again, because it would be preferable to having to see your face.
And Dan likes the sun because in the winter he gets kind of tired sometimes.
So we figured living in a sunny place during winter might be an equally good idea for both of us, but we were yet to be sold on it. We looked on a map of sunny places, and pointed to all the people who we knew who lived in those sunny places, and Austin is home to two of my very good friends from high school and their very good partners, so it seemed like a good place to start daydreaming.
We then looked at AirBnB, and almost immediately found an incredible house in the neighborhood we wanted to live in. Better yet, all in it would be less than our rent and monthly expenses on a home, so we would actually be saving money, a concept foreign to me (why would I save money when we are all going to die, most likely every winter?) but Dan has pointed out that I have spent many winters not dying and it is starting to sink in. We think about what a beautiful world it would be to not think we are going to die this winter, and we click the shiny red Reserve button on the house, which belongs to a musician/tech guy named Blaine.
Probably this guy.
Since at this point our rental was six months away, Blaine called us personally to discuss our stay. He first of all wanted to make sure we were "cool," because it was actually just his house that he lived in all the time, and all of his stuff was there, and we would be touching it. I was concerned about passing the "cool" check, because I usually do not pass the cool check, but Dan usually does, and that is why you get married, so one of you can pass the cool check.
We asked Blaine if he thought COVID would interrupt our winter plans to stay in his house, and he assured us we would have no trouble with our rental because he not only lived in his house, he also lived in a van and had no problems taking his van-house to a small swath of land in the desert he also owned and camping on it for the duration of our stay.
I was not sure I was comfortable staying in the house of such a lavish person who owned two homes while we were about to have zero, but Dan pointed out that a van is not a home, so Blaine really only had one home. I countered that home is where the heart is, so if his heart is in the van then it is his home and also that is why trucks transporting organs are temporarily homes. Dan patted me on the head and left the room, which I have determined in our relationship means I have won the argument and is not in any way a method he's devised of comforting himself about his marriage choices.
I celebrated our very fine decision to stay in Blaine's very nice home probably by getting drunk, and we went about our lives, which involved alternately being concerned about catching COVID and who would be the last president elected before the Republic fell and America turned into a wasteland made of disparate roving bands of killers, which will be an approved career choice in the New America, or in Dan's case, who the new president would be.
But as we neared our departure, we started saying things like, "There's no way he would cancel, right?" and "He made it like very obvious that we would have no problems staying there, didn't he?" and "Roxanne, if you are worried about the AirBnB you should talk to Blaine and stop following me around asking me about it." So I decided totally on my own to reach out to Blaine and just make sure everything was fine, which it probably was, because this is something you learn in therapy when you're an anxious person, that things are probably fine, and you're probably stressing out for no reason.
That therapy account on Instagram would never lie to me.
I quickly realized that Instagram lied to me and that things are not fine and that I was absolutely right to be afraid of things going wrong, because they very much did. COVID Problems, or CPs as I shall refer to them once and then never again, struck Blaine in a medium fashion that did not ruin his life, but did prevent him from renting his home to us. Dan ended up winning the argument about how many homes Blaine had, because Blaine did not want to live in his second home (aka his van) while his fiancee found a new job, which was understandable, and also the opposite of what he had said before.
But we live in unprecedented times, and Dan says that calls for unprecedented not-calling-people-assholes-when-they're-just-trying-to-get-by, and also Blaine seemed like a really nice guy who was doing his best, so I forgave Blaine. But now we are three weeks away from leaving and have nowhere to live. This is fine though because our lives encompass having nowhere to live as a rule, so I can't be mad that we continue to have nowhere to live. Even so, I returned to the fertile grounds of AirBnB, where nice Austin homes are surely still a dime a dozen as they were six months ago.
I learn quickly that Austin seems to use AirBnB in the way it was meant to be used (they are notorious originalists) in that people actually just rent their whole house to you and then go away while you're using it. So much of the inventory is just a person's house, and there are few houses that are straight rentals, unless you are a fabulously wealthy person who is willing to spend $12,000 a night on an artist's compound, which I assume is a misnomer because any artists I know are spending that $12,000 on paying back student loans, or acid.
So if you have $12,000 a night, you can live in a compound, and if you don't have $12,000 a night, you can live in someone else's house, but that is a more difficult proposition than six months ago because there is some sort of global pandemic, and slowly people have begun realizing that it is not going away quickly and therefore they need to live in their homes themselves.
"Looks real nice in there."
Pickings are therefore slim, much slimmer than six months prior. We find mostly houses far out of our price range, or with no yard, and having promised Likely a yard, I am unwilling to disappoint her and suffer whatever revenge she devises, because she is a spiteful animal.
We find a house that says it has five bedrooms and two bathrooms, which seems impossible and highly suspicious, because I have never seen a house with five bedrooms and two bathrooms before. But it looks nice, so we go to the reviews. Our process for booking AirBnBs has always been to rely heavily on reviews, where I make sure to comb them for someone who has written 'The beds changed my life' and then I book that place. This process has never steered us wrong.
However, this place had only three reviews to illuminate our future by, and they said:
Great location and nice space -boy who describes himself as a Student, Adventurist, and Friend
Great place, close to Lamar and South Congress -man who describes himself as a world changing father of 2
Nice place -woman who doesn't describe herself at all, I assume because all the good tag-lines have already been taken by the first two guys
The suspicion deepened. And with no reviews about the quality of beds to go by, we were...concerned. But we threw caution to the wind and booked it, because we may be excited about being homeless, but we were much less excited about living inside of our car like some sort of tauntaun-sheltering-us-from-the-elements scenario.
"That'll be $12,000."
Our only hope was that everything went right this time. With my Instagram quote firmly plastered on my brain, I was sure it would.
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