A Stranger In A Strange Land

I have been many places and I have seen many things in my life, but I had never seen 100 people in cowboy hats, line dancing in unison to a Nelly song. This I witnessed last night, a friend of mine, recent to Texas, wanted to check out a club in Pflugerville called Graham Central. 

I am not the clubbing type, I am not the type who generally tries to have "fun", in any sense of the word. In this case I humored my friend as I really had nothing better to do. This club is massive, it's actually about 5 clubs in one; a hip-hop club,  techno, biker, country-western and karaoke. Now people may react to hearing about a place like this in two different ways. One, "whoa, those clubs sound really cool" and two, "those sound like the descending circles of hell from Dante's Inferno". 

I would fall into the latter and my friend into the former.  We both have a similar demographic profile, but a remarkably different taste in  adventure.  Needless to say I felt really, really out of place. Without the necessary accessories of boots and a cowboy hat or a sleazy overweight girl in tiny halter top-I didn't blend, I couldn't if I wanted to. Now, I have been to lots of clubs; clubs all over North America and overseas, but this is Texas.

We ventured from club to club taking in the various scenes, horrific renditions of Foreigner and Rush in the karaoke bar, listless, awkward dancing in the techno area, lumpy bodies moving against each other in the biker bar and the country bar was a sea of cowboy hats and button down striped shirts. After musing over the various spots, I picked an area adjacent to all the spots but not really in any particular one. 

This was my limbo, or my purgatory if you will. I used this as my observation post, much like primatologist Jane Goodall would  have done to watch chimpanzees in Tanzania. I could monitor, observe and not interfere with the group and their society. So I watched, no doubt with a slight quizzical and bemused expression on my face. In one hand clutching a poor domestic beer and the other itching for a notepad to record my notes on the strange mating ritual of the Homo Sapien Texacanus.

I watched on one side, elderly cowboy couples line dance to some Hank Williams and on the other, lone forlorn clubbers looking for love, sipping their beers and nodding their heads to C+C Music Factory songs. This was fascinating to me, quite honestly I was fascinated by the whole thing. In the interest of brevity I won't elaborate much further on my observations.

My friend and I had a good time, he enjoyed the scene. I enjoyed it, much like I would have enjoyed watching a prairie dog colony or a community of aborigines. Now I am not any better or worse than these people, I am not making a value judgement. However, there is just nothing in common between me, the skinny white guy from New Jersey, and say, the 6"6, 330 pound black cowboy in the shiny silver shirt and bolo tie who (I am quoting) "love me some Lone Star Beer and Randy Travis on a Friday night".

Yee to the Haw indeed.