Longhorns opener happened over Labor Day weekend. My dad bought us tickets and we went and had a real good time. He usually buys us tickets for a Longhorns game every year, or at least every other year. It’s expensive, but it’s one of those things you can really bond over. Sports… they’re just easy. You can be passionate or you can be passive. But, you’re basically having a good time. Enjoying the people you love. Enjoying the idiots. Enjoying the business of being alive. Especially if you have a glass of wine or two before you head out for your day of sportsy things.

To start the day off right, I jammed 10 Coors Lights into my purse. Motivation to sweat our way through a tour of the madness that is Austin, Texas tailgating. This was Casie’s first Longhorns game, so we needed to show her the throngs of  fans that are dedicated enough, or at the very least drunk enough, to battle some serious heat for several hours before anyone kicks a ball anywhere. I wish I’d taken a picture of my decidedly Bohemian bag stuffed full of Coors. Slight juxtaposition.

We did Scholz and the massive $7 beers, we met up with friends and drank purse beers, we met up with people we barely knew and drank their beers. I let my dad wear my decidedly feminine pageboy hat to block the sun during a game of washers with a guy he was certain was a hustler.

Casie bought a ridiculously short-lived Longhorn balloon animal hat. Stop twisting its horn, we all said, it can not be adjusted in that fashion! But, she didn’t listen, and he abruptly and unceremoniously became… unihorn.  
Like that thing was gonna make it through the game and all the way home to the kids anyway, but I think we all thought it was gonna last longer than the 17 minutes it did. She popped him while preparing for the photo op here on the right. She literally sawed ’em off. But, lucky for her, we still won the game, so no need to accuse her of any voodoo… poor unihorn. A trashcan outside Darrell K Royal, his final resting place.

This was a night game… honestly the only kind of game you can humanely have during an early Texas September… but a night game means you had a lot of hours to celebrate opening day. All day to drink purse beers and murder balloon animals. So, the game itself is a little… tough. Adrenaline gets you through a lot of it, because college football is really fun. For one thing, there are young people there, young people with a lot more stamina and enthusiasm than you, so the place is filled with life, despite the fact that you definitely peaked about 45 minutes before walking into the stadium and now you’re just concentrating on not crying from exhaustion. Then there’s the marching band playing the fight song. And even though you gave the university more money than you can physically stomach, you still don’t really know it… but by god if you don’t swell with pride and punch your skinny arms in the air when everyone else does and yell something about give’em hell, give ’em hell, make ’em eat shit? There’s gravity defying cheerleaders, there’s frat boys dressed like cowboys blasting off cannons, there’s flags flying and they’re bigger than your entire house… it’s all very exciting. So, you forget you drank more beers than your body has a right to and you scream and you cheer and hope it’s a blowout so you can take your ass to bed. But if it’s not, you sit there with the people you love the very most and be really happy to be able to do this living thing.