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Blind South By - Days Five and Six

I'll leave Austin soon, I think, but not until I feel like I've reached my brim and I'm ready to run over into something new.

SXSW is over. You'd think that means I'd stop staying up until 6 a.m. and having such a great time. Or at least leave Austin.

Everything has a capacity and a breaking point. Without an upward limit we'd never strive towards anything above and beyond or even ideal. Trash cans fill up and overflow, sidewalks congest and push people into traffic, and people get so tired that they'll fall asleep where they stand. Your body breaks down and fails you. This will happen all your life, but now I'm talking about endgame for South By Southwest, a festival that can sometimes make you forget about being realistic. But capacities also exist to be stretched and challenged.

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The last 24 hours were without a doubt the biggest push. Saturday morning I sat at the Blue Ribbon Grocery with a cup of coffee and a breakfast taco pretty ready to just not move the rest of the day. Sleeping three hours for three straight nights only works until the adrenaline wears off. The thing I looked most forward to was going back the Omni to test out their bathrooms again. Saturday is South by Southwest's breaking point. Things were getting canceled left and right, the streets were packed by 4 p.m., people were leaving early with back problems, catching all type of ailments, and a sludgy river of filthy garbage trailed half of the way down 6th Street. Not good shit to be rolling your cane through. But there's still so much to see.

So I started to scrap my day's plans in favor of the frightening fallback called spontaneity. On a tip from two low-key, fly ladies at breakfast, I moseyed to the Wedidit party, a rooftop DJ function where the L.A. collective (Shlohmo, RL Grime, Groundislava, Ryan Hemsworth, and more) really let loose, swarming the day-drunk, sun-wilted crowd with classic dance, nu-trap, and Bugatti-Hop all day long. It was an easy event to stay at, a real party in the truest sense, and most of all a group of young people who really just wanted to get buck and touch on each other. It didn't get really crazy until I left at 6 p.m. though, when apparently someone may or may not have been stabbed (according to Shlohmo's Twitter).

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While people were getting either real-shanked or fake-shanked at Wedidit, I popped back over to the Hype Hotel (for the free shit, obvs), and when I realized that there were no more tacos I decided to try and go back to the green room to see if they had any. By now security at Hype must've figured I was some sort of artist handler or super-sensory talent scout, because I'd been backstage now three of the four days. I elevated up to floor six and decided to go cold chat with Chaz Bundick of Toro Y Moi, who had just finished his set (which I missed). Though he lives in my town I've never met him, and all reports of his good nature definitely ring true.

But my day still hadn't included one live performance, and come nighttime things started to break down further. San Jose rapper Antwon and I had plans to erect a kissing booth in front of his show at Red 7, but we were both just too damn tired to mouth hug all the drunken masses slithering up and down Red River. From one hotel to the next, I had more beers at the Hiatt lobby, contemplating how I could be so overfull with joyful experiences and yet feel so depleted and useless.

I had to stop fighting it; It was time to visit the mothership. #VICELAND, which apparently is spelled only that way, had one of the most killer rap lineups of the night, so with my correspondent status I figured I could go, drink free all night, and just "cool it" and "chill" as my editor suggested earlier in the week. NOT the case. Let me first say that the show ended up being totally mindblowing, but when we first arrived, Viceland was a damned calamity. Sealed off by the fire marshal, the stage room was at critical mass, the bouncers were the most frustrating and anti-human mules I've ever dealt with, and worst of all the bar was outside, so if you went to re-stock on free drinks, you weren't getting back in that room. And if I have permanent hearing damage, I fully blame Baauer, who hacked a DJ set that had all the things you wanted to hear but no style or technique, on a sound system so poorly EQ'd that in all honestly I almost yakked right there on the multitudes of molly-popping-and-sweating youth.

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Sets by Action Bronson, Trinidad James (who isn't not bad) and guest birthday appearance by Danny Brown sure made everybody giddy, but these great rappers quickly gave way to too much uncurated DJing. Maybe it was just because I'd been at Wedidit all day, but Baauer sandwiched in between two interim-music DJs, felt like one long monotonous block of the "trendy & edgy" spotify playlist. No he did not play "Harlem" Shake" and yes everybody tried to act like they thought that was all noble of him when really how incredibly batshit stupid insane that would have been.

Luckily the tide turned when TDE took the stage. The room cleared out a bit and the booze started flowing again, and by the time Kendrick Lamar stood on stage in all white with ScHoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, and Jay Rock, we could taste the paydirt. Lamar ran through quite a few early cuts from Section.80 before he chose a few careful good kid, m.A.A.d. city crowd pleasers (pretty cool hearing K. Dot rap Drizzy's verse on "Poetic Justice"), and when the beat dropped in "m.A.A.d. City," everyone at VICELAND completely lost it. I'm guessing I had the equivalent of a full beer poured on my head.

I'll speed up, though. After Viceland we needed to make the night count. We grabbed Reka and Sharon, my fellow frugal blogger girls from breakfast, and headed to Illmore, the biggest South By late night party in Austin, put on by ScoreMore and the blog Ill Roots. It took over a mansion-sized rented property, boasting celebrity appearances like Waka Flocka, Macklemore, Kendrick, and even supposedly, mercifully, Prince. After a few hours of schmoozing and free vodka Red Bulls, we made it back downtown to cap off the night. It was 4:30 a.m. and not only did I not have a place to stay, but I was now joined by two girls in the same boat. They were talking about someplace called Festival Beach but the idea of sleeping on the ground by the river somehow made me feel a little bit to much like that dude playing bongos outside the coffee shop.

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So I suggested that we "check in" to the Hype Hotel. I wouldn't so much call what we did "breaking in" as "taking the initiative to find a more comfortable place to sleep." So as we quietly slipped into the parking garage stairwell and climbed up to the 6th floor, I told the girls, "Just walk in like you're supposed to be here." By now I was intimately familiar with the green room at the bizarre residential hotel that was re-branded and dubbed HH for the week, and I knew that if we could make it out to the roof deck we could have some peace and quiet, or at least go swimming in the kiddie pool. And we totally made it there, toting leftover beverages that we picked up from the now-long ended Hype Machine events. We sprawled out on the deck, looking at the lights of the city, talking and drinking like old buddies that hadn't just met each other 16 hours before.

"You guys don't live here, do you?" Imagine the voice of the security guard that interrupted our six-feet-deep slumber at 10:30 Sunday morning. The scene must have been pretty fucking comical; a few young hotties curled up with each other on a mish-mash of ourdoor furniture, surrounded by empty cans, water bottles, and the 9-inch deep wading pool. Before they escorted us out (and managed to do so in the most hospitable Southernly form), we stretched and looked around: Austin's downtown rolled out around us in all directions, now overcast and steely grey, like it had been sucked of all its nutrients. What was left of the trash was just the stuff that couldn't be swept up, the real nasty grit and liquids. The city was teasing us like the fleeting and mysterious epilogue of limitless excitement that the festival had come to embody. Snorting and with heads hung, we were sent back downstairs and back onto the streets.

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Day Five was over but I couldn't have predicted a Day Six. Connecting again to friends, family and intriguing strangers, on a slightly less intense level, I decided to overstay my welcome in Austin. You can't live in any type of situation forever but I wanted to see how long I could pull out the stops. Was it worth it, you ask? Well, I'm now at the home of the coolest lady in Austin, an opera singer, artist, crafter, and prolific and legendary screenwriter, whom I was just introduced to a few hours ago. This woman, who is in her late sixties, just stayed up until 3 a.m. with us drinking Prosecco and doing impressions. We laughed and got serious and made stupid idiot jokes like cartoon caricatures and little children. Tomorrow we're getting lunch.

I'll leave Austin soon, I think, but not until I feel like I've reached my brim and I'm ready to run over into something new. I made it my number-one priority to completely ignore whatever the fuck anybody else has told me I could or couldn't do this past week, and I'm going to stay trained on that path. I started this piece thinking that what the disabled needed was equality, but I think more than that we need humor, sincere and helpful encouragement, and to fight back when we are dismissed, obstructed, or pigeonholed as pabulum.

THIS WEEK BY THE NUMBERS:
Number of phone numbers I got: 24
Number of times I used the word "hipster": 0
Number of total hours of slept since Tuesday: 17
Number of lines waited in: 1
Number of dollars spent: 185

Dedicated wholly to my friend Tristan, who is fighting the hardest fight imaginable. Godspeed, buddy.

To see the rest of Will's blind coverage of SXSW 2013, click right here.