Forget Moving to Austin, You’ll Just Come Crawling Back to Lubbock

Once upon a time, everyone cool you knew from high school moved to Austin.

They were all headed off to have some dope-ass life that you could only dream of, and you were feeling really lame for staying home and going to South Plains College. They were going to see all the good bands and eat all the good food and have all the fun and you were going to drink beer at Skooners until you died.

So you saved up all your money and joined them there only to find out that things were not exactly as awesome as you thought they'd be.

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You got a job at a restaurant making exactly as much as you did in Lubbock, then realized that your rent was twice as much for an apartment half the size of yours back home. You worked a crapload of hours just to feed yourself and pay for your classes. Big-time music festivals came through town, but instead of going to them like you thought you would you ended up cussing at the traffic on your way to your second job at the laundromat.

Your car fell apart and eventually bit the dust, so you started using a bike as your main source of transportation. Your bike was then stolen off of your porch in the middle of the night.

Nothing was going the way it was supposed to, but you just couldn't give up. You were in Austin. The big city. The epicenter of the music scene. The coolest place in Texas. You were going to make it.

But you didn't.

You didn't make it.

You eventually came back to Lubbock after struggling for years to make it work. You felt like a failure. You didn't even want to change your phone number and lose that cool Austin area code for years. You sucked. You friggin' loser.

Over time, you grew up a little bit. You realized that Austin could still be a fun place to hang out, but that Lubbock, your lame hometown, was a more lucrative place to be at this juncture in your life. You found a better job. You made way more money. You even met someone and rekindled relationships with all of your old friends. You had more time and cash to actually take trips and see all the bands you thought you'd never see. You even went on a couple of cool vacations abroad.

Life in Lubbock was never as bad as it seemed and every day it seemed a little bit better than the day before. Maybe you'd stay there forever. Maybe you'd just use it as a stepping stone to some other place in the sun.

But...

You made it back, and we're glad to have you.