In The World of Alcohol, Austin Stays With The Bottle...Music Blares; Cops Bust Away...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor

AUSTIN, Texas - Texans know and love their liquor. It goes well with the country & western music moaning loud and proud about Ma, trains, guns, wives, rain, dogs and prison. Here, in the state capital and the acknowledged center of the universe's fun, boozing in public has reached something of a milestone.

Cops say they busted more than 6,000 residents on driving-while-intoxicated charges last year. 2009 was a good year for chasing the girls and lost cowboy notes across town, but it is fabled Sixth Street that drew the Top Three bars police say served the tireless drunks.

Austin PD's novel idea of logging arrests may spread. Cops here routinely ask arrestees where they drank the night away. The locations span the many, many bars along the party drag. Listed by cops as the Top Three venues for 2009 were JBlacks, The Ranch and Molotov, a trio of wildly popular bars on the west end of Sixth Steet.

It makes you wonder which bars in, say, Big D, or Houston, or Brownsville might make those cities' Top Three. And perhaps the Austin model will spread across the Lone Star State, a state known far & wide for its death penalties and bars. It's sort of in keeping with police work that tries to shame local miscreants. In Fort Worth and other locations, sex offenders are publicized by way of websites used to disseminate the info. Other communities have citizen vigilante groups creating websites to list adulterers, vandals and thieves. It all goes to an attempt at making Life a bit better.

Austin's beer culture is here to stay. Too much history rolls down Sixth Street. Too, too many freedom-loving Texans have partied along the famous district, which also spills over into adjoining Fifth Street, where famous music venues such as Antone's also attract large crowds on weekends. It's not uncommon to see bar patrons leaving joints at an angle, barfing on the sidewalks and crawling away as if seconds from dying. Beer is funny that way. Three-four-five-six-seven bottles and there goes the next 60 days, arriving in brightly-lit drunk holding tanks and then the county jail. It can get weird when family and children are involved. Dad's in the can, say the kids as they move from bus stop to the classroom. Wives merely endure.

It could be worse.

New York and Detroit and Chicago and Miami and Los Angeles wrestle with crack houses...

- 30 -