Globe-Jotting

came to Austin from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998, the year of his first heat stroke. As the American-Statesman's movie critic, he is both loathed and dimly tolerated. Sandra Bullock, among others, will never speak to him again.

He reads more than he eats, drinks more than he sleeps and breaks too many sticks when he drums.
Frequently using his tattered passport, he hasn't time for a dog but just enough for a rat named Becky. He bit into the head of a chicken in China and plans to drink snake blood in Vietnam.

He is a fervid animal lover. You can comment on entries, but they will not be posted until they are reviewed by the blogger.
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The latest 10 entries, with the newest at the top. Drivers on South Congress Ave.

are still the worst I ve seen, besides my pal Ms. Onesie, who steers with her elbow, and that cabbie in Cairo who turned down a snug one-way alley and went nose-to-nose with another vehicle, honking and hollering until one of them (my genius) angrily surrendered. It was the lamest game of chicken on the planet.

And yet I drive SoCo, as the Chamber of Commerce calls it, daily, for it is my commute route, the thoroughfare on which I work and live. I know the avenue well, perhaps too well. I like it so chic and kooky all at once!

except on First Thursday, that paltry excuse for a party where oblivious drivers and pedestrians earn all flavors of disrespect from this qualified Death Race 2001 driver.
I am exploring the lower reaches of S. Congress, near my pad.

I ve walked the nearby park and neighborhood and waved to the guy in the gorilla suit who stands on the sidewalk at the small used car dealership across the street. (Poor guy. His suit is a tattered brown thing that s too furry and ties at the neck with a big string.

He looks like a bipedal hamster.)
Forget all that. Let s get to the taco cart near the railroad tracks, a ramshackle box that s only open from 6 p.

m. to 3 a.m.

daily perfect hours for this bat boy. It s the one with a Magic Marker-scrawled Tweetie Bird on its posterboard menu. It s family run.

The young boy takes my cash and packs the tacos in a paper sack with napkins, while dad furiously fries up meat and tortillas. His al pastor is unsurpassedor.
Sometimes Becky joins me on my late-night visitations to the taco cart.

She likes tortillas. The family members think she s a hamster. I wonder if they think Becky is related to the gorilla guy.

The move almost broke me, but I m back. Now I can read and watch movies as blue whales inhale plankton.
a finely considered refutation of religion by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

Grade: B+
, a travelogue tracing an intrepid journalist s foot journey across post-9/11 Afghanistan. A sparkless disappointment. Grade: B-
, Ian McEwan s pointillistic novel that transcends through language, humanity and wisdom.

Grade: A
I can t grade Martin Amis new novel House of Meetings, because I put it down after 50 pages out of boredom, and I am an Amis fan.
Currently working on Jim Harrison s exquisite, sad new novel Returning to Earth, The Orwell Reader and Larry Gonick s The Cartoon History of the Modern World Part 1: From Columbus to the U.S.

Constitution. Next up: Norman Mailer s The Naked and the Dead.
Two great documentaries on DVD that are totally worthwhile (and, incidentally, female-centric): Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing and the girl s basketball knockout The Heart of the Game.

Purchase an entire home tool kit; spend around 100 dollars on it, you ll avoid HUGE future headaches (and Depot trips). It ll have ratchets and sockets, allenheads and spline tips, make sure you get one with both american and metric sizes. Wonder if a small sock (toddler-sized) with leg and tail holes cut out might help with the leakage.

.? You may have discovered an untapped pet market!

Great pictures! Thanks for sharing - makes me want to go to France NOW!
Becky s fat b/c you give her beer.

Wait until PETA hears about this, Chris Garcia. You re gonna get a bucket of rat lard thrown at you.
My mother, bless her heart, wants to know what grandma should bring Becky the rat when she comes to visit me this weekend.

I told her Becky desperately needs new Diesels, a home theater, a Whole Foods shopping spree and approximately $7,000 in cash.
If Mom wants to make any kind of respectable grand-dude, as well as a sterling first impression, Becky s wishes will be fulfilled. And when Becky s happy, I m happy.

(Sometimes happy for Becky is napping in my lap, staring off into space, then, when ready to stretch and yawn, relieving herself on my pants. I feel the tell-tale warmth of jacuzzi water. Happiness is wildly relative.

)
Mom already is a grandma, courtesy of my brother s procreational fortitude, but since she volunteered grandmahood for a domesticated rodent, I ll take it. My grandma Mom s mom ruled. Spoiled us one Star Wars action figure and 10 boxes of Crunch Berries from rotten.

Mom has a very high bar to raise.
The baton has been passed, and Mom grips it with alacrity. She loves the maternal roles.

She still mothers us from a distance, infantilizing her sons with florid greeting cards, candy and plush toys for every holiday, the sole exception being the Vietnamese New Year.
We love it. We love it more when she slips some green in the cards.

She s Super Mom, loving, nurturing, caring and hyper-concerned. She should wear a cape and magic bracelets.
Maybe she will rescue Becky from her latest dodgy habit perching on the very edge of my new loft s outdoor balconies, two and three stories above some hard landings.

Becky s always enjoyed alighting on the precipices of elevated surfaces, where she goes still, eyes peering down, and appears to slip into a rat trance, meditating on life, the world and banana chips.
But she s been getting bold up there, crouching, ready to leap onto my neighbor s balcony from mine. She wouldn t clear the jump.

She would flail, paws clawing the sky, body tumbling, whiskers fluttering, tail twirling. Squeak, splat.
Mom, you have a job to do.

Come save the day as you have too many times to count.
Everyone knows that Becky the Magical Rodent enjoys a nip of beer or red wine on (many) an occasion. (Watch her do it )
Is this a bad habit?

Am I nurturing a future W.C. Fields?

Dunno.
But while researching rat hiccups Becky hiccups a lot, but never after drinking, oddly I came across the online and perused its Q and A page, which did address the hiccup thing (rats do indeed hiccup, just like us).
Q.

BARFLY RATTIES: Would small amounts of alcohol hurt a rat?
A. Not at all, unless your rat is allergic to alcohol.

Just remember everything in moderation. What you consider to be a very small amount of alcohol might be an extremely large amount for a rat. Just be careful.

There are studies that say a little bit of alcohol is good for humans, so it might very well do rats some good, too. However, this is a definite subject for debate, so although I have had rats who have shared a little cheer with me without any ill effect, I would not recommend that you try to extend your rat s life by giving him a daily dose!
Becky, who at this moment is digging up and eating and destroying one of my house plants, will not like that last line one bit.

There is a tiny little man on my kitchen counter looking rather frightened, as he should be. He is made of twigs, trussed together with dental floss, his arms and legs outstretched like someone falling backward into a pool in one of those refreshing iced tea commercials.
His mini-face has an evil tinge, because doubtless he brims with foul intent, mean thoughts and the capacity for heartless acts that upend the lives of innocents.

He is about to die.
I hate this little man, this rickety voodoo dude (voo-dude), who represents the cretin who stole my wallet two weeks ago. The infuriating incident happened at the gym, and here s a caveat: People who work out at the Sixth St.

Gold s beware of a brazen thief who riffles through the coat rack.
(Just because I was blithe enough to leave my wallet in my jacket at a place where I recognize almost everyone does not make it my fault or inevitable that the crime would occur. It s not like I hung my coat on a tree limb near a New Orleans cemetery at 2 a.

m. I wasn t asking for it. Yes, pre-verbal meatheads roam gyms, but I figured they were too dumb to steal.

)
Voo-dude is dead dude. The culprit, definitely male, took the wallet and within 20 minutes had tallied $60 on my credit card at Halcyon Coffee Shop on Fourth St., where one can buy coffee, very expensive bar drinks and exotic smokes in its smoke shop.

My Visa: up in smoke.
I had this guy tailed fast. Less than an hour after the crime I closed the Visa, my debit card, both bank accounts and made a police report.

I hope they catch him and throw the book at him. Specifically, at his head.
You want wide-net frustration, get your wallet stolen, or lose it.

You have to get new everything, from health insurance cards to driver s license and on and on. Whatta you know? You also have to get a new wallet.

Did I mention the subhuman snotball also walked with about $60 in cash? Jackpot!
Now, I don t believe in voodoo dolls or any other supernatural claptrap hence my long-ago apostasy from religion so of course the little man is a lie.

The real little man is the guy who stole. He s a tiny, weak man. And a teeny-weeny human being.

Austinites, who recoil at a sprinklet of water from the sky, have gotten all tremulous and flinchy over the city s current metamorphosis into a gigantic Slurpee.
Notice how upon the first smattering of rain in our fair town you instantaneously hear the keen of sirens in the distance? Oops an accident greased by that heavenly lubricant called water.

Austin drivers are notoriously, vividly, flagrantly terrible, and so it stands to reason they will wreck the moment conditions change microscopically. That s what happens when you re doing 80 down I-35 with a cigarette in one hand, cell phone in the other and neglect to signal or peer over your shoulder while changing lanes encircled by barreling big rigs. Crunch.

Darwin strikes again.
Now, with the Great Big Blizzard of 07 burying cattle and choking our tangly infrastructure and sending skyscrapers to the ground, drivers are worse than ever. My brief commute over South Congress is so crowded with baby drivers Oh my goodness, there s a puddle approaching, hold on, heaven forfend!

I might as well get to where I m going by horse-drawn sleigh. Way quicker would that be. And it would neatly fit the operatic vision of winter some locals apparently harbor.

Safety is paramount. Don t get me wrong. But Austin is already an oblivious hive of maladroit drivers, and it s times like these that their incompetence shines.

What happened to all that moronic bravado so many big-truck-Hummer-SUV egomaniacs fling around like so much Bevo manure? The ice has shriveled it to an unprecedented meekness, an overcorrecting timorousness inspired by the alien substance dotting the pavement.
That flash of brights and quick blast of horn behind you, that will be me.

Sleigh bells: ditto.
I m so glad I chose a musical instrument that is impossibly expensive, big and awkward and exhausting to move, complicated and painstaking to assemble and so unmuffably noisy that its aural clamor can be heard from Austin to flyspeck villages in the jungles of Myanamar.
I ve played drums for years and years and have cursed their absolute impracticality the entire time.

Why couldn t I have picked the ?
Instead I play a sprawling kit whose clutter takes up half a normal room and whose sound makes your neighbors ears ring, even when they re on vacation halfway around the world. Some astronauts have heard me practicing paradiddles from space.

You know you re in trouble when you play an instrument whose multiple foundational parts are called hardware and that requires a permanent staff of burly, labor-hardened roadies.
When I moved recently from a house in which I could actually play without disturbing humans and wildlife alike (How? Ask the NASCAR engineers who built my special drum bubble) I left the drum set behind for as long as possible simply because I dreaded breaking it down and hauling its endless pieces to and from the car.

So I sold the stupid thing to a music store. Broke it down, loaded it, then dumped it, with help from shop employees, at the store. No way could I play that old acoustic kit in my new loft without a SWAT team raid.

I went electronic, as in electronic drums, and I m in percussive paradise, despite the pain of the initial set up. It s a mean machine, arranged like a typical acoustic kit but with pads and rubber cymbals and an electronic brain. This is it:
Looks weird, dorky, spindly.

It s anything but. Switch it on, don headphones, pick your sound Concert Hall, Heavy Metal, Birch, Funk, R B, Big Band, Symphony or others from the 99 preprogrammed sounds and pound. It s a sound thing, a glorious, roaring, clanging sonic blast.

I leave further sound descriptions to music critics Corcoran and Gross.
But they ll have a hard time, because, like everyone else, including Becky, who weaves around the base of the e-set as I thomp, they won t hear a peep, pop, ping or paradiddle.
Each April I take a big trip.

Over the years it s been Israel and Egypt, Eastern Europe, Spain, Morocco and Portugal, China, Japan (twice) and elsewhere.
Not this year. My big trip will be the one down I-35 to Home Depot, a journey I have made seemingly dozens of times in the past 20 days.

It s so tedious. Backbreaking. I feel bad for my car tires.

I feel bad for me. A first: I bought a power screwdriver. Help me.

When I inevitably return to the hardware mega-emporium in April, I will take photographs and try to speak with the locals. Perhaps I ll take a wild adventure down aisle 9, Plumbing. I ll send you a post card.

My griping about home buying and moving continues. But change finds its comfort zone, slowly. The process winds down and Becky the Super Rodent locates and tags perfect spots for clandestinely relieving herself.

(One being my pair of Adidas in the walk-in closet. Bad rat. No cheese.

)
Pleasures emerge. Watching the new Reds DVD on the new, big LCD television. Noticing the place transform as framed pictures, artwork and classic movie posters go up.

Enjoying the efficiency of new fancy appliances. Washer! Dryer!

(A cheer worth repeating, while I spin around, arms held high.) No more do I hoard quarters with apocalyptic fervor.
All concrete and steel lofts are something to get used to.

I joke that I live in an airplane hangar, a warehouse, a big garage, a mausoleum, a dungeon. Bring whips and chain, I tell visitors.
But that s changing fast.

New stuff, chosen with neurotic exactitude, transforms the former echo chamber into a livable space with personality and color and warmth. It is still, by design, a minimalist place, but stylish, more Twombly and Rothko than Van Gogh and Pollock.
Someday, as the local trips dwindle and things find their places, a masterpiece.

After ping-ponging for a week between the old place and the new place, hiring two guys to move the big things, spending a wet Christmas Eve weaving through stores with Bath, Crate, Container, Target, Buy and Ikea in their names, hauling knee-buckling boulders of stuff up the stairs and unwittingly throwing Becky out with the trash (she was recovered, nesting deep inside the bag, resigned to an ignominious fate of rot and rubbish), it is, almost, complete.
Moving is malignant. I ve lost weight, slept scantly and nearly collapsed in anguish more than once.

I have fresh bruises the color of death and a sliced finger tip that won t heal because of its high-traffic location. I feel like a character in Requiem for a Dream.
Home-buying: Don t do it.

It s a trick, a diabolical trap. Until the dust settles. A few more dust particles need to settle.

Then: ecstasy.
Everyone told me how tense and emotional closing on my loft would be, how my eyes would pop over all the paper work and my hand would shake as I signed hundreds of dotted lines. They described how otherworldly I would feel about dropping so much cash, the new responsibility and the mystical sensation of It s mine.

I OWN this place.
None of that happened. Magic was absent.

There was just sheaves of gobbledygooky forms, a pen with the title company s name on it and big gleamy smiles from my realtor and the title people. They seemed simply delighted, like little elves. I even wore a collar shirt because of all the hype, like I was going to a job interview, or a funeral.

I should have worn my Motörhead t-shirt.
A forced formality fogged the florescenty conference room. Bottled water and coffee were on hand.

There might have been mints. As we waded through what s really a drearily mundane ritual, they kept asking if I was excited. No, I said, thinking, Do you guys know what a colossal pain moving is, how traumatic uprooting can be, how much money I m hemorrhaging and how much more will be spilt in this bloodletting?

Excited ? Try anxious, depressed, clenched with raw, throbbing despair.
It all works out.

Things falling into place, Becky tromping up and down the stairs, the HDTV getting broken in, rooms being stylishly appointed, the bank account howling in pain.
Just a few days in and I like it. I like that I live near a tombstone-maker, a pawn shop that paid me $50 for an old stereo receiver and Hill s Cafe.

I like that I m still a South Congress dweller, if a tad more south than before. If my dentist and doctor s offices were on the street I wouldn t have to go anywhere else, ever.
That s because all of these things sit on the avenue: the post office, the DMV, my gas station, my grocery store, my cafes, my dry cleaner, my tailor, my pet store, my mechanic, my pizza slice place, the Continental Club, Trophy s, convenience stores galore, a CVS, my bank (two branches!

), my video store (just off Congress) and, of course, my workplace. And now my loft. My house.

I OWN this place.
Rat diapers. That s what I need.

Becky, in her encroaching dotage, wets more than ever. A drip there, a puddle here, a row of gold beads down my arm. So much moisture that I m starting to think I live in an aquarium.

(Or, considering the open-book vista I provide here, a fish bowl.)
And now that I m moving into a (just-bought) loft-condo that s brand-new and rat-pee-free, I need those pet Pampers pronto. So I Googled, and was had.

A pet site boasted of rat diapers, in many colors, soft, washable, reusable polar fleece, easy velcro attachment on back.
Reading on, my elation shriveled to deflation. The diapers are a joke, though someone actually made a pair for this photo:
Also a joke, it seems, is this brilliant rat leash:
While I might make my own rat diapers now that I have the building materials, I went ahead and bought a spray that makes things taste bitter things Becky relishes chewing, like sofas, walls, books, candles, etc.

The rat has done some maddening damage to my current rental, and my stuff, but I can t wait to see her attempt to chew the all-steel and concrete loft. She can funnel her excess chewing energy bounding up and down the staircases in the three-story abode.
Moving is the devil s work.

I ve slept about 14 hours in the past three weeks. I ve squandered hours and hours filling change of address forms, organizing appalling sums of money, signing papers, fretting, yelling, shopping and shopping. The process has obliterated vast swaths of my normal life.

Emotional murmurs and explosions attend the fun. Sadness enters as I tear apart my home of eight years, look at the drum set I won t be able to play for a long time and uproot the old, ossified comforts of longtime residence.
Then the excitement returns, fanning away the fog of nostalgia and sparking the buzz of the new, which is laced with the scary minor-chord hum of change.

It s a clangorous sound right now. Harmony comes later, when the dirt settles, when I settle, and a new life Chris 2.0 takes off.

Austin reminds me of Paris in the number of doggies that roam and frolic and doodie everywhere, wagging tails both nubby and whippy, sniffing forbidden nooks and snatching balls in sloppy mouths, from which primal rumblings are shouted in play and in peril. (Was that puppy poetry, or pure doggerel?)
Jo s Coffee on S.

Congress is a seasonal hangout for me. Fall is good, even perfect. So, surrounded by excited dogs of all shapes, sizes and drool output, I took a book to Jo s last Saturday and basked in the cool autumn sunshine.

The crowd of about 25 people quickly ballooned to twice that, and there I was, alone, reading, sipping and petting random roving hounds. People wore sunglasses and short sleeves. A beachy, cocoa-butter smell flittered in the air.

And then a bird dooped on my arm.
A long, lithe, sandy-colored dog that looked to be part antelope stood nearby, his anteater snout open and smiling. (Dogs always look like they re smiling when really they are just panting, which means they re not as pleased as they appear, and that makes me sad, because for a while I thought all dogs were unconditionally ecstatic.

) He was as skinny as a marathon runner, or a model.
Plastic cups filled with water were offered to some of the dogs, though a lucky golden retriever mutt got to lap up a spilled soy chai off the ground. I was introduced to Murphy the black terrier, whose age I guessed at about 6 years old, though it winds up he s only five months old.

When he really is 6, he ll probably seem about 34, bad look for a dog.
Two separate parties inquired about the book I was reading, by evolutionist Richard Dawkins, a sensible and necessary polemic that is causing a lusty stir in science and religious circles. The people were interested in the book, in a good way, and we briefly talked about the controversies it s triggered.

One woman led me to , which I really enjoyed. A healthy row makes a lively spectator sport, and dynamic reading.
I said goodbye to Murphy when I left.

He strained at his leash and wagged, like a boingy spring, his stumpy tail.