Eleven Lanyards and the Block They Ate

The drawer stopped at two inches and would not budge.

I was looking for the little Allen wrench that came with the box fan, the one I need about twice a summer and can never find. What I found was resistance. Something soft and ropy had wedged itself against the back of the drawer, and when I finally yanked it free, eleven SXSW lanyards came out at once, knotted like a nest of snakes that had died at a networking mixer.

Each one had a sponsor name printed down the strap. Several of those sponsors no longer exist. Two of them changed names so many times I genuinely can't tell what they used to sell. One just says DISRUPT in white capital letters on orange, which is what I'd call a threat.

It's late July and 104 outside, the thermostat is still under its strip of blue painter's tape, and nobody is going to be in town wearing a badge for another seven months. So this is the off-season. This is when the audit happens.

Methodology, such as it is

Each lanyard gets matched to one March. For each March I write down what disappeared from one downtown block I've been walking since the late nineties: a stretch a few blocks east of Congress that I'm not going to pin down to the address, partly out of habit and partly because the businesses below are composites, with names changed to protect the evicted. You've walked this block. Every downtown regular has. It's the one where you used to know what was in every doorway, and now you know what's in every doorway in the sense that you know what a QR code is.

Not every lanyard is mine. Some belonged to friends who volunteered for wristbands, one to a cousin who worked catering for a brand activation and came home smelling like fryer oil and grievance, and one I found on the sidewalk in 2016 and kept out of a sense of evidence.

The ledger

You'll notice gaps. 2018 I spent in Lockhart on purpose. 2020 the city canceled the festival in early March, which was the first spring in a decade I got to see the block do nothing, and I stood on that corner with a Topo Chico like a man visiting a relative who'd finally been let out of the hospital. 2021 went online, which meant the block spent that March empty for less sentimental reasons. 2023, 2024 and 2026 I didn't keep lanyards from, either because nobody handed me one or because by then I was keeping a different kind of score.

What a lanyard actually is

A lanyard is a leash you pay for. I say that with the authority of someone who once wore one for six hours to get into a free taco party and was rewarded with one taco, a can of something called "focus water," and a conversation with a man about how his app was "basically Yelp for vibes."

The badges themselves cost more every year, the way everything in this city does, and by the top tier you're looking at the kind of number I associate with a central air compressor. My central air compressor, specifically. The one the repair guy described in June as "honestly a miracle it's running." Same energy as a platinum badge, really. You pay a fortune and somebody tells you you're lucky.

The Tuesday problem

Here's the entry I keep coming back to: what the block lost in March 2025 wasn't a building. It was the noise.

Ordinary Tuesday noise. A delivery guy dropping a hand truck down the curb. The bookstore owner — the real one, before the green room — yelling across the street at the shoe repair guy about the Spurs. Somebody's dog that barked exclusively at buses. The specific screech of the bar's back door, which nobody ever oiled because the screech was how you knew the keg had arrived.

All of that got replaced, one March at a time, by festival noise that just never fully left. The block now sounds like a soundcheck year-round. There's a speaker mounted over a door that plays the same ambient playlist in July that it played for the badge crowd, as if the building is trying to remember a better week. Every storefront is designed to be rented for nine days at a premium and tolerated for the other three hundred fifty-six.

That's the actual math. Not the rent, exactly. The rent is a symptom. The disease is a block planned around its single most expensive week.

Meanwhile the city tore down the old convention center after the 2025 festival to build a bigger one, so the festival scattered across downtown venues and spilled even further into the blocks around it. I don't have a lanyard for that. I have a feeling about it, which doesn't fit in a drawer.

Things the block has gained, for fairness

I promised my neighbor Delia I'd include this section after she read my lake post and said I was "allergic to good news."

• A very nice crosswalk signal that chirps.
• Three places to buy a fourteen-dollar cold brew, one of which is genuinely good.
• A mural of a cowboy boot with wings, which has been photographed more times than every Ray's Heel & Sole customer combined.
• Shade, sort of, from a hotel that blocks the afternoon sun. I will concede the shade. It is July. I'm not a monster.

Disposition of evidence

I untangled all eleven lanyards on the kitchen table, which took twenty minutes and produced a level of profanity Delia heard through the wall. Then I had to decide what to do with them.

Throwing them away felt like letting the festival win the argument. Keeping them felt like hoarding receipts for a store that already closed.

So I braided them. Green into blue into red into DISRUPT, all eleven, into one thick, ugly, multicolored rope about four feet long. It's now holding the back screen door open so the cross-breeze can do whatever a cross-breeze does at 104 degrees, which is not much.

First useful thing a lanyard has done on my property in seventeen years.

The Allen wrench, by the way, was in the other drawer the whole time.