About one million years ago, a glacier punched its way through the Wicklow Mountains south of Dublin, leaving behind a long, curved valley and two small lakes to remember it by.

Then about 1,500 years ago, a guy called Cóemgen settled in that same valley—by then unimaginatively named the “Glen of Two Lakes,” or Gleann Dá Loch—so he could live out a cloistered monastic life. Virtually nothing has survived about Cóemgen except for fantastical, sometimes amusing, legends. In one, he dropped a book in the lake only for a friendly otter to return it; in another, he rolled around in nettles to quell his carnal passions for a lovely maiden and encouraged her to do the same. (Girl, run.)

Cóemgen’s desire for hermitage backfired spectacularly, since he gained followers and fame, and well, here we are talking about him. By the 10th century the valley featured an entire “monastic city,” today a set of scattered ruins punctuated by a 30-meter stone tower. After the English showed up with their extremely weird language, Gleann Dá Loch became “Glendalough,” and Cóemgen became “Kevin.” That’s right: on the longest possible timeline, I’m this guy’s namesake.

That’s all a mildly interesting history lesson, but Saint Kevin was completely incidental as to how Kiki and I found ourselves getting married in his old stomping grounds, of all places, last week. Despite our love of the stage, neither of us was in the mood for a big wedding; instead, Kiki had the lovely idea that we should elope with our two sisters, hers and mine. Ireland was a logical choice, since my brother-in-law Stephen is Irish¹. When I floated the idea to Margaret she immediately recommended Glendalough, where her good friend Susanne owns a retreat venue called Glendalough Sanctuary. So the parts of the wedding fell into place like magical Lego bricks. 

Kiki and I took an exploratory trip in May to get a feel for the place. We rented our right-hand car and drove an hour south from Dublin along typically Irish roads—narrow, curving, gorgeous—and arrived at Glendalough Sanctuary, just up the hill from the monastic city, with views of the fields and sheep and ruins below. 

The next day, we explored the valley. The ruins and lakes are picturesque as hell, but we spotted an obvious problem: it was crawling with tourists like us. Where could we have even a short wedding with a modicum of privacy?

But Glendalough had one more bit of magic for us. Susanne led us down the road a bit and helped us climb over a fence into a sheep meadow. We crossed the field, climbed over a second fence, and standing apart from the other ruins was St. Mary’s Church, the oldest surviving structure at Glendalough. Despite the busloads of tourists only steps away, it was empty and quiet, like it had been waiting for us for a thousand years.

We were already sold on Glendalough, but now it felt predestined in some way.

Back in Amsterdam, we arranged all the things you need for even a tiny wedding—dress, food, hair, makeup, photographer. In no time the week arrived: we packed Kiki’s poofy dress into an enormous suitcase, and back to Glendalough we went, waving to the sheep in every field we passed and hugging Susanne hello. Just as we arrived, her right-hand man Paschal was hard at work building a table extension for our wedding-night dinner, the first of a dozen tremendous acts of kindness they showed us over the week. Five stars aren’t enough for this place.

Soon after arriving, we had our first couple’s activity: a meditative sound bath. This is well outside my usual range of leisure activities, but was a great way to connect with each other and take a step away from the corporeal world. A wind storm howled angrily outside, which was distracting until I realized: all of it—the practitioner’s ASMR music, the wind through the trees, Kiki breathing next to me—was part of the sound bath. (I only fell asleep a little.)

Afterwards we drove to a painfully charming local pub to meet Margaret and Stephen, who were having a pint with Susanne and a few other Irish friends. The funniest part of the evening was running to the corner nightshop for fried fish and eating it as finger food in the parked car. From the sound bath to this: a perfect wedding-week evening.

On Tuesday afternoon, Kiki’s family showed up—Mima, Louis, and the nieces Layla and Sophie. Seeing everyone meet each other for the first time was of course a high point of the week (and a bit surreal, as it always feels when worlds collide). Fully assembled, we walked down the hill and over the fences to St. Mary’s Church, where I led a brief wedding rehearsal (spoiler: shoulda rehearsed more). That evening we had a fantastic dinner at the Wicklow Heather, and sitting there next to Kiki with the two sides of the family chatting happily, I felt like a millionaire.

Then it was Wednesday, the big day. There was an excellent brunch and an errand to get a bouquet. Back at the sanctuary, the ladies all took their turns in the hair and makeup chairs, and came out looking like supermodels—an easy task when they were all six-foot stunners to begin with. I wished in retrospect that we’d done the “don’t see the bride until the wedding” gimmick, cause Kiki woulda knocked me over backwards.

Cars honked at us in celebration as we walked back down the road and crossed the sheep meadow for the third time. The tulle of Kiki’s wedding dress had collected an entire Glendalough ecosystem—twigs, leaves, live bugs—by the time we got to the church. Setup took only minutes (tiny self-run weddings have their advantages) and then it was go-time.

(Click here to view the video. I have to hide it on Dropbox, since YouTube didn’t like the copyrighted music.)

Weather had been a concern, of course—that church hasn’t had a roof in centuries—but Saints Mary and Kevin were smiling upon us. The sky was a lovely gray² and the rain was elsewhere as we walked down the aisle to “Three” by KT Tunstall, preceded by Layla and Sophie tossing rose petals. First the nieces realized they were out of position and switched sides; then Kiki and I realized and did the exact same thing. There was a lot of awkward shuffling for a 15-minute ceremony. 

Margaret welcomed everyone—ourselves, and also the “saints, the snails, the swallows, and the sheep”—to that holy place. She shared messages that she’d collected from our parents. Our nieces each gave a reading—an Irish blessing from Layla; a Taylor Swift lyric from Sophie. (Perfect, no notes.)

Then we exchanged vows. Kiki had requested to go first since “I’m the writer,” then she immediately proved herself wrong by doing an amazing job, listing the things she loved about me and about us, and listing her promises. My favorite: “I promise to keep doing bits. They are going to be so dumb, I swear. The dumbest, dumbest bits.”

Then it was my turn. I was really proud of what I’d written and looking forward to reading it, but I immediately botched that by bursting into tears from the opening line. (I know, I was probably the only person who actually cared.) Key quote, courtesy of Rob Delaney on “Catastrophe“:

This life wasn’t even on the menu. There was no menu! It was like one of those restaurants where the chef decides what you’re going to eat. Then they bring you something unbelievably delicious, and you realize they know better than you could ever know, and you never want to go to any other restaurant ever again. Fuck menus!

And finally, by the authority vested in her “by absolutely no one,” Margaret declared us husband and wife. We kissed, newly married.³

Short, simple, and perfect, just like we wanted. Kiki was proud of not being a bridezilla; pretty sure I wasn’t a groomzilla. Of all the things that could go wrong, the worst things were missing our outro musical cue (Dolly Parton, “Why’d You Come In Here”) and forgetting to change my shoes (I got married in sneakers). Neither the few people present, nor the saints, snails, swallows, nor sheep, really minded. 

The week wasn’t over—there was a fantastic catered dinner and Irish breakfast on Thursday morning, then Kiki and I spent a charming 24 hours in Kilkenny before flying home. (When the Kilkenny hotel clerk found out we’d just gotten married, she gushed her congratulations and left cakes, pastries, and a card in our room. God bless the Irish.)

I don’t know how destination weddings normally go; I would assume many couples rarely or never actually return to the venue. Not so for us. When she recommended Glendalough, Margaret called it her favorite place on earth. And now, of course, it’s one of ours. We’ll be back soon. You should go, too! But you won’t have as good a time as we did.

DISCLAIMER: The last thing the world needs is a white man in his 40s opining about Taylor Swift. For the record, this is just a glorified diary entry.)

Back in college circa 1999, I was lucky enough to see Weird Al Yankovic in concert. I generally remember having a great time, but all these years later, I have only one specific memory of that show: the first ten seconds, when Weird Al himself ran onstage and started singing “Gump,” and in an instant, the goofy celebrity figure who only existed abstractly in my head became an actual three-dimensional human being. I laughed out loud, simply flabbergasted that this guy was real.

I thought about that moment a lot in the weeks leading up to seeing Taylor Swift in Amsterdam with Kiki and the nieces. Taylor’s become such a pop-culture force of nature that it’s functionally impossible not to have an opinion about her.¹ So it seems bizarre that—with a little bit of luck and a whole lot of money—it’s possible to just walk into a place and see her.² When she finally appeared Thursday night, over a year after we bought the tickets, emerging center-stage from enormous petals like a pop-idol flower, my first thought was: Look how small she is!

That’s nothing against Ms. Swift personally (she’s 5’10”). And certainly nothing against her work ethic. The numbers are familiar to any Swiftie, but staggering to the casual observer: a three-and-a-half hour show repeated 151 times on six continents, which adds up to 22 days spent onstage. It’s an economic engine on its own. It’s such a spectacle that the even the backup dancers are famous. 

Taylor herself famously prepped for the tour by running literal marathons on the treadmill while singing her songs at full volume. We were watching an athletic performance as much as a musical one. Somebody once quipped that she looked like two toothpicks holding up a pencil, but these days she’d be the one snapping you in half. As if that weren’t enough, she recorded and released an all-new album in the middle of the damn tour. I’ll say the same thing about the Eras Tour that I’ve said about “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”: You don’t have to like it, but you do have to respect it.

This isn’t really a concert review, but it was a hell of a concert. Taylor’s a goddamn pop-chorus machine gun who isn’t even old enough to be president. “Cruel Summer” has a bridge as perfect as the Golden Gate. “22” is pure concentrated nuclear joie de vivre. “Love Story” has the best key change since “If I Could Turn Back Time.” And so on. Taylor’s polished her dorky-queen act to a perfect sheen and she radiated out to her audience, all 55,000 of us wearing electronic wristbands that made us a physical part of the show. She was clearly very good at her job, and clearly enjoying it. 

If you’re sad about missing out, there’s good news! Everything is everywhere all at once these days, and so the whole 3.5-hour show has already been made into a concert film. (It was the 11th highest-grossing movie in the US in 2023. Taylor’s pop-culture ubiquity defies description.) It’s now on Disney+ and I highly recommend it if you’re interested; it’s a good concert film and honestly improves on the live experience in a lot of ways—the view, the sound quality, most importantly the cost. 

But nobody goes to arena shows for the acoustics. We go there to be there, to drown out the artist themself with our clapping and cheering and singing along. In 1976, Greil Marcus described the applause at an Elvis concert as “thundering with such force that you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.” Suffering is the last thing we were doing, but you get his point. The experience wasn’t hearing Taylor sing songs; it was being at Johan Cruijff Arena³ and singing them with her.  

In that sense Taylor de-focused again, from a 34-year-old woman back to a cultural abstraction. Like most people I love any instance of happy crowds, and it hardly matters why they’re happy. Whether it’s football or church or pop concerts, you’re tapping into some fundamental human psychology that amplifies our collective joy to more than the sum of its parts. Yes, the planet is on fire. Yes, you can and should think Serious Thoughts about Taylor Swift, about the privilege that allows you to be there, about whether there can be such a thing as a good billionaire. But happy crowds are just as important. They’re what I appreciated most on Thursday night. They’re what makes us human. They’re what will get us through this.

CDK Company is a dance troupe based in The Netherlands (website), and they recently released an extremely energetic dance video to Gotye’s ubiquitous “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The scale of the production is striking, as are the Wes Anderson aesthetics. But the real eye-grabber is the choreography, a sharp, baroque contrast to the plink-plink-plink simplicity of the song.

I don’t even know if I like it! The dance moves are so rapid-fire, so herky-jerky, that it’s hard for my eye to settle (which was their intention). But the physical talent and technical precision involved are undeniable. Plus they’re Dutch! So I watched it twice just the same.

As plans solidify for the all-but-inevitable expansion of I-35 through central Austin, KUT has shared a truly impressive deep dive into TxDOT’s plans. Since the write-up is well over 5,000 words, I thought I’d do a write-up of the write-up and summarize the good, bad, and ugly. TLDR: It’s about 20% good, 60% bad, and 20% ugly.

Let’s start with their physics-defying intention to add four more lanes, which—it is almost universally understood¹—will leave traffic worse than it started. Add to that the decade of construction, and it’s hard to argue the widening provides any benefit (though of course many will argue it just the same; meet me in the comments).

Besides this lovingly-wrapped gift to traffic, noise, and pollution, the expansion will do what expansions always do, and push out more than 100 homes and businesses—most of them low-income—in the name of “progress.” (Go have dinner at Stars Café and buy a rock at Nature’s Treasures while you can.) 

That’s the incredibly, intolerably bad news. TxDOT will get its way, and a few years later we’ll collectively forget the construction misery, and a few years after that you’ll start hearing the same drumbeat all over again. So it goes.

But this shit sandwich is not without its pickles. TxDOT might be singing the same old song about I-35, but previous verses have been arguably even worse: over time the highway expanded not only out but up, turning the metaphorical wall between east and west Austin into a physical one.

This project will rectify that generational mistake by lowering the main lanes of I-35 below ground level most of the way between the river and Airport Boulevard—farewell, upper decks.  Even better, the design allows for so-called “caps” that hide the monstrosity in a tunnel, providing the opportunity for parkland or even buildings on top.² The upshot will be Austin’s own version of Boston’s Big Dig, which was both an infamously nasty boondoggle and an indescribable improvement to downtown Boston. That dual outcome is also plausible for Austin.

I’m so excited about this aspect that I’m in danger of sounding like I support the project. I don’t! There’s a widely-circulated proposal to execute our own Big Dig without expanding I-35, and I whole-heartedly support that. If this is what we get instead, then I’ll accept the cognitive dissonance and enjoy the improvements while I rue the drawbacks.

That’s my short summary of what’s being planned. The true nerds can keep reading for a few highlights and lowlights I noticed when I went through the KUT article. (Or, ya know, just go read it.)

The wackiest change worth mentioning: just north of the river, the northbound frontage road will jump *over* the depressed highway, and both frontage roads will run side-by-side on the west side of the highway. Check out the orange lines here:

One strange side effect of this decision is that, if you’re driving south and you wanna exit for downtown, you’ll bypass it, take a left exit, and do a crazy u-turn and crossover maneuver. 

By the time you get to the heart of downtown, the highway will be below ground level—and, if Austin foots the bill, covered by green space. It’ll look something like this (again they’re showing a fanciful number of vehicles on the road).  

To reiterate, this proposal is a lot worse than it could be—those ground-level frontage roads comprise eight or more traffic lanes, practically a highway on its own. But I won’t pretend it’s not a lot better than what we have now.

Near the UT campus, the rogue frontage roads will hop over to the east side of the highway. Everything in orange below is hidden by park land, or could be. You know UT is licking its chops at the possibilities here (Does Bevo have chops?), but say a prayer for the drivers stuck in the 22 lanes of traffic underground. Yes, traffic tunnels are generally safe; no, they’re not a fun place to wait during rush hour.

North of campus, the frontage roads go their separate ways again and the whole project gets a lot more conventional, in ways both good (upper decks permanently demolished, hooray) and bad (most of the doomed homes and businesses are in this stretch). There’s one more Big Dig opportunity from 38th street to Airport Blvd, where the main lanes are again below ground level.³ By the time you get to Capitol Plaza, it’ll be the same surface-level I-35 we have now, but (somehow) even wider. 

Unsurprisingly, there’s much more to say—the most obvious thing I haven’t mentioned is the continued expansion of I-35 north and south of downtown, road projects which are much more typical and have practically nothing to get excited about. (Hilariously, the southern component of the project includes an upper deck, the same fucking thing they’re making such a fanfare of removing in central Austin. TxDOT is like the Doozers in real life.)

I dunno how to conclude this long post, besides encouraging you to avoid downtown Austin for a decade or more, and suggesting you take your as-yet-unborn grandchildren to see the completed thing when it’s done. There’s literally no way this doesn’t experience delays and cost overruns and generate more traffic than we started with. Cause that’s how these things always go. 

When you live in Europe, you often wake up to the news. I’ll never forget Kiki startling me awake one morning with “Will Smith slapped Chris Rock!” Of course, sometimes the news is bad—occasionally very bad. So it was to wake up to texts from Brad and Lampe telling me Cortney DeAngelo had suddenly, shockingly passed away in her sleep.

When I told my friend Rahel that an Austin improv friend had died, she asked “Were you two close?” I started to type three different responses:

First I wrote: “Yeah, she was one of the best techs in the Austin improv community.”

Cortney was one of the three so-called “tech ninjas” (along with Lindsey McGowen and Cindy Page) who formed a tight mutual bond while producing professional-quality work around the Austin theater scene for little-to-no pay. Like so many improvisers who’ve experienced the ninjas’ work, I’ve become dogmatic about how good tech can elevate a show: “You’re going to love this show and you won’t even know why!”

Cortney’s comic timing onstage was good, but her comic timing on lights was phenomenal. With nothing more than a few sliders she could make or break a show (usually make it, unless she was doing her usual brand of mischief).¹

Lindsey, tech ninja #2, is actually in Amsterdam right now for the IMPRO Amsterdam festival. In a weird coincidence, on Sunday night—perhaps right around the time of Cortney’s death—I made a social-media post to highlight Lindsey and Emil running the boards, saying: “The technical improviser Avengers have assembled.” Cortney would have been an easy, first-ballot addition to those Avengers.

Then I wrote: “Yeah, we were in a troupe together for years.”

The passion for good tech extended to Cortney being a part of ¡ZARZAMORA!, my long-time troupe with several other old-timer improvisers that hopped around to various festivals.² Cortney accompanied us on many of those, and was never less than an official full-time member.

I keep coming back to the promo picture that ¡ZARZAMORA! took for one of our formats. It’s admittedly hard to look past certain other elements of the picture, but there in the background is Cortney in her green wig, just as I imagine her: a sassy goddess. (In this show format, she *literally* played God.)

But finally, I wrote: “Yeah, she adopted my cats when I moved to Amsterdam.”

Cortney wore her heart on her sleeve, where it radiated in every direction like her trademark perfume (man did she love that perfume). Imagine my luck when I needed to find a new home for my two cats, Suitcase and Sabado, and Cortney and her husband Jonathan agreed to take them.

(That’s an oversimplification; they’d actually only agreed to take Suitcase, with Sabado coming along to Amsterdam; and then with less than a week until the big move, when it became apparent that Sabado was in too fragile a state to move, they agreed to take them both.)

(And that’s STILL an oversimplification; they only agreed to foster the cats until I came back for them; but they got along so well that we mutually agreed the cats would stay there.)

This of course promoted Cortney to our inner circle of friends, with a Facebook chat called “Cats!” where she would keep Kiki and I posted on how damn happy she and Jonathan and Suitcase and Sabado were in their little apartment.

Sadly, Suitcase and Sabado both preceded Cortney in untimely deaths—I fucking hate this being the *third* tribute I’ve written in as many years for that single household. Our hearts go out to Jonathan; they’d just moved into a new house, and Cortney’s last message in the “Cats!” group was “I can’t wait for y’all to come visit!” There’s just nothing to say about something so awful.

Cortney’s final Facebook post was so eerily perfect that, when I checked her page after hearing the news, I thought it was a memorial from somebody else. She’d just finished coordinating this year’s FronteraFest, one of Austin’s longest-running theater festivals. Again, the picture captures her perfectly: photogenic, exhausted, and happy about a job well done. And such a goddamn pro that her body told her fatal condition to just hang on a second while she finished flying and landing a whole festival. 

This week we’ll head back to the IMPRO Amsterdam festival, because the show must go on, as Cortney would be the first and last to tell you. She should still be here, taking a break on the couch with Suitcase and Sabado before jumping into her next creative endeavor. My best tribute to her is to be pissed off that she’s not.

God save the Queen.

---

Today’s the five-year anniversary of one of my most secretly amazing nights, and I figure that’s a good enough excuse to end the secret. I think I’ve told this story to fewer than twenty people, which for me is a VERY low number.

So I’d come into possession of a “gift certificate” offering two free nights in a decent Vegas hotel in exchange for sitting through a timeshare sales pitch. Timeshares are a scam, but the free hotel stay felt like scamming the scammers. I booked it in February 2019 and invited my friend Yichao to make the drive from LA and spend a guys’ weekend together. 

Yichao picked me up at the airport and we made the most of Vegas for 48 hours (the correct duration for any Vegas trip; no more, no less). We wandered the Strip, went to Drag Brunch, got confused by slot machines, and ate an alarming number of calories. (Did you know there’s a $100 all-you-can-eat buffet? Now you do.) Oh yes, and I dutifully sat through the two-hour timeshare sales pitch and repeatedly told the guy that I was not his target market before finally being released.

On our second and final night, we walked across the highway to the Rio Casino to see Penn & Teller (great show). As we filed out of the theater, I suggested to Yichao that we dodge the crowd vying for taxis and Ubers by having one last round of blackjack before we headed back to the hotel.

A nice call on my part; I went on a hot streak, turning my $200 or so into almost $500 in less than an hour. As is common, our blackjack table had an optional side bet: for $5 you can bet whether any of the three cards in play—your two cards or the dealer’s up-card—would be a 7. If one of them is a 7, you win $10; two out of three, it’s $100; three out of three, it’s $1,000.

You shouldn’t need long with a calculator and a deck of cards to realize this side bet is for absolute suckers (even more so than gambling in the first place). But I think of gambling as entertainment, not investment, so I tossed a $5 chip into the side bet circle as the mood struck me, just for the tiny dopamine hit. 

You see where this story is going, so I’ll tell it as abruptly as it happened: shortly after midnight, I placed a fateful side bet. I was dealt a 7. And then the dealer got another 7. And then I got a third 7.

Yichao and I leapt to our feet, yelling and high-fiving and generally causing a scene. Moments later, though, I realized something was wrong; the pit boss was interrogating the dealer in a serious tone, and the third player at the table was waving us back to the table. Maybe I hadn’t won after all?

Nope. In all the excitement, I hadn’t noticed something: it wasn’t just three 7s. It was 7s of the same suit. Which meant I’d won the jackpot. Which stood just north of $32,000. 

Should I say something profound here? My life is so stupidly privileged that it beggars belief. I didn’t deserve this lucky hand more than any other idiot at the tables.

As you’d expect, there’s some paperwork involved in winning jackpots. We sat buzzing for an hour or more at the table, sharing the story with passers-by and sipping free drinks (generously tipped) while casino management scoured the video footage for any shenanigans and had me complete a tax form (W2-G, if you’re curious). Yichao said he was just as happy as if he’d won himself; I’m sure I’d feel the same way if it were reversed.

At last, the floor manager decided the necessary boxes had been checked and instructed the dealer to pay me out. An interesting ritual: he counted out the full jackpot in chips from his tray, then immediately separated $7,000 of it into a separate tray for tax purposes, which the pit boss whisked off to the back room for the accountants to play with.¹ The remaining $25,137 was pushed in a big pile over to me, just like in the movies.

Apart from the millions of little butterfly-effect coincidences that conspired to enable this win, there’s one incredibly large sliding door: I hadn’t been placing side bets on every hand. There’s an extremely plausible multiverse where I *don’t* drop a $5 chip in the circle, the exact same cards are dealt, and I watch my jackpot float by unclaimed. 

The point here is NOT to obsessively place sucker side bets! The point is that I got very, very lucky.

Even after everything was settled, we still hadn’t actually played the blackjack hand! I foolishly said “hit me” (Always split 7s against a dealer 7!) and busted out. I left the dealer with a generous tip, scooped the pile of chips into my wool hat, and nervously walked the 20 steps from the table to the cage. It was another half-hour wait for them to tick more boxes and print me up a certified check², during which I called Kiki with the news. Finally they handed it over, and just like that I had a flimsy piece of paper making me $25,137 richer.

Well past 2am, we taxied back to the hotel. I said good night to Yichao, telling him not to worry about paying for his end of the Penn & Teller tickets or anything else he owed me. Though I’d already warned myself against extravagant spending, I did splurge on a first-class ticket back to Austin—Spirit Airlines just didn’t seem right.³ At the airport the next morning, I made video calls to immediate family to share the news, and checked approximately ten times per hour to be sure the check was still okay.

The Aftermath

Back in Austin I deposited the money with my credit union. The exchange with the bank teller was funny; neither of us wanted to be the first to comment on how big a check it was. I soon made a category in my Quicken app called “Holy Crap,” which proved to be genuinely helpful. 

About 25% of the winnings went to pay the remaining balance on my FEMA loan for my 2016 house flood. Another 10% paid for fun stuff: tickets to see Hamilton when I met Kiki in New York the following month, my flight to Amsterdam a couple of months later, and some toys for around the house. (And yes, I made multiple charity donations.)

A month or two later, all of the rest went towards my Chevy Volt, which belatedly offered me some close contact with my winnings. I figured out that Chevy Volt prices were $1,000 cheaper up in Dallas than in tech-happy Austin—well worth the road trip. Since my credit union didn’t have a branch in Dallas, literally the only way for me to have money on hand was to withdraw it in cash. So I did, and for 24 hours I got to spend some quality time with my winnings before handing it off to a Dallas Chevy dealer.

So that’s my casino story, which (now that the money’s gone) I don’t mind sharing publicly. It wasn’t life-changing on the scale of winning the lottery—if I’d only gotten two 7s instead of three, I’d be writing you on the same MacBook from the same Amsterdam couch.

But man, am I glad I placed that side bet.

Though it all feels like one big project, visiting and photographing 300 courthouses could hardly be more different than making a coffee-table book about them. The former is mostly a test of endurance and road trip route-planning. The latter is a hugely complicated creative and logistical endeavor. Sure it’s possible to order a simple photo book from Shutterstock, but this idea felt like it needed to be done properly or not at all.

After settling with Kiki in Amsterdam at the end of 2020, I waffled on whether—more importantly, how—I should begin. One of my first actions was to mock up the cover, which started as an iPad sketch and changed surprisingly little over time.

The book’s title gave me my next assignment: make the ridiculously subjective judgment of which 90 courthouses are the prettiest, and which ten are ugliest. I had over 300 courthouses to choose from¹ and zero architectural expertise to draw from. But the concept was tongue-in-cheek enough that I felt comfortable making gut decisions (and hey, if you disagree, make your own book). Some interesting trivia that emerged at this point: Texas has a surprising number of twin and triplet courthouses—even one set of quadruplets!

After some weeks I finally narrowed down my winners and losers into a nice organized spreadsheet. But I hadn’t even started making the damn book. It only took a few minutes poking around Adobe InDesign to realize that using it was going to drain my enthusiasm. Instead, I opened a blank document in Keynote—yes, Apple’s PowerPoint app—and started building a mockup, one page per slide, dragging around images and text boxes.

The fundamental questions began almost immediately. Would I be ranking the courthouses, and if not, how else would I organize them—alphabetically, geographically, etc? I made a hundred book-design decisions you would expect—fonts, color scheme²—plus a thousand that you wouldn’t, like how to format the index. My rationale for most of these is lost to time: why did I start the book with the East Texas chapter? Why did I put Travis County Courthouse next to Navarro County Courthouse? I don’t know, but I probably had a reason!

It was slow going, with weeks of inaction punctuated by short bursts of productivity. That’s how big projects go with me. After about a year, I had an “alpha” version of my mockup ready for review. This felt like a huge accomplishment, but it was still a simple thing—only a few of my photos even had captions! For all that work, it wasn’t much more ambitious than the aforementioned Shutterstock picture book. My reviewers gave great and candid feedback, which in summary said: This isn’t finished! Give us more! 

So I doubled down, researching and writing captions for every page, typing the phrase “County Courthouse” so often that I made a keyboard shortcut for it (“cch”). My productivity slowed to a glacial pace, but never quite stopped. I got through a second round of friend reviews and kept plugging away. There were obvious to-dos like the back cover design, plus weird little side projects like creating the maps and the numbered arrows pointing to all 100 courthouses.

There were still miles to go before I slept. But one happy hour in spring 2023, energized by my second beer, I decided in a flash that the book would be on sale by my birthday, June 30th. 

Deadlines are motivating. I made design decisions on which I’d been hedging and checked and re-checked and re-re-checked every word and detail in the book. Amazing how many times you can glance at a typo without noticing it.

Meanwhile I made final edits to the photos themselves—that’s over 100 separate Photoshop jobs, and I’m not especially good at Photoshop. There are wizards out there who coulda made my pictures twice as pretty in half the time, but this felt like a “me” part of the project. I’d noticed that many of my photos were cropped a bit too closely—note to aspiring photographers: stand back!! But soon before going to print, I got a huge assist from our new robot overlords: Photoshop released an AI-driven “generative fill” feature that can expand an image beyond its original borders. While chuckleheads online were using it to stretch the Mona Lisa and whatnot, I was giving almost a dozen of my photos some breathing room. With any luck, you’ll have no idea which ones they are.

All that done, I hired a designer called Jennie on upwork.com who recreated my Keynote mockup in InDesign with incredible speed. Jennie and I went through five rounds of feedback as I refined it (see above about the damn typos). Example feedback: “Page 57: would you narrow the text box slightly so the word ‘is’ jumps to the final line?”

As Jennie and I finalized the design, I educated myself on self-publishing with IngramSpark, the most popular self-publishing platform. There were a dozen more hurdles too boring to get into, but the upshot was my trip to Texas in July, where I picked up a box full of copies of my very own book.

As we speak, my book is available on Amazon in paperback and hardcover editions. There’s sadly only one Amazon-free way to buy it, at BookPeople in downtown Austin. Full transparency: if you’re kind enough to order a copy, I’ll earn almost *one US dollar* from the sale! (You might’ve heard about the slim profit margins in the publishing industry. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll never make a profit on this.)

This blogpost is part of my very small promotional effort for the book. I sent a review copy to the Austin American-Statesman, and I’ll do some promotion to my 11,000+ followers on Ugly Texases, where there’s some obvious crossover appeal. Who knows? Maybe it’ll get noticed, picked up by a publisher, and become a bona fide hit.

But that’s all gravy. My first and only goal with this project has been a copy of the book for myself and whichever friends and family care to have one. Any time I want (which is often) I can pick it up off my bookshelf, flip through it, and say out loud: “I made this.”

On a 2014 drive from Austin to Denver for an improv festival, David Lampe and I entertained ourselves with a little app I had that listed every historic marker in the cities we drove through. I’d skim through the list as we approached each little town, and if something really piqued our interest, we made a quick stop. 

The frequent highlight of these (often the only highlight) were the courthouses, one per county, which gave our long road trip a nice tempo. This bit of entertainment caused us to zig-zag our route and spot as many courthouses as possible, and—starting with Hartley County Courthouse (Channing TX, built 1906)—photograph them. 

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” our caffeinated conversation inevitably went, “if someone visited every county courthouse in Texas?” Fun might not be the word some would use. Texas has 254 county courthouses¹ spread over an area bigger than France, most of it empty space punctuated by cattle herds and Dollar General stores. But, over the following six and a half years, that’s exactly what I did.

At first, I took pictures of courthouses as I happened to pass them by. On every visit to mom’s place in Nashville, I varied my route to hit new ones. Before long I was making dedicated day trips, stopping for as little as 30 seconds to snap a single photo before driving on. Many times, I found myself racing the sunset to get a courthouse photo before it was too dark. In the more remote corners of Texas—and friends, there are a whole lot of those—these were effectively now-or-never opportunities.

My bingo map of Texas slowly filled over the years. I had no particular endpoint in mind for the project until 2020, when I made the big decision to move to Europe at the end of the year. This put me on deadline with over 80 courthouses to go! But thanks to a little thing called COVID, I found myself with a lot of free weekends. So I tackled them a dozen or so at a time in long looping day trips. The project reached its nail-biting climax in December 2020: one day after quitting my job, one week before flying to Amsterdam, I visited the last few dozen in a single epic four-day journey that methodically criss-crossed the Panhandle like I was mowing the lawn.

But—you are surely asking, your voice raised—Kevin, why?? It’s not too complicated: I love road trips, I love old buildings, and—despite its long, undeniable list of flaws—I love the state of Texas. Taking a single picture of the courthouse in each of our counties, accruing unknown thousands of miles, was a decent way to scratch all of those itches at once. Even if only for a few minutes, I passed through almost every corner of this enormous state, visiting places I’d never seen before and never will again.

Dozens of times over the years, people shared the thought: “You should make a book!” My initial response was simple: There are already Texas-county-courthouse books! At least four of them, in fact. You’ve probably noticed Texas has its fair share of super-fans. I’m neither the only person to have completed this stunt, nor to have published the results.

But the peer pressure wore me down, and I started to riff on the idea. I knew for a fact that not all of my pictures were print-worthy, so any book would need to comprise a subset. “I dunno,” I mused one day, “maybe I’ll make a book called The 90 Prettiest Courthouses in Texas and the 10 Ugliest.” Like so many off-the-cuff jokes in my life², it stuck.

To Be Continued. Buy my book on Amazon!