*The views expressed in Truesday are those of the author and do not represent Austinist as a whole. Thank heavens.* -The Editors

It really does feel like we’re fattened up just in time for the slaughter*. As if there’s a personal conspiracy to find one thing, one point, one idea and then build the shit out of it until it peaks. Then blow that bitch up and wave it off like I never knew what the big deal was to begin with.

That’s how this type of duck usually quacks. Expectations built upon expectations built upon a rickety-ass foundation and BOOM! You’ve got a movement away from a movement. An exodus. The relieving.

My favorite shit-kicker neighbors have an exploded water heater. It’s been done explodified for several weeks now. There’s a car battery rotting away on the driveway, in the puddle bled out by the exploded water heater. They have to know it’s exploded. They walk in it every goddamned day, stepping over that fizzing, sizzling car battery. Perhaps it's indicative of something less benign, I don't really know. I think one of them lost control of his car a few weeks ago and plowed it through their other neighbor’s lawn. Three cop cars pointing at a yard-rutting Ford, leaning up against a downed pole.

It’s easy to judge these things on the surface. Seems so simple. Like the story is so typical that it blasts right on through mildly intriguing into sad monotony. But what the fuck? How could this possibly be as simple as it appears?

They were out there, the dudes, standing with slumps, targeted by those police lights. Though appearing pretty sedated, their faces showed a curiously awed fear. Like they just woke up in a stranger’s life. As if they’d Quantum Leap'd, or got crossed-up in some weird Memento scenario, blinked, and WHOOSH – car is wrecked and cops are tapping their toes with expectation. Looking at them, you knew that they knew they were beyond help at that point. Chemicals moving through the system, dousing all attempts at neurological focus.

Son, you been drinkin’ or taking any narcotics? Maybe a prescription?

[I have no idea what to tell this mustache.]

Your truck is halfway in your neighbor’s yard.

[Yard? Shit! When the family hears about this, Dad’s gonna lose it again. Gotta hear about the job thing and the girl thing and the school thing and the visiting grandma thing and FUCKING SHIT MAN, WILL YOU JUST CALM YOUR HEMORRHOIDED ASS DOWN! Seriously. Just cool those jets of hellacious judgment for a minute and let me sort this shit out… or maybe not, but I want it quiet either way. ]

The Xbox live. Boxed chicken and pizza. Buffalo wing sauce on a store-pressed pair of slacks and happiness hinged on the outcome of league playoffs. Advertising and muscle relaxer vacations. French cuffs and not having any cash to tip the shoe polish guy at the titty bar. Daycare childhoods, Jack Daniels mouthwash and thinking Uruguay is in Mexico. Anonymous credit, UFmutherfuckin’C, and keeping the goatee in fashion forever and ever and ever.

This is the mindset that doesn’t notice a blown water heater. This is the lifestyle which even if it did notice the blown heater, wouldn’t do shit to dam the flow, even if it ever bothered to figure out what that might entail. To stifle the negative outcome. To quell the impending disaster. To do what it could to reverse the damage already done.

And it’s not necessarily a question of priority. It feels more like intent.

We can see the water building, we really can. Flowing out and around, pooling amongst the fizzling car batteries. Just look around. But we can’t all be clever enough to find that exploded water heater before we’ve run amok through our neighbor’s lawns and subsequently find ourselves in a state of perpetual defense after that.

Best we can do is follow the flows upstream.

Lucky they missed the house. By like, six feet.

*By ourselves