Independence

Barton Springs Earlyish Morning Swim Report, 4/26/2025

Weird fog and cloud cover this morning when I arrive at the pool late, 7AM. It’s the far end of the semester—why I’ve been so bad at writing here, maybe—and though I’ve been swimming I did miss three days in a row this week. I met a friend on the way in (a friend from the outside world, not the pool) who told me that the pool wasn’t too crowded, and her beautiful child told me that water was great, and they were both right.

My mother favored a certain kind of cheap nylon voile curtains for the living room. They turned sunlight to milk and blocked prying eyes. In my memory, we were forever driving to Waltham, Mass., to get new curtains to replace ones mauled by the cats, though perhaps this only happened twice in my childhood. This morning’s fog reminded me of those curtains. The sun pressed its face up behind them, impersonating the moon, until I got to the east end of the pool on my first lap and it tossed the fog, the curtains, aside, and dazzled me. Then it went back in hiding.

I have been swimming, just not posting. I’ve surprised myself by sometimes going to Big Stacy, also city-run, spring fed (with a soupçon of chlorine), and open at 6AM. It’s a lap pool and not so lovely, though lovely enough, and in the last weeks of the semester while I toil in the fiction mines it’s easier. I think different thoughts in a lap pool. I have always been an irritable person. I am—I embrace it—a crank, a person with the soul of a habitual writer of letters of the editor but without the follow-through. Indeed, my inner monologue is at least 63% unsent and unsendable letters to various editors. Swimming in a lap pool encourages this kind of thinking. Terrible things need to be thought about: maybe that’s why I’ve been going to Big Stacy.

Still, in a literal way, I don’t have to look out for my fellow humans in a lap pool—we are all swimming between the lines—and it’s possible that despite my griping in this very space, I don’t mind doing so in Barton Springs. Last week a speedy swimmer came incredibly close to me. LOOK OUT LOOK OUT LOOK OUT! I yelled, like a Shangri-la warning the Leader of the Pack, and at the last moment the swimmer pulled up short. Later, the Egyptian geese took their little goslings from one side of the pool to the other, and honked something similar to me, and I did, I stopped and looked out.

That might have been the day that the singing man of the pool crooned, “Oh what a piece of shit morning, oh what a shitty ass day.” Or that one young man turned to another and said, pointing to a distant figure, “Is that Brendan? I think that’s Brendan. Brendan! Brandan! Hey Brendan!” and the distant figure turned and said, “I’m not Brendan, but I can be if you want.” Or the day a different man said to his friend, “I had a bike accident and went tits over ass,” and the friend answered, in a tone of sympathy, “T over A.”

Today, for certain, it is Independent Book Store Day. Go to your local independent bookstore! They are places of hope and goodwill and possibility, in a time of such strangeness. Austin—I am leaving Austin in stages with me and mine; I suppose I should write a whole post about that soon but I find I am not quite ready—is a city full of brilliant independent bookstores. There’s BookWoman, Alienated Majesty, First Light Books, BookPeople, Black Pearl Books, Austin Books & Comics, Reverie Books, The Little Gay Shop, Monkeywrench Books, and other shops I feel certain I’m missing.

Please pause for a commercial: I have a book coming out in December. If you’re interested in preordering it, why not go to your local independent—or a non-local independent, or bookshop.org.

Here it is:

You can read more about it here.

Today was definitely the day of the voile fog over downtown Austin. By the time I came to shore it was 8AM, and a bearded lifeguard was assuming his place in his elevated chair. He sang, in a Willie Nelson/Ray Charles mashup, “The night time is the right time for meeeee….” Below him, two startlingly handsome young men were thinking about getting in the water. One called up to the lifeguard, “Can I ask you a question? Are there other places to swim like this around the city?”

“Sure!” said the lifeguard. “So many. Places like this, they’re a dime a dozen. You can’t throw a rock without hitting another Barton Springs.”

He was so good-natured it took them a while to get the joke: how can you ask for more when surrounded by all this beauty? The goslings went waddling by. The light was still milky. "Listen,” said one of the young men to the lifeguard, stretching all his lovely muscles, “I don’t know how to swim, but I’m jumping in now. I’m counting on you, bro.” He meant the opposite. too.