[2023 – November 30^th through December 3^rd]

In Early Autumn, 2022 my rake scraped the concrete of my “back yard”, gathering fallen leaves at dusk. Listening to the Good Beer Hunting podcast as I bagged the orange and red deciduous piles, I was intrigued by a live panel discussion with Jeffery Stuffings.

This proprietor and beermaker for Jester King Brewing outside of Austin, an impresario of wild fermentation, got deep into his drive as I hid out behind my northside bungalow.

He laid out his map for synthesizing a passion into a beer list. I’d known about his company but with Foedre for Thought, I snatched Jester King Brewing from the ether and placed it on my bucket list of breweries to visit before I die.

…

Set on a mini mountain in Yacht Harbor, The Yellow Treehouse was our quarters. It was a place for our twin three-year-olds to climb and explore within the Weirdest City in Texas. Rock gardens and secret gates in a maze of wooden decks, and doors leading to hidden patios. Stairs of stone from the Aqua Azul Path below. A greenhouse and a hammock. A turntable, books, and incense.

At night the twinkling lights of homes in Silicon Hills blended with the stars of the cobalt and cerulean Texas sky.

Our arrival day consisted of travel and flight on an “oh-pane”. TSA at O’Hare making sure our toddlers Sloane and Isla, put their stuffed bunny and toy puppy on the conveyor to be x-ray monitored for murderous, explosive content.

Post-flight we devoured a bag of crunchy Elmo straws at Austin Bergstrom International Airport, waiting for the rental car and the minor fiasco of borrowing and installing two car seats.

If it isn’t at least minor fiasco, then it isn’t a twin toddler scenario. This is the math of our reality. The liminal subplot of attempting to instill culture yet finding a balance in keeping our sanity. It’s just never easy and at any point it could boil over.

Constant relentlessness and an ongoing looming feeling as though I’m hanging from a thread. I guess we could have just stayed home. Some men love television. Other men love video games. But for me, the call of the wild ale of Jester King was too grand.

Before checking in to The Yellow Treehouse, we stopped for dinner at Radio Coffee & Beer on Menchaca Road. Neon cherry buzzing signage felt heraldic of old South Austin. Veracruz All-Natural has a food truck there, tucked into the edge of a tree-lined outdoor patio setting.

The steak tacos, which just must be normal quality for Texas, were a hedonistic panoply for me; some of the best I’ve ever had. Without saying a solitary word, this humble taco truck simply asks the patron to re-examine their concept of luxury. And I had to.

Though ATX climate is warm, it still felt like Christmas with lights strung around posts and holiday cheer flowing from vintage outdoor Panasonic speakers.⁽¹⁾ The interior of the Radio bar felt like a cozy lodge with tinsel and colorful bulbs. The warmth of the décor was welcoming as I perused the cocktail list and the twenty-four handles of beer tap rotation.

We settled on two drinks.

Cowboy – a mezcal creation with some bitter Aperol. Ancho Reyes Verde chili poblano liqueur, and lime juice that sent smoke signals. Also, Zilker Brewing Company’s Dracula Music, a Black IPA in collaboration with Radio Coffee & Beer.

In the nonstop intensity of traveling with twin children, even just the fact that Radio had a Black IPA on tap was spark of respite. I took refuge in that temporal window of joy as I took the first sip. I allowed the stress and brooding worries of my multiple tumbling Terminator Dwarves to ease.

The spice and hop notes and dark chocolate of my beer merged with the aromas from the Veracruz grill, and the sounds of “Last Christmas” by Wham! which happens to be my personal favorite Yuletide song.

The sun melted through the landscape as George Michael’s angelic vocals whipped around the stereo field with sleigh bells and melancholic melody.

…

The following morning, we spent some time at Little Buckaroo Ranch. Our daughters proudly got to ride Cocoa the Pony as well as feed the fainting goats and pet the rabbits and other barnyard buddies.

The plan was to meet my friend Joey and his husband at Jester King for lunch. We required a snack break so we decided to stop at a local McDonalds, known to our kids as “Old MacDonalds” for some pre-packaged slices of apples.

As of this writing, my children are three and they still somehow believe our lie that the only thing McDonalds sells is apples. In their world, people line up in the drive-thru, car after car, just to pick up some deliciously healthy fruit to enjoy while on the road.

For some reason they still haven’t noticed all the beautifully photographed obesity epidemic that is plastered all over the drive-thru signage.

This particular visit to Old MacDonalds also spun to a potty break. We unbuckled our rental SUV car seat belts, screaming and whining all the while, about which car door we are going exit from as well as who gets to crawl our first and which baby stuffed animals we are bringing in. We shuffled into the fast-food chain.

I cannot adequately convey the difficulties of the twin toddler factor to people without kids, or people with kids. Colleagues, therapists, family, even people with kids just one year apart. I just can’t. So, I’ve all but stopped trying, aside from this final futile attempt I’ll document here in the scroll:

Nothing can top the mayhem of being trapped in a public bathroom stall with both twins. I can’t take them into the women’s restroom because I’m a full-grown man. I can’t yet let them go into the woman’s restroom alone because they’re only three. So, we have to go into the filthy men’s room together.

We use the handicap stall because if anyone is handicapped at that moment, it is me. The wheelchair guy can wait. Motherfucker just sittin’ there relaxin’, doesn’t even have twins.

Getting both kids passed the initial curious urinal fountains of unsanitary distraction is Challenge One. Fifty percent of the time there is a dude in a stall creating havoc that we just don’t need. The other fifty percent of the time, a dude has just left a form of destruction. Unlike the women’s restroom, the men’s version necessarily reeks of maximum carnage.

Attempting to keep Child One from touching the toilet and the walls and railing and door, while balancing Child Two on the toilet paper-lined seat is Challenge Two. Challenge Three is doing the exact same thing again, but in reverse, while mental enfeeblement kicks in and lethargy increases.

You know that last time, earlier today, when you went to use the restroom and there were zero challenges involved? That’s a life of lavishness.

The whole time during this, by the way, I’m projecting myself mentally to Jester King Farms where my friend Joey is sitting shirtless in the grotto, vibing out, probably surveying the land while enjoying some spontaneously fermented Lambic from stemware in the 72-degree tropical sun.

I’m trying to stop Child Two from pulling out all the toilet paper while I one-handedly tug at Child One’s underpants and jeggings. Trying so hard in a clownlike juggle to keep the plates spinning and not let anything fall from the backpack onto the filthy stall floor.

I’m thinking of bottle conditioned Farmhouse Ale and escaping my reality of the next agonizing section involving the hand washing and hand drying of multiple children and getting back out the door without anyone picking up used straws found on the sticky tile.

Even when we exit the bathroom, we’re still in a fast-food joint. The last venue on earth I’d like to be in, especially on vacation. This takes place more than once a day while traveling, and this mere motif in illustration is assuming they both use the potty.

If only one goes, and the other tries but doesn’t go, then we will be doing this all over a few moments later because I can’t just leave one outside of the bathroom to wait. Where is my wife? Well, she decided to go on a fifteen-minute mental health survival walk.

…

We set out for Dripping Springs, a sprawling rural, Dark Sky Community, southwest of Austin proper. It’s a Hill Country farmland dream ride, where every bend of the old path reveals a new brewery or wine bar or distillery.

Jester King Farms is truly the entre into society of one of the fairest buds in the City of the Violet Crown.⁽²⁾ A wooden playground for kids, galloping pathways through forestry, and a goat ranch where beasts loosely loll around the laidback, artistic hippie haven. An immersive encounter over one-hundred-sixty-five acres. It’s my own, personal version of a theme park.

An old airstream camper modified to an outdoor private restroom by the conjurers of the extraordinary. A drastic upgrade for twin potty break.

The song of Jester King’s fruited farmland is Saison. Well water and Texas pale grist causing clouds to cascade in my tulip glass. Fruity, spicy, and conditioned to reveal delightful quirks of perception. True farmhouse funk. The Lone Star State in a bottle.

My first ever pour from the outdoor wooden pavilion pizzeria was Acerose Efflorescense, a Belgian Blond Bière de Coupage. A blend of an older barrel aged Saison with a younger, more hoppy Saison. Orchestrating a dance with enchanting interplay between floral dry hopping and wood.

My second beer was Wychmaker, Jester King’s take on an American Rye India Pale Ale. Perfectly dialed in and cutting.

Third, was a shadowy Russian Imperial Stout as dark as a B-movie genre film called Black Metal. A grainbill slashed with chocolate malt allowing no light to permeate the globe.

The final installment in the Pole Barn treasure map was an oak barrel aged wild ale known in a series called The Weigh In. This variant was re-fermented on Montmorency tart cherries. French fruit illuminating hidden wonders in the terroir of pastoral paradise.

This is all combined with a wood fire pizza called Phoenix involving pickled jalapenos, pepperoni, and pecorino romano, and some sort of insane maple bar desert. We got to catch up with Joey between additional screams and whining and mass interruption.

An old demon cat bit my kid after my other kid chased it around the Pasture Bar. I saw the bitemarks. A tattoo imbued by a feline mistress not comfortable with gremlins that multiply when sprayed with keg foam, kicking from the draught system.

…

We stopped at the Texaco station for gas and more snacks. Being generally drained from the day, we became a bit complacent on what exactly the kids were going to be doing in a convenience store left to their own devices. Mathematically, there should be four parents involved, working around the clock. Legally speaking, we should have been assigned another married couple to live with us and work for free in raising them.

A combination of apathy, exhaustion, and existential dread gave way to the twins running a manic spree. A turbulent free-for-all in the Texaco food mart. Their energy sparked from a mutagen, peaks and fully thrives on our sense of weariness. It attacks.

Before I realized, it had become the 1980s television gameshow Supermarket Sweep. A frenzy of “grab anything you can before the buzzer”. Running the aisles. Unharnessed. Knocking things on to the floor in a frenetic display of raw nature set loose.

Powerless to stop it, the tabulating fees rang up. Chips, candy, bananas, pouches, cookies, ice cream, an apple, and more candy. Also, even more candy.

$90 worth of snacks. No wherewithal left in the tank to express any declination. I wasn’t making the clerk put that stuff back. God knows I wasn’t putting that stuff back. Aside from a giant package of Ricola cough drops, we paid and bagged everything up and set sail back to The Yellow Treehouse for the night.

…

When traveling, we never have any sort of structure for sleeping. It’s a detrimental issue that we as two well-educated, somewhat adjusted, grown adult parents haven’t been able to solve. At this point in the game were are merely attempting to run out the clock.

If you have any suggestions, I might ask you to shut up unless you want to come spend the night and help out. It’s really fucked and we don’t sleep. We are supernatural.

The second night in The Yellow Treehouse we decided to try out the notion have having both girls sleep in the same bed, while I lie perpendicular to them at the foot. They laid there watching their little pink iPad things. Sometimes they fall asleep while watching and sometimes they just watch for so long my parental guilt kicks in.

That night instead of staring off in terror through the blackness to the sounds of Peppa Pig, I knew after midnight it would be December 1^st, so my newest essay would go live. The post was a personal one about a friend of mine who died when I was sixteen. I put together a Facebook post with the link and I tagged ten or twelve people I went to highschool with – most of which I hadn’t spoken with for twenty-five years.

I didn’t know how anyone would receive it, yet by tagging them I was basically forcing them to at least click on it. I spent almost a year writing and revising the essay, so I knew it was what I wanted to put out. I didn’t really need anyone to feel any certain way. But I was infinitely curious what people would feel.

Even though it was well after midnight, some feedback did begin to roll it. One guy Rob Hornung drunk dialed me via Messenger at 3 AM. I did not answer. I hadn’t talked to him since 1998, and no offense to Rob Hornung but I wasn’t prepared to have a reunion while lying in bed with the sleeping kids.

The following days I would receive an avalanche of positivity and nice comments from people. I could see on the WordPress app that hundreds of clicks were coming though. People were sharing it. I think through a relatively tough travel experience that my wife would agree it barely inched out to a net positive, the idea that I would create something, send it out to the internet, and garner a bit of appreciation did help me through. The messages and feedback meant a lot to me.

…

We parked and while everyone got ice cream, I ran across Guadalupe Street near The Drag and disappeared into Civil Goat Coffee. Trying to draw out every minute of the ticking seconds I had there, I was but a vacuum siphon, extracting every molecule of the café atmosphere from the surface area of the finely ground craft coffee beans.

In front of a Dragworm, and some University of Texas students I had to ask the Civil Goat people if they could pre-grind my beans. I felt embarrassed. But The Yellow Treehouse, however grand it was…did not supply a proper burr grinder.

…

We arrived at the Austin Nature & Science Center at the edge of Zilker Park. The ecological refuge under the exhaust fumes of the interstate would let the kids not only explore rocks, fur, and bones, but also highlight on their current obsession: paleontology.

Digging in the Dino Pit would buy us two hours of investigation time to zone out and actually sit down. Because when dinos become extinct, they come out of their bones, according to Sloane.

The kids innocently skipped all around the forest trails beneath the caged Birds of Prey – a center for injured birds of Central Texas. Turkey vultures and giant hawks and ominous owls and other mammoth winged creatures would eyeball us through the chicken wire.

I knew they were obviously wishing to snatch our kids up like twin morsels of a pink sushi roll. Targeted game and razor talons, the domineering predators sharply stared. Biding their time.

…

We left Zilker and travelled through Westlake at sunset. Up and down hills and curved roads past architectural marvels. Dwellings that shatter the soul, plain and simple. The opulence and stunning modern mansions are enough to make you question every single life decision you’ve ever made.

Home after home, a mosaic of engineered style drenched in IBM and Texas Instruments owners’ equity. A snapshot journey right passed bourgeoise “Fuck-You Money”, directly back into middleclass reality.

Semiconductor wealth. Greenery and prestige and acreage. Locked gates.

…  

We ended the evening at Sundancer Grill, between Yacht Harbor and Sail & Ski Yacht Club Marina. Off the Hurst Creek Arm of the Colorado River, we were caught between the moon and New York City with Christopher Crosse in a palace set to a perpetual soundtrack of Yacht Rock.

Equipped with a nocturnal playground for the kids, with boat shoes on we leisurely played shuffleboard with Steven Nicks and Foreigner while consuming burgers and fries.

With a shaker pint pour from perhaps one of the final existing kegs of Anchor Steam, we kept it catchy with tunes of exhilaration and escape. The predilection and penchant of sailors and beachgoers.

Just like the theme of our Austin trip, with more emphasis on the melody than on the beat, sensitive yacht-rocksmen like Kenny Loggins and Michael [Old] McDonald kept us from capsizing.

Saccharine sincerity and garish fashion.

…

(1.) I might note, just for the record that Christmas Day 2023 in Chicago was 50 degrees. I mean it snowed on Halloween, but still.

(2.) An O. Henry quote from a story publish in The Rolling Stone, October 1894.

The phrase appeared in chapter two:

“The drawing-rooms of one of the most magnificent private residences in Austin are a blaze of lights. Carriages line the streets in front, and from gate to doorway is spread a velvet carpet, on which the delicate feet of the guests may tread. The occasion is the entre into society of one of the fairest buds in the City of the Violet Crown.”