The New Hot Fuzz

Our neighborhood in Austin, Texas, has a new sheriff in town, and he’s 100% adorable.

I pity the fool who doesn’t get this reference.

One of Heather’s favorite things to do when we’re driving and a cop car passes is to pretend we’re fugitives on the run. She locks the doors and, in her best 1930s gangster voice, hisses, “It’s the fuzz! Everyone act cool!”

(Spoiler: The last time Heather and I were remotely cool was when we got locked inside a Whole Foods walk-in freezer. And even then, we were only cool in temperature, not in vibe. The quinoa-stuffed soccer moms in form-fitting yoga pants judging us through the glass made that clear.)

Our neighborhood is bursting with character: charming old homes, authentic check-cashing joints, pawn shops featuring “slightly-loved” couches, fast-food chains stacked like grimy dominoes, and scrappy possums acting as unofficial neighborhood mascots. (We’re looking at you, Jeremy.).

As with most places that have even a shred of personality, our neighborhood is being gentrified. And yes, Heather and I are very much part of its inevitable gentrification invasion—we are just one avocado toast away from a full-blown HOA run by a bunch of entitled white women who moved here from California because their husbands wanted to be closer to their lord and personal savior, Joe Rogan. (I think we are several steps away from that but what do I know. -Heather)

An art installation in our neighborhood. We really do love Windsor Park and all it’s character.

Speaking of invasions, Mueller, our next-door neighborhood and Windsor Park’s arch-frenemy (not really, but it is fun to create that narrative in my head), continues its relentless mission to replace every last blade of grass with cheaply built, mid-rise condos guaranteed to disintegrate five minutes after the warranty expires.

Mueller isn’t just gentrifying; it’s gentrifying aggressively—like a CrossFit bro who won’t shut up about his macros.

Although, in fairness, they do have a killer skate park and pump track—it’s so damned cool. And though it is pretty “cookie cutter”, it was built on some vacant land where the old airport used to be, so they didn’t have to tear down a bunch of cool houses to make it so. (At least I don’t think they did.) But most importantly, Mueller has a fleet of pizza delivery bots, where instead of actual humans delivering your food, you’ve got these friendly little rolling igloos.

Behold! Our dystopian robot overlords are here! And they are cute!

The little bots are dystopian—I know this—but it’s a cute dystopia, and at least they don’t expect a 36% tip for doing what is essentially the same job an oven does. (Though give it time—Grubhub will find a way to add a "suggested gratuity" for non-human workers, just in case we wanted to subsidize the AI uprising.)

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D9’d

We were a little bummed that our ‘hood Windsor Park was cut out of the delivery service. We never saw them in our neighborhood—until one night when I was driving home after picking up 10 lbs of food for our cat, Sable (who is constantly hungry and lets us know 24/7 by screaming the song of her people in the key of Nickelback) when I spotted something strange.

Moo Deng vs My Cat, Sable: which should you buy

Illuminated by my Honda’s headlights (the sensible kind—not the eye-melting blue LEDs designed for maximum rearview mirror rage), a small, glowing figure rolled methodically through the seedy side of our neighborhood, patrolling Windsor Park’s gritty boundary.

Like any uncool and clueless white person in a horror movie, I immediately turned down a dark path to follow the strange little light—only to find that one of the pizza delivery bots had gone rogue, lost in a dark alley.

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He’s Got a Badge!

I texted Heather about this igloo sighting. And Heather, lover of all things small, cute, but mighty (which, for her, is literally everything small and cute), immediately went into full civilian detective mode to uncover the deets on this poor little bot who had lost his way home.

By the time I got home, she had solved the case. “HE’S GOT A BADGE! HE’S THE LAW!”, she screamed, and shoved her phone in my face, showing me the Windsor Park Facebook page. And sure enough—our little lost bot had been deputized.

No one can outrun the law now…as long as you can’t run any faster than 4mph.

Heather, ecstatic now, wanted to go see him. The fact that some areas nearby are not the safest places to drive down into at night in Austin (there may be a little human trafficking going on at Cap Plaza) did not deter her. Off we went in search of the Igloo of Justice.

“Lunch and Destroy”

Heather then started crafting an elaborate backstory about the little bot’s ambitious transition from a lowly pizza delivery bot to a tough-on-crime enforcer. Tough like, issuing tickets to squirrels caught subletting birdhouses without permission from the property manager (who, naturally, is a possum).

Fuzz Dredd has struck terror into the hearts of local Porch Pirates and nefarious mice! Serve and protect.

Fuzz Dredd patrolled near pawn shops, payday loan joints, and authentic-yet-secretly-corporate-owned taco trucks (at least according to @KeyboardKarl1776 on Nextdoor, whose reliable sources like Alex Jones also inform him that Starbucks runs fake mom-and-pop coffee shops, because nothing says “artisanal coffee” like deceptive corporate branding served alongside an egg-ish white English muffin that tastes like cardboard—thanks for your hard work, @KeyboardKarl1776, you keep the conspiracy theories thriving!)

As I drove, Heather sat like a hawk armed with her iPhone 3GS from 15 years ago (she refuses to upgrade), determined to get a picture of him.

It wasn’t hard to find him—lights blaring, patrolling the alleyways of our neighborhood like RoboCop, if RoboCop had all his funding cut and had to be outsourced to a DoorDash affiliate.

Heather jumped out with her 18-year-old camera phone, ran toward the igloo on wheels, then practically curtsied to him, whispering reverently, “Thank you for your service.”

This feels like an episode of “COPS”. - Heather

Bad Bots, Bad Bots, whatchya gonna do?

Fuzz Dredd seemed… relieved—perhaps because Heather’s prehistoric iPhone 3GS, whose selfie capabilities were on par with cave drawings, spared him from another influencer duck-face snapshot (captioned with some overused, appropriated trope like #BlessedByTheBot, or #SometimesItBotLikeThat.

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Fuzz Dredd Forever

Yes, Facebook confirmed Fuzz Dredd’s promotion from pizza pusher to full-fledged law enforcement igloo, triggering whispered neighborhood fears that APD would be defunding again—by securing another hefty raise for our boys in blue.

We pieced together that Fuzz Dredd had been deputized for the seedy area of abandoned and STENCH-tagged buildings that are planned to be bulldozed to make way for a Whole Foods, which will inevitably bring a cacophony of faux-independent corporate chains pretending to be hip and edgy, all while continuing the homogenization of Austin into anything but '“keeping it weird.”

And before you point out that an abandoned, crime-ridden area is bad for a neighborhood and the Whole Foods cachophany sounds pretty awesome, why not make it… I dunno… a park? You know, to encourage community, not capitalism.

My fear with this continued corporate capitalistic crap is that we’ll have a “House That Jack Built” nursery rhyme of businesses springing up like herpes:

• A Whole Foods, which begat a yoga studio,

• The yoga studio which begat a kombucha-kale soup brewery,

• The kombucha-kale soup brewery which begat an artisanal vegan meat-free hummus stand,

• The artisanal hummus stand which begat a kale shoppe—yes, “kale, again” and “shoppe,” spelled pretentiously to justify premium prices—

• Until eventually, the only thing left is a pop-up bookstore that only sells coffee-table books about artisanal coffee beans pooped out by the cat who ate the rat in the house that Jack built.

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Join the Resistance

Fuzz Dredd gives no mercy, he’ll run over your foot and not even think twice about it!

Heather and I are now Fuzz Dredd Activists, working to keep him employed and helping him solve crime more efficiently than APD (ha ha, APD, if you’re reading this… ha ha, it’s a joke, bro, don’t tase me, bro!)

Because here in the Big Armadillo, filled with tech bros flaunting Cybertrucks worth around $80-120K (depreciating by 20% the moment their cobalt batteries—mined by South African child labor, thanks Elon—leave the dealership), there’s only one badge we now trust.

And that’s Fuzz Dredd.

And it beeps, adorably, like R2-D2 (but we can’t officially say that, or Kathleen Kennedy will appear as a hologram and sue us faster than Disney sues a daycare for painting Mickey Mouse on the wall).