Speaking of which, just a bit here of a slice of the faithful county in which I live. In total, I have been pepper-sprayed three times, shoved to the ground four times (three by police, once by a protester) and called more names in person and in our online comments section than there are words in this story. I have lost two pairs of glasses...and I have tried to explain what the Occupy movement is at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center. It's too early to come to a consensus on what all of this means... - Kelsey Whipple, "Westword", 12/29/11 - 1/4/12 This could be my own neighborhood on any given day, as opposed to a local branch of a nationwide solidarity movement. As Che has said, all political struggles are connected. I think that it may also be too early to come to a consensus on what Che means either. I, however, am not a professional journalist, and I haven't lost any personal property which I haven't left on the bus. ...it was dizzyingly mercurial, it abhorred any form of leadership... It was irreverent and enamored of freedom... It talked incessantly of love, its members were "brothers and sisters"... It was the need to relate to people in an alienated society. ...ideological positions taken up against American "imperialism," "corporate state," and capitalism. Support for blacks at home soon extended to all minorities and, quickly, to the "Third World"... - Tad Szulc, "Innocents at Home, America in the 1970s", 1974
I love old books, which I find at my local library's annual book sale. I think about the Occupy protesters when I read about just after student rebellions across the country, right after the shootings at Kent State happened, the universities' administrators were running scared. But...far from convinced of the death of higher education. I was caught in a riot... My son, then fourteen, was enthralled, and we talked about the riot...at the commune-type house where my daughter and her husband then lived. If something does not work in a society, it will be discarded sooner or later... But the old town-meeting spirit survives and is resurrected in communities across the country. New needs and concepts of religion are emerging - even in the far-out form of Billy Graham spectaculars, Jesus freaks, teen-age Hindu "gods" commanding the attention of tens of thousands of Americans, and Children of God communes. ...America's indestructible puritan and fundamentalist...leavened by the youthful rebellions and a humanistic conscience. - Szulc
I live in a neighborhood with discarded people. A community that still flies the flag of the Republic of South Vietnam, and tacks it to their garage like some kind of talisman. With enormous Buddha statues in their living rooms. A street with wandering souls, stumbling along with their grey skin and hair. When off duty from its occupation as a major traffic corridor, it can be a ghostly place. On a windy pre-dawn New Year's Eve, I'm at a bus stop watching trash blow down the street. I see a small bag moving at a constant speed. It changes lanes, moves into a turn lane, and blows into a parking lot. ...reading big-city newspapers, one could be unaware of the pattern of revolutionary-type violence...across the country. ...that they were fairly isolated acts. But travel and local newspapers...revealed how...widespread was this American violence. ...quite a few young people had concluded...that the time had come for "armed action" in the United states to create a prerevolutionary climate. ...during 1970. Manuals on bomb making and urban sniping techniques were available for the asking. A cooling off period had set in, at and around campuses and the cities by 1971. The 1960s gave us...an almost overwhelming sense of crisis, the inexorable rise of the minorities, the youthful rebellion, the steady self-assertion of women...consumerism...and, above all, the hunger for discovery and experimentation. ...a race that had drained away all its spiritual resources in the struggle to survive and that continues to struggle in the midst of plenty because life itself no longer possesses any other meaning. - Szulc
..."low-stream" is technology that is designed to be more human, more responsive to local and community needs... This whole concept was developed by E. F. Schumacher... ...much of the interest, for example, in the occult, in irrationalism, mysticism, or parapsychology - is either naivete' or quackery. Millions of people, having lost faith in industrial civilization and its ruling ideas, are desperately searching for a new world view or a new religion. And many of them are extremely gullible, easy prey for the para-scientific hucksters and hoaxtersDumb scientists are dogmatic and religious about science itself. The epistemological revolution in science is part of a much larger revolution in our culture that, in turn, is a reaction to the exhaustion of industrial civilization. I think it is naive, not to say anti-democratic, to go on letting major technological decisions...be made by small elites from the business, government, and science communities. Granted, we don't know much about how to get intelligent citizen participation in such matters. We lack the necessary social and intellectual technologies, so to speak. Our moral responsibility is...to invite millions of people, especially the dispossessed and disenfranchised... - Alvin Toffler, Interview, OMNI Magazine, 11/78
My daughter and I...argued and fought over ideas... I met many of her friends... I saw...a perplexing, often tortured, uncertain and self-damaging, but brilliant, perceptive and...well-intentioned generation who had an enormous influence on America's thinking and policies. - Szulc
On New Year's Day, a theatre was showing a documentary about former CIA director William Colby. Before the show, I found myself downtown at a corporate deathburger for lunch. The streets were relatively empty. At the other end of downtown, the Broncos were playing the Chiefs. Inside the lunch place was a curious mix of people. At three different tables were groups of clean cut college aged kids, on some kind of urban field trip. At a smaller table was a couple of the same age who appeared to be Occupy protesters, from across the street where the battle to occupy a couple of parks between the state capitol and legislature have been taking place. This is one of two downtown deathburgers which serve as kinds of social clubs for the homeless, of which there were a smattering as well. In line were homeless, and big white bald guys in Broncos jerseys and sunglasses, and their ladies. I get my meal and sit next to a grey haired guy in a tweed hat and jacket over a grey sport coat and grey tweed sweater. With one hand on his coffee, he appears passed out, but wakes up every few minutes to giggle. The Occupy girl is tall and thin, with short black hair and piercings. She floats by one of a couple of tables with clean college kids, and she tells them, "Happy New Year guys." They stare at her as she floats away. One table gets up and leaves. I listen to the kids at the other one. They sound gay, and are discussing church.
This party hopes to mix Chanukah celebrations in with some queer fun. ...and her flock of chicks has been a staple for Colorado lesbians... "When you go...just with one friend...to the straight bars...you often get hit on and it can be miserable." Coming our gaysian can be one of the most difficult tasks for a man or a woman of Asian descent. ...being gay can be a cultural taboo. ...Asians and Friends, formerly the Long Yang Club... "The LGBT community can be intimidating depending on what you see and what you know,"...President Mark Gerardy said..."An international student might not know where or how to come out. As Asian person could be second or 10th generation and still not be able to come out. And even if they do, they still have to navigate the inner workings of the gay community." Straight women notoriously make out and have been known to eve fool around with or have sex with their female friends when they have had a few drinks. It's as if women generally accept a wider variety or sexuality, and this is considered quite acceptable in our culture. ...new Mexican/Asian-fusion restaurant. "The area is...with a lot of young adults. It has a hip vibe, it's eclectic, and it's a little Mecca in itself." "The descriptions we use...artsy, accessible, tolerant, diverse...affordable, vibrant..." ...the ideal spot for an intimate, European-style cafe'. ...dynamic diverse area... ...where he could "sell buttons to Latinos and coffee to yuppies. ...the community is filled with hard-working people who need a home away from home." "...something to help breathe life back into the neighborhood." ...trendy salons to keep the young and hip looking the part. ...they all have different cultures and vibes... ...threading...razor cutting, European color techniques, Japanese straightening... "...you drive up here and it's something like a Manhattan neighborhood, or a couple of blocks you'd find in Brooklyn. ...new holiday show The Buttcracker!...a twisted look at all that we hold dear and sacred during the holidays. - Out Front Colorado, 12/14/11
Early this morning I heard the yell of a teenaged girl. School is back in session. Yesterday after work, I hadn't had much lunch as I was too busy. I decided to stop and eat at a short order place on the way home. As I walked up to the entrance, a guy came riding up on his bike. He came into the place behind me and sat at the counter. He ordered French fries before he got up and went back outside. When he came back in, he (assuming that he had everyone's attention, as I've witnessed others in local restaurants before) announced that he thought someone was stealing his fries. He went on announce what a stupid idea it was to build New Orleans where it was, and then announced that he was going to go to a strip club. He looked vaguely familiar. The guy I saw today I hadn't seen before. He appeared to be in his sixties. The drunks and homeless are recognizable, not by what they wear as in a particular wardrobe. It's the way they carry themselves, as if you can tell by the way they walk that they have absolutely no place to go. This guy was walking off balance down the sidewalk, grinning into the distance. He did what I see all drunks do. He crossed the street in the middle, not at the crosswalk. Never at the crosswalk. ...unable to remember what had happened last Thursday that made it different from last Wednesday...a solitary man, somehow never marking the change of the seasons save to understand only by his skin that it was warmer or cooler...feeling deserted but never knowing where to put his hands to relieve that feeling, a transient man, passing down the same streets every day and perceiving only dimly that there were streets beyond those streets... There was no place for him here. He was out of phase with all around him, he was an alien object. A beer can thrown into the grass. A broken wall untended and falling back into the earth... - Harlan Ellison
It's a quiet neighborhood. In the middle of the night, you can hear police cars doing 70 mph up the street. There's a story online, posted to Facebook, about a woman who was drunk in a brand new art museum, dedicated to a local collection of a famous abstract painter. She was observed scratching and poking one of the paintings, before she dropped her pants and urinated on herself. The story ended with the potential depreciation of the work. Nothing about the depreciation of a human life. Yesterday morning at my usual bus stop, a guy came buy to ask both myself and a guy who didn't speak English if either of we gentlemen smoked and had a cigarette for sale? He both appeared and sounded like a guy I saw a year or two past, who stopped his car in the street as I was walking to the same stop. This guy asked me for gas money, and was willing to show me how low his tank was. Today, after work, I'm on a bus home. Not the bus with the ex-felons who talk to each other about starting their lives after prison. This is the bus with high school kids. Some girls get on, and something makes them laugh out loud together. I don't remember the last bus I was on, the last neighborhood I was in where I heard such a good sound. The following morning I'm on another bus, this one to grocery shopping. On the bus is a man and a woman sitting apart from one another. The woman asks the man if he wants something to eat. He replies, "What, what?" She tells him, "Look over here. This is where they took me to detox. I slipped on the ice, can you believe it? Someone thought I was hurt." I get off and go into a deathburger for breakfast. They come in right behind me. She get him something to eat and they sit down. She keeps telling him to eat. He says he can't eat anything. She tells him to try.
Two days later, it's a day after a bout with the 24-hour flu. I'm at a highway corner which is usually shared by a rotating couple of panhandlers. The first one I see reminds me of what I imagine a nineteenth century muleskinner looked like. The other is wearing black dress slacks and a button down shirt. He has a huge cardboard sign, detailing his fiscal responsibilities. On the bus home are a couple of people discussing their cancer diagnoses and treatments. Listening to them speak makes it appear as if they are inside of some kind of place isolated with each other. Their conversation is peppered with references such as metatarsal, needle biopsy, and Dilaudid. They speak of places which I haven't been, about excreting pieces of tumor and operations and doctors drawing long breaths before speaking. An elderly man with a cane gets on and sits across from the pair. He's making faces with his toothless mouth. Eventually, he leans in and tells them that he had pancreatic cancer. Right away, the other two welcome him with enthusiasm as a member of the inner conversational circle.
A friend of mine at work passed away last year. I still have tears for her. I didn't know that I had so many tears. She didn't have cancer, or AIDS. She had Lupus. After she went into the emergency room, she was dead in less than three months. In the end I understand she was skin and bones, drooling in a coma, and hooked up to eight fucking machines each of which came with a bill of $25,000. Everyone at work passed the hat when after she was gone. She isn't here discussing the medicines and procedures, or the intricacies of the path the disease took to enter her lungs. After her casket was lowered this past summer, a guy with a ponytail and cut off denim shorts came out and threw over the canopy before a backhoe came in to cover her. The guy then packed the dirt down with some kind of machine with a handle, such as I have seen at road construction sites. She still has no headstone.
The next morning I am sitting on a bench in front of the home of a neighbor, waiting for a ride to work and writing this by moonlight. I can hear her in her kitchen behind me, chopping something. As I left the house at 2:30 AM to walk here, I heard a lot of fire engine sirens going down a boulevard, accelerating police cars, howling dogs, and crowing roosters. The previous day she had told me that I must be rich, as I had no car and no family. After she dropped me off at a corner, on the street I passed an elderly woman holding the arm of a tall guy. I would pass the same couple again the next morning. By this time, it was 3:30 AM. The couple had to walk in the street to avoid ice covering the sidewalk. She took tiny steps. It was five degrees F. Where was he taking her at 3:30 AM? Senior exercise?
I get on a connecting bus home after work, and sit behind a couple of women. They strike me as sisters, each with a toddler. They talked non-stop, like a couple of kids. One is like a hyper clown, making the other laugh. I'm watching the three year old, who is watching the two adults. She's beautiful. She's trying to interact with these two symbiotically dependent adults. The hyper one gets a call on her cell. It sounds as though a friend on another bus sees a guy she likes, and she goes into hyper overdrive. A gaggle of Hispanic teen girls get on. The last one is speaking Spanish to another who stays behind. The hyper girl wondered aloud "what the fuck was up with" the hair of one of the girls. She says of the one waiting at the door, "On or off bitch." The girl doesn't hear it. The pair is looking for their stop. The hyper girl wants to know where their "fucking street" is. The driver tells her to stop using profanity. She tells him that she isn't talking to him, the other thinks she is hilarious, and the pair and their kids go bouncing off the bus. A kid who gets on makes reference to the color of her skin. She doesn't hear it.
...the mayor's vision of "building a world class city where everyone matters." ...engages community, and is...accessible to all. We will be...exploring new revenue opportunities... Denver's makeup is one of diversity within communities. ...comprehensive plan will change the face of Denver and include some of the most blighted areas of the city. - Washington Park Profile, 1/12 The rift created by the vast disparity in incomes in Boulder is simmering... The Good neighbor meeting for...the Housing First project...permanent housing to chronically homeless individuals...described to me..."200 angry neighbors, looking well dressed and educated, run amok, yelling, threatening violence"... - Denver Voice, 1/12 Or was it science fiction's shocking insistence that the world of the future may really be different from the known; and therefore acceptable, world of the present? - Paul A. Carter, "The Creation of Tomorrow", 1972 "Collectives" of young men and women...ran "food conspiracies" which purchased basic foods in bulk cheaply and resold them at no profit. The talk was of abolishing once and for all the nuclear family as we know it, and replacing it with collective or communal living. For many kids, youth rebellion meant...happily and sleepily homeless and indigent...(from affluent families)...the notion that the capitalist society must be destroyed, they felt it was socially justifiable to rip it off. ...shoplifting, mugging, forging checks, stealing credit cards... ...the public sympathy...for the Flower Children...became an angry reaction... The Spartacist League believed in Revolutonary Marxism and denounced the Socialist Youth Alliance and the antiwar Student Mobilization Committee for pushing "class collaberation." "The Spartist" newspaper accused Progressive Labor of shouting "Power to the People!" instead of "Power to the Workers!" - Szulc We are simple men...we don't have any big thinkers among us. We figure that men ought to be roughly equal. And we understand that no laws are going to do that. So our program is to kill rich guys. Do away with them entirely. We're going to kill the rich when and how we can. ...until the rich are just like us, or we're like them, or until we all meet in the middle. - Robert Sheckley, "Body Game", 1978
The following afternoon, I'm downtown at my bank after work. I had considered going to the bus terminal to get new bus schedules. I decide to go homem as I am too tired. I get on the bus, and at the next stop, a woman gets on with a man, and asks him, "What happened?" He answers, "The bus terminal is on fire." She replies, "It'll probably be on TV tonight." Someone else says, "It's probably on TV right now." The following day, on another bus home after work , a guy is standing and conversing with the driver. Almost all the seats are empty. He has grey wispy hair under a desert camouflaged cap, and a canvas grocery bag. He's telling the driver that someone "owes me a million dollars. And on top of all this mess, I don't pay taxes."
At the start of a new week, I'm at my usual bus stop, not long before dawn. As I got off the bus to get to my stop, I saw a drunk feebly attempting to flag down the bus. As I'm on my way to the stop, I hear him say to me, "Hey bro!" I stop and look at him. He appears to be smoking, having gone silent. I answer him, "That's what I figured." He replies, "Good bro!" On the bus, I'm listening to a couple of regular riders. One is telling the other how he's beginning to feel "too far from home." I don't know where home is for him. He describes how it was 15 to 20 years ago, "There was nothing. Now it's exploding. Shopping malls, restaurants, golf courses." He has parents and an ex-girlfriend back there. I came here 21 years ago, living up the street from a shopping mall for the first 16 of those years. That particular mall is the number one tourist attraction, in either the city or the state, I don't recall. His desire to return home he expresses as, "No one's getting any younger." His old flame has been through a relationship, he's been through a marriage. I've been through a mall. I remember blind dates that I had there, a place to eat which I liked, saw a few movies. I otherwise steered clear of the place. The other guy on the bus advises the first one to make sure he goes back home "with $1,000 in your pocket. If you go back home having to work as someone else's flunky, that's the impression that sticks." I feel as though I have mysteriously landed in the middle of a song by the Eagles. I see family photos of friends who I haven't seen in three decades, posted on Facebook. It's as I am all the sudden discovering their lives over all those years. I womder if these two guys are on the FB?
I now live in and around many of my co-workers. One of them is always asking me if I heard about this or that fire or assault on our street. When I get to work, she asks me if I heard "about a guy who was either shot and run over, or just run over, just yards from my front door at 10 PM last night?" I never hear about it first. That's okay with me.
The Douglas commission...commented that..."'joining' America implied giving up...one's group identity. ...ethnic groups followed suit, so that the last few years in American domestic history have been characterized by nothing so much as the resurgence of ethnic identity and the destruction of the melting pot myth." - Szulc
I'm turning a corner to the bus stop, to catch an eastbound bus. At the corner, a northbound bus has stopped at the red light. It turns green, and I expect it to go. The north/south stop is on the other side of the street, but I see commotion onboard. In the dark, the interior is lit up, and out jumps a collection of middle aged men bundled up against the cold. The driver lets them out so they don't have to cross the street. I recently was on that very bus, later one morning, when some guy was standing next to the driver complaining that he wouldn't let him off where there wasn't a stop. The driver began, "Unfortunately, there are some stupid (bus) drivers..." The guy told him to stop "tripping". The guys this morning all appear to be dressed in black, all except for one little guy. This guy is in a light colored down coat, and what appear to be pajama bottoms, or some kind of thin brown pants with a pink leaf print. It's cold enough this morning that I put on lined pants, and I'm carrying my slacks in my bag. I wonder where the little guy is off to?
This morning, I am working near a restaraunt which I stop into for breakfast. They've just opened and the cook is playing host and waiter. He wants to know, "Did I wake you up this morning?" I tell him that I'm on the way to work. "You're just getting started then. Come on in and we'll warm you up." He hands me a menu. "Holler when you're ready." White people, English, and and CNN close captioned. "Ride Like the Wind" is coming over the speakers. I recall an SCTV sketch where this song was lampooned. On the TV is a giant cruise ship on its side. The news anchor is moving windows on a big touch screen. She's showing diagrams, computer simulations. A congresswoman is speaking about how the national government is too big, and its citizens don't want it to spend any money. When she finishes, she is smiling. I wonder what she is smiling at? As I am putting on my coat, a little white haired guy in a dark suit, with a flag on his lapel, grabs a menu and slowly walks in. He looks at me without blinking, as if he is waiting for me to say or do something. He quietly say hello, sits down, and begins reading what looks like a kindle. Out in the parking lot, among the other few vehicles, I see a cream convertible Caddy with black vinyl top.
In its 1971 issue on guerrilla war in the United States, Scanlons magazine published a series of interviews with...revolutionaries...middle-class Americans... "Basically, what I gained...was a progressive feeling of coming together with my sisters and brothers. We never did smash the state, but the streets laid the foundations to make this possible... We are moving on to urban guerrilla warfare and a higher consciousness... So flower children carry guns instead of flowers because that's the only way everybody's gonna eat." ...the question of what America is going to do with her immense wealth and resources remains largely uncertain and unanswered. ...I found a sense of unease, malaise, disorientation, and alienation... To some, the American Dream was elusive or altogether lost. To others, it was turning into the American Nightmare...all the generations were caught in a social and political maelstrom. Basic resources were breaking down... Nobody seemed to have the time or desire to do anything well... ...proper care was needed for those born in the 1960s so that they could enter the 1980s just around the corner, as reasonably well adjusted and prepared citizens." - Szulc One of those is me, born right in the middle of the 1960s. My entry into the 1980s? Well, that's another story.
The store where I am working has a contract Postal station. It's a place where the neighborhood seems to always bring their toddlers along. All the young children appear to be the same age, and always with a single parent coming to mail something. The children all have to wait in line, wait for their parents, told that it won't be long. The children are not completely verbal yet as they vocalize questions, crises, play, sometimes all in the same sentence. In a white society, these children appear to be a kind of social icon for the meaning of life among the sometimes whispering adults. Our contract station is a place for toddlers and parents, the elderly with canes and oxygen tanks, middle aged guys on their cell phones, and wives to unexpectedly run into each other. They discuss with each other the achievements of their teenagers, or having a new deck built on to their home by a guy who is doing everyone's. Has the economy been turned back on?
It's another pre-dawn Friday in my usual bus shelter. This morning I am listening to a couple of different conversations on either side of me. To my left, I hear "It's my first paycheck in years." "You only get paid once a year?" To my right I hear, "My brother is out on parole. He was in for 3 years. He's been staying at my place but we don't get along, so I've been staying with a friend." Out here she has, on our side of town. With her long blonde moussed hair tied in a ponytail. "He's back to his old ways. He used to have it made. Our parents would give him $300-$400 a month." "He might have to learn the hard way." "So what do you do on weekends?" "I try to stay busy. I get drunk so I can sleep."
The previous afternoon, I had worked a closing shift training a girl in her early twenties, at a store in a large and wealthy neighborhood. She lives with her parents among multi-million dollar mansions, what she calls "tract housing". On her small drawstring backpack is written "Hail Sagan". I ask, "Carl Sagan?" He is one of her heroes. She watches documentaries on the Science Channel and sci-fi TV shows. At the top of her pack is a patch for an old hardcore punk band called MDC. She's exploring political punk music. When you put a young person in a place where the world has been removed, I suppose they go seeking the rest of the world. Her dad is an ex-Navy man who designs either military intelligence hardware or writes software, or both, for Lockheed Martin, behind where one of my brothers lives. She mentions that she has discussions with him.
The following afternoon, after working at a different store, on the bus home I meet a young woman who appears about the same age. She needs change for a five and I give it to her. I answer her in Spanish and she appears surprised. "Esta Espanol...?" As she tells me about her commute, I hear a commotion at the front. The driver has a big styrofoam beverage from a deathburger. I look just in time to see the horror of what at first appears as a cascade of brown water over crystal boulders, but is in fact his entire drink spilling to the floor. It runs across the front of the floor. He stops hard and parks to clean it up. I've been on a bus where the driver told me that I can't open and drink a bottle of soda, and in fact signs to that effect are clearly posted. I don't know what the policy is for drivers. On the connecting train, we continue to talk, the woman and I. The sun is in her face. Her brown eyes shine like gems.
The gathering American malaise, I thought, was indefinitely more dangerous and unsettling than the youth rebellion... It lacked...the optimistic forward thrust... Instead, it had the grim inexorability of a storm. The ethic was there, all right, but the same could not be said of work... ...the fantastic shift in population patterns literally transforming the nation, that occurred during...1965-68...created new cultures, and subcultures and destroyed the accustomed ones. Poverty at home...sent millions...from farms...to already overcrowded cities. The big-city bus terminal became the Ellis island of the 1970s, a port of entry for rural Americans into modern urban society. By the late 1960s, it had simply become uneconomic to be a small landowner or farmer... The new towns - the "planned communities" started from scratch...were the futuristic...dream of urban planners...Lakewood, Colorado...(meant, of course, for the fairly affluent)... - Szulc
This morning, I am waiting earlier than usual for the bus to the grocery store. Across the street, in the dark, I am watching someone with a camping headlamp searching the parking lot for empty aluminium cans, In the same parking lot, six hours later, someone is setting off what sounds like an unlimited amount of fireworks for reasons which I can not determine. This the lot of one of two establishments across the street from each other. This one is a Mexican restaurant, and the other is a franchise convenience store/gas station. The convenience store is under new ownership, and all but one of the employees who were my friends have been replaced. The door has a new sign, asking that only 3 kids at a time come in at the same time, and that they leave their backpacks at the door. I wonder how long this sign will last.
Last month, I ran into the manager of my townhome complex. The complex was constructed in 1984. Three years later, our HOA began managing the property. The manager told me that it has decided to discontinue doing so. After sending an email to the guy in charge of the management company, he replied, telling me that one of the residents has agreed to take over HOA duties. I got a call from that resident on Sunday. He tells me that he feels we have all been left in the lurch by our venerable HOA, and he decided to step up to ensure that we have some kind of HOA. He is calling residents to give them the news. His list shows a third of the complexes residents with Vietnamese names. He wonders if he will need to hire an interpreter, and what those residents will think of him being a Vietnam veteran. I know that two of those residents are bilingual, and that one of those two is gay. I don't know what he will think of this. He obviously hasn't seen, on certain days, the parade of South Vietnam flags over the Vietnamese businesses right behind us. I wouldn't expect anyone who has made it here to prefer the current Vietnamese government.
The following morning is the beginning of another week. Somehow, it's another Monday. Again I am at the lightrail station, watching commuters walk out of the darkness from the parking lot to the train platform. On the train are a couple of middle aged guys, one in a coat embroidered with the name of a commodities company, the other with a hunting cap under his hood and sunglasses. The sun won't be up for another hour. A third guy, with a grey beard, gets on and quietly asks the commodities guy something, who points to the seat behind him where the predawn sunglasses guy is sitting. The bearded guy yells, "Hey it's Bill!" The was no previous warning that these three characters knew each other.
I went to Vietnam three times. I have watched as the Vietnamese people came here... If they (had) stayed (in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975), they would be in prison or dead. ...these are the people who end up making the best Americans. They will do whatever it takes... These are proud people... - letter to Westword newspaper, 1/26 - 2/1/12
...the great American cities have exquisitely different personalities. They all fascinate and attract. They stupefy and repulse, probably are ungovernable in the long run yet go on existing... Pessimistic social scientists tell us that the American city is doomed. ...a 1973 survey showed that only 13 percent of urban dwellers actually wanted to live in the cities. ...poverty, shortage of good jobs, frightful overcrowding...dilapidated housing, racial tension, worsening public education, and a generalized breakdown in public services. Following the riots of the 1960s... Presidential commissions were appointed. ...the structural problems...were left untended and free to perpetuate. - Szulc
A couple of middle aged guys approach the connecting bus I'm on toward home. I hear some "shit"s and "damn"s, punctuated with laughter. The first one who gets on and sits down inventories his 40 oz. bottle of Magnum. The other is outside with a transfer in his hand, hustling the driver who is having a smoke. Both riders appear to be about fifty. The one outside is wearing a hunting cap backwards and a half-smoked cigarette behind one ear. He smokes it before joining his pal on the bus. They spend the trip recounting their week with each other, such as their week was. The next morning I am back on the train, with a young guy in a pea coat. His lapel has a pin which reads, "I stand with Occupy Denver." The following day is my day off. My sister treats me to lunch at the art museum. I take the bus back to my neighborhood, where I wait for another one just down the street. On the bench are three drunks. From a building behind us comes a fourth. Down the sidewalk come two more. From across the street comes another. From the same direction comes one with headphones. Off a bus comes yet another. They all seem to know each other. One takes a swig from a 40 oz. bottle of magnum and hands it to another. One says that he is listening to Dude Looks Like A Lady on his headphones. Someone asks him if he's off work. He acts drunk. He says no, he went to see his parole officer. He's dancing like he's drunk. The one who bums the bottle is telling the other, "He told me he doesn't make anything on this corner. Then he tells me he makes $40 to $50 a day. What's the fuckin' story here? He used to live right across the street from me." The one with the bottle says, "If that's the way he wants to live."
How can another week be half gone? Like somebody's baby, I'm back on "the morning train. I work from 7 to 3:30 and then, I take the train back home again." The first bike commuter I see is the first one I've ever seen smoking a pipe. The second one is the guy with the Occupy Denver button. Aha, he takes the east line north, to transfer to the west line south. He has a new button or two. As soon as I'm off the train, I see a young guy drop one of his two backpacks on the ground. As it hits the ground, it methodically deposits all of its contents onto the northbound tracks. He is standing there in the dark, surrounded by middle aged men carrying lunch coolers and big coffee mugs. Below the train platform, I pass a young woman seated on a bench. She's wearing pink Crocs, Capri pants, and a Qdoba hoodie. She appears to be trying to stay warm. Another guy is standing, trying to decipher pages which he has printed out from Mapquest.
On the bus is a regular rider, a senior who used to give to the old driver an extra coffee the rider always purchases. Instead, this morning he gives it to another regular. This other guy appears to have mental issues. I've seen him jerk his head, look around and smile, make mysterious hand gestures. I saw him on a corner once, not spinning a sign, but moving a sign half the usual size from side to side in a pointing motion. This week is the first time when I have seen him with a bike. Tuesday, he showed up with a bike, along with what looks like some kind of a dolly designed to carry an oxygen tank. He has a small bag attached to it. I can't imagine how he pulls the dolly on his bike. He wears what I describe as a Russian style winter hat. On Tuesday, he says out loud, "Do they steal everyone's bike or just mine?" When he gets his coffee this morning, he replies, "Thanks brother. Can't get service like that anywhere else." He has a NASCAR coat with Dale Ernhardt's autograph embroidered on the back. Also this week, I have been listening to another rider on her cell. She's wearing one of those hoodies with the name of the city all over it. She spends the entire ride talking to her "baby. Let's go to Walmart, baby. We'll do laundry, baby. These bus rides wear me out." A second person is also on their cell. It's as a back and forth double one-sided conversation. "They told me it was a safety hazard." "We do this all the time, baby." "You know, my grandmother..." "Alright, baby, if you insist. No, someone said "thank you" getting off the bus."
After work on a Saturday, I see both "baby" and the Dale Ernhardt coat guy on a bus home. He has a knit cap over his Russian hat, with grass on it. I am on another bus home from my bank downtown. One guy gets on and sits next to a woman with a white perm. He tells her that he likes her "snow white hair." He and another guy discuss the weather in deep voices and slow speech, punctuated with laughter at inside punchlines. His behaves without any contemporary references which I recognize. His rhetoric strikes me as timeless and distant, polite but unidentifiable. He carries a hardhat. A day laborer? After he disembarks, I notice that the woman in front of me is reading a text book. The title of one paragraph is "How did Galileo solidify the Copernican revolution?" The following day, I have lunch downtown with my sister and Mom, before they head off for "mani pedis." Part of her occupation is as a hearing officer. I tell her about my stories of my neighborhood residents. She tells me about the dynamics of halfway houses, occupied by former prison inmates who sometimes appear before officers such as she. These places are run by for profit companies, and residents must check in and out. It's possible that either one of two apartment complexes across the street from me may be halfway homes. She tells me that, though residents are discouraged from associating with neighborhood inhabitants such as drunks, such inhabitants may in fact offer a kind of unique support as only those who have experienced the same circumstances can possibly do. After lunch, I arrive at the same bus stop where I found myself after lunch with my sister on Wednesday. Today, from across the street, comes a guy with a plastic bag from a discount clothing store. I see a pair of white sneakers inside. He asks, "Anyone want to buy shoes and a 180 gig iPod? Twenty bucks." No luck with any of the passers by. Before following a guy with a walker back across the street, he tells a story about how he can't take his merchandise "to a pawn shop because my old lady stole my car. She wrapped it around a tree." He soon remarks that she in fact sold his car along with his clothes. Before heading back the way he came, he gets a bite from a pair of drunks who tell him that they will meet him later, presumably with the aforementioned $20. I wonder if he accepts checks. The liquor stores don't.
Speaking of the neighborhood, for the first time ever, this week I got in the mail a newsletter about and from my neighborhood city Councilman. The Winter 2011 2012 issue is full of things which he has done for the neighborhoods which he represents, along with photos of him in the process of doing the things which he mentions. "...the major projects...that will improve life for residents... We're...paving streets... For the first time ever, we will finally be paving some...most infamously muddy alleys... ...I will be introducing...ordinances including: Expand Retail Liquor Store distance requirements to protect neighborhoods from an overabundant access of retail space being used to sell liquor." The Councilman "along with the 8 new staff and community members celebrated the opening of" the new branch of a bank, across the street from a medical marijuana and tax center, in front of where I catch the bus most mornings. "The new location creates eight new jobs for the surrounding neighborhood." The new bank "will conduct banking in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese." That should about cover it. The MMJ/tax place sometimes has a homeless sign spinner, along with a young regular guy in a wheelchair who panhandles. The same corner hosts people dressed up in uniforms for a fake charity, who collect money from passing cars. And this is the corner with the south bound bus stop which hosts nine drunks and a guy with shoes and an iPod for sale. There's a photo with the Councilman sitting with the President during his recent high school visit, a photo of him working on the roof of a neighborhood home, one of him with the new mayor, one of him on a bicycle, one with some motorcycle rider who deliver toys.
I used to live in another neighborhood, for sixteen years. It was my first neighborhood in this town. This first neighborhood was my home during my employment at six companies, with a handful of others during short periods. I lived there from the end of my twenties through the beginning of my forties. The first place where I worked, I met a WW II vet who remembered this neighborhood when it "was all woods". I watched these post WW II homes excavated block by block. "Scrape" is the word which I would learn is used to describe a home offered for demolition. It had two movie theatres, a shooping mall, and a supermarket all within walking distance. For all its affectation and hype, I was nothing more than a resident with a view of the mountains out of his kitchen window. The other day, someone at work, a neighbor and friend, told one of our new drivers that I was Pancho Villa. Because I moved into her neighborhood and I liked Mexican people. Two neighborhoods at opposite ends of the economic spectrum, and every other kind of spectrum. Up the street from the shopping mall, I was no one's hero. What do real estate agents say? Location, location, location.
There was even a halo that hung over the field from the fireworks smoke. It brought a city some relief from the stress and strains of everyday life.
LoDoNA (Lower Downtown Neighborhood Association) and DORO (Don't ask me...) are co-hosting a public safety forum to address issues affecting residents such as sleeping on the mall, graffiti, and other quality-of-life issues. ...the most-fun-you-will-ever-have-at-a-meeting event...an opportunity to learn from...signature chefs here in LoDo.
...amenity space...a membership-level health club with yoga garden, a private screening room, open-air dog park...surrounded by oversize plasmas...personal wine lockers, an entertaining kitchen... - Denver News, 1/10-2/10/2012
Even though we have a reputation as a meat and potatoes city, there are a lot of younger people moving into the city and bringing the idea that you don't have to eat just meat and potatoes.
...you can spot girls...frocked in Proenza Schouler booties and intentionally oversized Lanvin dresses from MAX. These are ladies who have heard it all behind the dressing room doors but prefer to get their gossip from W magazine. A place where men discuss business in hushed tones over Manhattans as women with coifed hairdos and shoulder pads leer...
We thought about making tables from stainless steel autopsy tables and about putting the staff in lab coats like they wore in Six Feet Under. I feel good about a mortuary being a place of peace. I think we've struck a balance. - Denver and Boulder Dining Out, Spring 2012
