Prologue: Nobody could have guessed that the universe was going to end on a Tuesday
Every generation has a story to tell. For my grandparents, it was growing up during the Great Depression only to come of age to fight in an earth-shattering world war. For my parents’ generation it was Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement and the cultural and social revolutions they participated in during the ‘60s. The Millennials came of age to endure 9/11, the Great Recession, the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the three-ounce liquid limit through airport security. Sandwiched in between these massive generations is my own. Born between the advent of the birth control pill and advances in fertility treatments, we are the smallest in number. The marketing firms had difficulty defining this obscure segment of the population. Like brand X, we were something ill-defined and generic to them. We became known simply by the marketing term used to describe us: Generation X. So, what’s our story?
We had Nirvana, the rise of the Internet and the Information Age and some minor military skirmishes, but nothing that our children will be forced to memorize in class. We had the whole Monica Lewinsky affair, Columbine, and angst-fueled music. We saw the birth of the startup, the transformation of alternative music from college radio to Clear Channel, and an explosion of wealth not seen since the waning days of the bubonic plague. That was the ‘90s in a nutshell, well that and the fact that the universe came within a breath of complete annihilation outside of a big box store. You probably don’t remember that at all. That’s the funny thing. Of all of the events of consequence that happened during the ‘90s, the decade when my generation flowered, the most critical one of them all, the very moment that defined reality itself occurred and nobody even knew about it. The only scraps of evidence that remain are the cached news agency Internet pages reporting a mass suicide at the Stubb Foundation.
The media of the time pitched the mass suicide as a dotcom that took the whole “drinking the Kool-Aid” trope a bit too literally. There was no suicide note left at the reception desk (there was no reception desk, or receptionist, actually), so people were left to come up with their own conclusions. Some claim that when the Stubb Foundation was about to go to its initial public offering, the employees agreed to commit suicide rather than face the inevitable collapse of the company. Others said that the mass suicide was simply a team building exercise taken too far. It was as good an explanation as any, given the times, and especially in a place like Austin where startups flourished in a consequence-free environment. Yet for all the speculation as to why they did it, nobody could figure out exactly what the Stubb Foundation did to make money. Of course, wasn’t that the problem with most of the dotcoms of the time?
If anybody does recall the case of the dotcom suicide, they couldn’t know what really happened, what the Stubb Foundation’s true mission was and how it saved the totality of all existence from total collapse. Nobody knew that little spicy nugget of trivia except me. The only reason I know the truth is simple: I just happened to be “the Chris.” But I’m getting ahead of myself.
1: Where the weird things are
November 1996
Austin, Texas is hard to describe. Topographically, the city straddles the Hill Country on the western half and the terrace to the east. Bio regionally, it straddles the forest to its east, the plains to its north and the semi-arid savannah to its west. Politically, Austin is a stridently liberal city in an otherwise conservative state. In other words, Austin is weird. It’s proud of the green spaces that it painstakingly preserved, including the crown jewel of the Greenbelt, and jealously protects its local businesses and landmarks from the ever-encroaching homogenization metastasizing in the rest of the country. Austinites are by and large educated, liberal, outdoorsy and by city ordinance they all wear earth tones. Austinites love to make fun of Dallas, Houston and LA, but they show a particular deference for their Latino brethren an hour south in San Antonio. It’s the kind of place that drew people to California decades ago. In fact, the only thing keeping the entire state of California from moving to Austin is that it is hot as shit (hot as shit being technically determined to be between 103 and 112 degrees. Anything above 112 degrees is hotter than f&*k, below 103 degrees but above 95 degrees is hot as balls).
Another thing about Austinites: They absolutely hate it whenever their city gets mentioned in the news. Whenever MSN has one of those top places to live, top cities to find work, top cities for quality of life, Austin ranks up in the top ten, if not the top five. Austinites can’t stand that for they do not want you to know just how awesome living in Austin is. And they have a point. Austin is weird to be certain, but nine out of ten dentists agree that Austin used to be even weirder. As more people moved to Austin to experience the weird, the increase in intentional weirdness actually disrupted the fragile ecological balance, reducing its authentic quirkiness. Newly erected ice houses and cigar bars, painstakingly designed to look run down and gritty, began to pop up. I would one day call this architectural style “contrived authenticity.” ™ Then again, that’s a typical Austin thing to do, pine over the past, lament the city’s incredible success and talk about how great it used to be before everyone moved there (especially the damned Californians). That’s exactly what I did about six months after moving to Austin in autumn 1996, which is arguably the last moments before Austin became a real city.
I fell for Austin from the moment I drove into the city and pulled up to Espresso Lube—a coffeehouse/auto mechanic shop. The sign outside advertised, “If it’s in stock, we got it.” It took me several seconds to get the snarky humor, for I came from the swamps of New Orleans.
The two cities had a couple of things in common: They were both liberal islands in red states and each had its own unique heritage, which they actively loved and guarded from being overtaken by national chains.
But where New Orleans was a city in a constant state of decay, both in terms of its economic prospects and its physical infrastructure, Austin was blooming with vitality. New Orleans was home to gutter punks, homeless runaways who thought Mardi Gras was a year-round thing and yats while Austin was home to proto-hipsters, homeless runaways who thought that South By Southwest was a year-round thing, graphic designers and software engineers. Where New Orleans’ economy was based on tourism, Austin’s was based on high-tech business. Where New Orleans was the murder capital, Austin was the live music capital. New Orleans had awesome mosh funk and brass hop, Austin had awesome alt country and post punk. New Orleans had thousand–year-old oak trees that canopy the city. Austin had a mixture of diminutive oaks and cactuses. While New Orleans, already several feet below sea level, was slowly sinking further into the Gulf, Austin was a hilly city with vistas that overlooked the Hill Country. You get the idea.