There Is No Taco Bar
Or, his name is Sid
“I cracked the lock on the swimming pool,” my neighbor Jeremy said to me as I walked my dog around our thawing condo complex. Like me, Jeremy teaches at St. Edward’s University, three miles away from where we live in Austin, Texas. An interactive gaming specialist, he used basic game theory to open the locked gate on our shared swimming pool, which had been closed due to COVID-19. “We need water,” he said, “and we can get it for our toilets at the pool.” It’s all about optimism during the storm, it’s all a game. I would have smiled, but there wasn’t much to smile about.
By that point, we had been without water for seven days after a winter storm slam danced through Texas, crippling an unregulated and outdated power grid not designed to handle the cold, all due to an extreme lack of leadership by our politicians. Water lines snapped, leading to people dying, most of them poor and young, including an eleven-year-old boy who froze to death in his bed. “We are evacuating,” I told Jeremy. Everything was complicated.
The snow started to fall on Valentine’s Day. Although my wife, Ilse, and I adopted our puppy Brisket last August, we imagined her birthday would fall on the Day of Cupid: she has a patch of white fur on her stomach in the shape of a heart. It also doesn’t hurt that we adopted her from a shelter in Lockhart, a small…
