If you meet the Buddha on the road…
The subversive message of Austin’s visual atrocities.
Urban hiking in America with its obsessive car culture shocks even the woke walker. I am on the path beside the ugliest street in the universe. Sometimes there’s sidewalk, and sometimes it’s a narrow earthen path pounded down by the passage of feet. As a rule I walk on the left side of the road so I might see that final car that comes for me, and this heightens the sense of swimming against the tide in shark-infested water. A family who have thrown off the humiliation of generations by buying a Cadillac mock my poverty as they drive by me, and I suspect they can’t conceive of walking by choice — after all, in a car culture, all but the most abjectly poor can get some kind of car. In the din and assault of onward moving cars, I come to a utility pole supporting something high above my pedestrian realm — high-tension power lines, probably — and on this pole is scrawled in chalk, “BudDha.” Knowing what little I know about the Buddha, this is at once the most unlikely and the most likely place to see the name.
Burnet Road is the aorta of commercial goods and consumers into my Austin neighborhood. Here rush torrents of groceries, furniture, and new and used household goods. The restaurants receive pleasure foods, kegs of beer, and cases of wine. Along the street flows an…
