My Muggle Mayhem Monday

A couple of days ago, I went out to get my daily cache (as I am known to do).  I went downtown (as I am slightly less known to do) well after rush hour to find one that had been recently placed near a state history museum, thinking that I was going to have a quick sit-down-and-find.  This wasn’t the part of downtown where everyone goes to party and dine.  This was the part of downtown that is dead after all the state workers go home.  I was oddly looking forward to seeing it.  A civic project to run a pedestrian mall from the Texas State Capitol to the museum had just been completed, so the cache was in the middle of an area that had not long ago been an often-driven street.  It should have been a quiet, no-muss, no-fuss situation.  So, imagine my surprise when I turned off the highway to find streets blocked off and hordes of people walking up and down the streets!  What the heck?  On a Monday?  I mean, it is close to the University of Texas, so my immediate thought was that there might be some kind of sporting event.  But basketball season just ended, football season is far off, and baseball season would draw people to a different location.  The nearby Moody Center, the recently built replacement for the soon to be completely demolished Frank Erwin Center, seemed to be the epicenter of the activity, but there weren’t any major musical events on the radar (I usually know about them).  My answer came from the comedy world.  While (I like to think) I’m fairly well versed with the bright lights of that milieu, a comedian I’ve barely heard of with enough fame to fill Moody on multiple nights was doing his thing and the streets were alive with strollers and officers directing traffic and pedicabs shuttling people up and returning back down the street.  Somehow, I managed to navigate the hordes and make my way to ground zero.  I sat on a bench beside a lamppost, knowing that beneath the skirt would be what I came for.  I also looked at the long line of pedicabs staging next to the lamppost, waiting for their next fares.  One pedicab driver in diaphanous superheroine gear gave me a smile as two others, a hipster and a cowgirl, intently discussed something I couldn’t make out under the music blaring from their mounted speakers.  How would I surreptitiously grab the cache with nobody noticing?  The answer was that I didn’t!  Don’t get me wrong: I got the cache.  But if I waited for the area to be muggle free, I literally would have been waiting into the wee hours of the night, so being surreptitious was not an option.  I bent over to the base of the post and did what I needed to do.  And nobody said a word.  I’m not even sure anybody noticed. Because that’s the funny thing about muggles: one or two muggles and there will no doubt be some observation.  Twenty or thirty of them, though?  If nobody belongs, then everybody belongs.  I signed the log, took a photo, and put it back with no muss and no fuss.  I can’t even tell you if anyone even noticed me as I walked away and back to my car.  

A few muggles?  Be stealthy.  A metaphorical million muggles?  That’s just background noise.