Here ye here ye here ye. All rise. The court of public opinion is now in session, the Honorable Judge YouTube presiding.
It's hard to believe that it's been two full seasons since the launch of Star Trek Discovery, on CBS All Access streaming service. To this day, I've never figured out how to get hooked up with CBS All Access. Everything I've seen of the show is direct from the internet. I believe that I first saw the Discovery in a post of a clip of its unveiling at a convention. I agreed with fans that it appeared to be a terrible design. I first noticed that they changed the engines this month, on my Star Trek Ships of the Line calendar. Love the new engines. I think that it was last year. Someone posted the first episode of season one online. I thought that the dialogue was terrible. I didn't realize after watching it that the main character is Spock's half-sister, or that the character is transgendered. I had trouble understanding what the plot was. The ship which appears to be a variation of the old Enterprise NX-1 shows up to investigate a Klingon ship. Why? I don't know why a Klingon ship needs investigation. Was it in Federation space? I don't know. Then there was a bright light. The main character knocked out the captain, and when the captain came to, she put the main character into the brig. This is all I knew of Star Trek Discovery until this year.
Some months ago, I stumbled onto something called Midnight's Edge. Generally speaking, it's a kind of online public disclosure channel about new science fiction television programming and film releases. Lately, it's been a magnet for those accused of having what one critic of the channel refers to as a "hate boner for" the CBS All Access program Star Trek Discovery. I found it when I was looking on a search engine for information about said program, which I have yet to see more than the tiniest bit of. I was looking for alternatives to signing up for the CBS service., to watch the show Midnight Edge goes into detail about Discovery. It focuses pretty tightly on what it is able to discern from CBS decision making and from what it can surmise about ratings. Midnight's Edge concludes that a relatively tiny audience has signed up for the service, a little over 100,000 subscribers, explaining that this is too little revenue to satisfy the financial deal made with the distributor, Netflix. After season one failed to impress enough potential subscribers to satisfy Netflix, which paid for the entire production cost of this original season, Netflix has elected to drastically reduce what it is willing to pay for the second season.
When I encountered these first criticisms, I wondered what difference they would make. The show appeared to continue being produced. I don't know what difference it makes to the actors, who are being paid for the work they do. Midnight's Edge also reports that the program originally was never going to mention Mr. Spock, nor did it have plans to show the original USS Enterprise. Trekkers felt as though the show didn't care what they thought, and other YouTube commentators claim that Trekkers have flocked to their YouTube postings for vindication of this. Midnight's Edge reports that the program claims to have heard these Trekkers, and both Mr. Spock and the Enterprise have arrived for season 2, with Captain Christopher Pike in command. The USS Enterprise design has been reinterpreted, both inside and out. Midnight Express explains the legal reasoning for this. I wondered if Trekkers would revolt at any redesign, but I have yet to hear of anything like this. Spock has a full beard now. I think this is fuckin' cool. I like the ship redesign, and the bridge redesign. All I have seen are some still shots from the program. I have yet to see anything else beyond the first episode of season 1.
Here toward the end of July, 2019, I've been watching various YouTube channels which discuss Star Trek Discovery. They are very entertaining. These are Trekkers, who know Star Trek "cannon" far better than I do, and they're excellent debaters. One of the YouTube commentators mentioned something about an outtake from the program, the entire cast singing the word "nerd" together. The commentator claims that this is the cast calling the Trekkers nerds. I recall the cast from Star Trek he Next Generation during an interview, one cast member talking about the first couple of years of that program. The cast would go to conventions, where they were met by an average of "30 people who hated us." I understand that these were fans of the original Star Trek series who didn't like a new "Enterprise" cast and/or didn't think the first couple of seasons were up to par. The consensus among fans and cast of STNG is that the show found its footing by the third season. I wonder about the cast if Star Trek Discovery, and it's monosyllabic acapella performance of "nerd." Is this in fact a message from the cast to Trekkers? Is the cast drawing its own line with Trekkers? Is this cast from the performing arts department of Donald Trump's university? I eventually saw a clip of the cast singing what in fact was a parody of the musical Rent, swapping words from the original song with a narrative about nerds. The parody appears to me to be an homage to all those nerds who watch the show, without the show could not survive. One of the Discovery show cast members was a member of the original cast of Rent. He refers to the cast also as nerds. If this is indeed the case, the performance is being misinterpreted among some Trekkers on YouTube.
I've seen a couple of YouTube channels, both very different, both not simply making banal complaints but brilliantly eviscerating the plot, and both amazingly entertaining and simplistically genius. Jesus, these people are faster and smarter than I'll ever be. One YouTube channel questions a plot point where one planet's cave-dwellers "learn how to fly starships. In, what, two weeks?" Another YouTube channel can't believe that both USS Discovery and USS Enterprise become "surrounded" by enemy ships, or "drones." Surrounded in space...by a circle of the enemy. The pair of Federation ships never attempt to make use of the third final dimension and fly out of danger. The writers of Star Trek Discovery are accused of not paying attention in school or perhaps suffering from brain damage. Well, I suppose we all can't be as smart as Vulcans. I'm sure humans are being asked here to be smarter than the writers. There is one particular YouTube channel featuring a young woman with long bright red hair. She displays a message sent to her from Michael Kurtzman, an exec with some oversight over the show. In the post, he mentions that he knows "some martial arts stuff," and he threatens to knock her teeth out. He would later claim that his "drunk brother" gained access to his computer without his knowledge. I'm trying to remember if I have ever heard of either TV or streaming programming production, with critics who have driven one of the head guys to lose his fucking mind. Yeah, I happen to know some psychological kind of things and stuff. Just ask my drunk brother. Or has there been a program where the actor playing the main character is in a position where he or she must respond to a question by promising that "we'll fix the timeline. We will. I promise." The actor went on to address the critical Trekkers; "They're intellectual." I suppose supporters of Discovery, and there is a following, are whatever the opposite of intellectual is. The actor finished by saying that the show "wants younger viewers, because that's how you keep the franchise going." Okay. Intellectual vs. young. I wonder if intellectual means old. Are you listening, Mr. Spock? You know some intellectual stuff. Just ask the new young viewers.
Okay computer club members. Here's my own take on Star Trek Discovery. I don't remember such a clash of world views between a production and such a distinct part of an audience. But I feel that this production has put its cast and crew and writers in an impossible box, from which they are begging us to be patient with them. I suspect that all they want to do is have a nice Star Trek, please God. And after two seasons, the clash is gaining momentum. One of the posts I watched online just this month is a recap of season two. Nothing I saw on there made any sense to me. The ships doctor disappeared and reappeared as some kind of monster who wasn't recognized right away. A thinking planet swallows a couple of crew members for a while. The season ends with the USS Discovery travelling through a wormhole 930 years into the future. I'm not angry, I'm just lost in this space. They tell me it's called Star Trek. If they say so. They must know some stuff about writing...
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Monday, July 1, 2019
July 2019, Four o July, The HUH (Homogenized Urban Hipsters), West Denver Cleanupalooza, and My Tall Photographic Hippe Goddess
This month begins on the corner yards from my front door. I'm on the way to work this morning, waiting at a red light next to a truck driven by a Caucasian guy in a fishing hat. Through the open window, he asks me, "Is, uh. Is this a good bike route?" I tell him that it's okay. I'm down the hill, through the underpass, and parallel the interstate before I get to the bank. Then I'm at the gym before I head off to work. The entire block around where I work is cordoned off by yellow police tape and police cruisers. At 7:11 AM this morning, a guy shot a gun through the window of an empty parked vehicle. He appears walking past the front of our store on our camera before he is shot and killed by police. A police sergeant escorts me to the back door of my place of employment. Last week, and month, the alley was blocked off by muralists. This morning, it's a deceased guy who liked to shoot car windows. I get a call from one customer who wants to know when she can cross the police tape. The street outside our front door is blocked off from traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian. Another customer is escorted inside by an officer who is on her phone to a relative. "I don't know when I get out of here," the officer says. "This is going to be an all day (crime) scene." A police officer delivers a stack of newspapers to the door of our neighboring business, which never had a chance to open this morning. Yet another customer is escorted inside. He drops off and says he will pick up later. I don't want to keep this guy (the police officer) waiting. I'll come back when there's not a crime scene."
The new apartment stock coming into Denver is largely for luxury renters... ...about 5,600 homeless people [live] in the Front Range. Some housing is...not close to stores or bus routes. "A lot of people get housing, but lose it. In Denver, people can't really afford to live where they work."
[Candi CdeBaca is] the first democratic socialist to serve on Denver's City Council. "We've never had representation from Globeville or Swansea on City Council." ...long...home to some of Denver's most vulnerable populations of people. The district saw more displacement during early development in the city than any other area in Denver. - Life On Capitol Hill, 7/2019
...we soon learned that social media post does not warrant votes...except (I think) one highly publicized race. Congratulations to Candi CdeBaca. ...we have had our challenges. ...we have lost major advertisers [to online sources.] ...I refer to...the Dubious Seven (D7). Talking Black and walking white does not sit well with me. [Of seven publicly visible local African-Americans campaigning against incumbent African-American Mayor Hancock,] this [is a] form of "Black on Black Crime"... I hope the D7 (and the others who were quietly outspoken) revisit their values...and ancestral heritage... There is no way today, in this Black America, we should we witnessing this form of castration of a Black Man from Black men. - Denver Urban Spectrum, 7/2019
In October 2018, my partner and I quit our jobs in Denver, ended the lease we'd held... We'd been in the city for a while...we'd developed...friend groups, professional networking groups...social justice causes. I'd been struggling with Denver's rapid growth... Like most metropolitan areas that become popular, tech in Denver is on the rise, neighborhoods [gentrify and are] renamed, and folks are either losing the housing battle and falling into homelessness, moving to the...outskirts, or leaving the city... ...most new Denverites are too green to...care... - Elevation Outdoors, 7/2019
...under the weight of higher property taxes. "I'm concerned that something like this could eviscerate the entire district in a year. It's how you kill cities. ...like seeing gentrification in print." A letter of protest to Mayor Michael Hancock, Denver City Council and other city officials was drafted with the help of [the head of] both the neighborhood Business Improvement District and the resident Community Development Corporation... .."we have a vested interest in...attracting small business, building new jobs... ...we see longtime people leaving... It's...systematic." ...the city hasn't been proactive in supporting small businesses in the corridor... ...Denver...eliminated its business support offices four years ago in favor of creating BIDs... "But BIDs are hard to establish, and don't...replace support offices in what they do." [Denver county has six arts districts left.] All report rapidly rising assessments and little useful advice from the city on how to deal with them. "It's damaging the character of the city... ...there's no champion for us at the city..." "Maybe we need to shut down Santa Fe Drive in protest during rush hour.." - Westword, 7/11-17/2019
...Raven Canon...launched the "Echo" [homeless newspaper in Colorado Springs] in January 2017...acting as head editor and lead writer...was also homeless, was found dead on the streets on a cold morning in March 2017. "I got tired of being hunted like an animal at night." - Denver Voice, 7/2019
Tuesday. Less than 48 hours after a guy was shot and killed some yards from where I work, I am taking out the trash to the alley. It's the alley which was blocked off last week because artists are painting a mural of the building opposite the one in which I work. Yesterday, the alley was closed due to a dead guy, which also resulted in the artists taking the day off. They are back today. I hear one ask the others what they want for lunch. I awoke with a splitting headache, and I never get headaches, and not enough sleep. The following day, the headache is gone but I'm still without enough sleep. Okay, so Caucasians are not the only ones who walk their dogs. I've see three Hispanics walk dogs, one couple this morning. But Caucasians are still the only Latter Day Saints who I have seen directing an SUV out of a parking space. On my way to work, I pass cross a bridge over the river. It rolls along lately from afternoon rains. This morning, it sparkles in the sunlight. After a couple of turns, I'm on a street of old and disappearing homes. I read about this street from an author who grew up here, and who has seen people she knew sent along their way. On this same street I keep passing young Caucasian couples who strike me as new residents. I passed one along this street yesterday evening, loading an SUV. I pass them again on my way back to work this morning. They are still loading an SUV. Up the street, another Caucasian young couple carry bags and boxes to their car. They come out of a little home with a brand new front door. I remember the suggestion of a new front door as a way to increase the value of your home. If you are a homeowner. They live next to another old home being demolished. A couple of Caucasian cyclists roll past. A guy comes into work. He's homeless and, as many homeless, wears an orange reflective vest. I've seen him come in here once before. He spoke to the manager. He stands with his bottom lip protruding. I ask him if he is looking for the manager. He turns and walks a few steps away before he returns and gestures with one figure, asking another employee to come up to the front counter. The other employee tells him that the manager is not here. He shakes the other employee's hand. After he exits, he tries to shake a passing a stranger's hand before he rolls away his lawn mower. We have no grass to mow.
"Four o July"
A restaurant across the street from where I leave has a sign posted on their door, notifying patrons that it will not be open during "Four o July". My own Four o July begins with breakfast at a diner on the way to the waterpark. This is the diner with orange plastic upholstery and waitresses in white uniforms. On the other side of the window over my booth is a young woman, at an outside table. She's in a summer dress and has tattoos and false eyelashes. She's filling out an application to work here. This is my first assumption. These days, the clientele here include a purportedly "healthy" dose of young Caucasian hipsters. Semi-urban, but urban enough that they can be recognized as homogenized urban. I make my second assumption, that these homogenized urban hipsters, or HUH (I like that. HUH. My first acronym.) reside not much farther than a block from here, in any one of a myriad of new condominium complexes which now occupy the space where once a mighty rubber plant once stood. The employees of which this diner, still open 24 hours, was built to serve. I'm sitting next to a foursome of Indian nationals. Next to them is a young couple, and the guy has some kind of permanent grin. Behind me is the register, where the owner sits in a shirt the same color as the upholstery. Customers are lined up to pay. "You from Chicago?" he asks one. "You like to fly fish?" he asks another. One guy paying his bill is in a U.S. flag shirt, a bandana around his head, and tights.
The Indians and the couple with the smiley guy clear out. Another hipster trio arrives. A young red-haired woman with freckles is in a tie-dyed T-shirt. I've seen the shirt for sale at more than one summer outdoor festival. The vendor calls himself the Tie Dye Guy. My waitress takes their order and mentions to them that she will be heading up to a local speedway today. The trio tells her that they are headed up to Boulder to hang out. I hear a customer tell the owner, "We've had a big Fourth of July party since '98. We buy everything. (?) The problem is the kids. They're not kids anymore. They maw through the house like locusts." After breakfast, I'm bummed because it's overcast and not exactly warm. Not the most encouraging swimming day. The trailhead for the bike trail to the water park is on the other side of the river. I must traverse a sidewalk on a bridge, with a low cement wall on one side and the railing with the river below on the other. Approaching from the other direction is a homeless guy on his own bike. He stops along the way to let me pass. When I do, he says, "You're welcome." The trail is full of July o Four riders, some with their own flag gear. At the waterpark is an employee in flag socks. And the clouds have burned off and the sun is out. And I am encountering both wisdom and parental outrage.
I hear a father tell his child while in the pool that "Water is water." Hmm. Very Eastern. NOT. I watch a young, lanky guy with a blonde mop of hair come down the steps toward the pool. His T-shirt reads "FRICK". But I spend my hour at the pool between the pool and the drop slide into the deep end. And it's during one exit from the pool to the slide when I look up and see her. I call her Golden Mom. Her tan is perfect, her hair is blonde, and she is curvy and idyllically beautiful in her bikini. One would think that she would be satisfied with this. She is in fact gesturing animatedly as she berates her fifth-grader for not going down the drop slide. Apparently, her daughter has already been down one of the much longer and higher slides across the park. Golden Mom is at a painfully visible loss as to her daughter's reluctance to go down such a relatively short slide. She tells her daughter that she will be on the other side of the pool to "video" her daughter going down this slide. The child is behind me. I say to her, "Your mom sure wants you to go down this slide." She responds that, she tried to last year, and the lifeguard told her she was taking too much time. I go ahead of her. She climbs the steps and sits at the end of the tube. She comes back down. Golden Mom is beside herself. She goes up with her daughter, the daughter stays, and she comes back down. The daughter is still too scared and descends the steps crying. The pair calls it a day. Golden Mom would, rather continue to try her hand at parenting, be of more use to her daughter if she were stuffed and mounted.
After an hour at the pool, I decide to head out to find Four o July lunch. Down the trail to a connecting trail along the river, I run back into the cyclist traffic and more U.S. flag gear. The bike trail must be the place to be seen in your flag shirt. Along one stretch of trail are people carrying tubes with which to ride the river. Just over a hill, along a wooded bank, is a homeless couple. the lady is decked out in clothes and colorful scarves. She tells the guy, "Okay, I'm going to wash up." The trail has the bike traffic and the river has the tube traffic. I am making better time on the trail than the tubers moving with the current. I don't know why I am surprised when, as usual, it rains and hails in the evening. I step outside to watch fireworks together with lightning.
[Of] fourteen Afghan [local police] officers. Six...were not qualified to have weapons. Of the other eight, only three said they had been to the main police training center. The Afghans mimicked the Americans raising their weapons. "They could have shot everyone." The police officers without weapons aimed their fingers and laughed hysterically. Another police officer stuck his rifle butt between his knees, pointed the weapon at his head... On a walk through the village, an Afghan police officer waved his gun at a baby. ...a video of the Afghan army trying to do jumping jacks...resembled...an incurable disease. "...we asked them, 'Do you ever arrest anybody?' 'No.' 'What do you do?' They're like, 'Eating, sleeping, nothing.'"
...Karzai wanted to make a deal with the Taliban... ...Karzai finished his speech... He called me "ma'am," pushed his way toward the door, and...a loudspeaker burst into flames... I...watched Karzai run toward one of the helicopters...to fly the lonely three and a half mile back to the presidential palace. The journalists were...hungry, new to Afghanistan... ...like I had once been. I...didn't want to scrub any more people off the bottom of my shoes. I soon finished packing. In the corner, I left a gray plastic trunk...with things I needed only in Afghanistan. ...gathering dust almost as soon as I shut the lid, in a house filled with similar boxes in different rooms... - Barker
I am a proud American, and I like to think of myself as a good American. But I can be better... I vote... At games, I stand and applaud when...the military are honored, but I need to say "thank you"...in more personal ways. I appreciate the freedoms we enjoy, but probably not as much or as regularly as I should. I'm not proud of that… - Mile High Sports, 7/2019
Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of "traditional values" installed. In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on...the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated...the Shi'ite fundamentalists. ...our "traditional values" have always been bigotry, greed...buttressed by wanton appeals to a God of love. Thanks to..the upwardly mobile, pita bread and salad bars have sedimented down to Burger King... ...occupations that pay well - corporate law, international banking, cocaine retailing - involve almost zero energy... ...exercise is to eating as contraception was to sex in the sixties... ...uncoupled gluttony from obesity... Does your date still think sushi is stylish? Then he probably has been passed over for a promotion and squeezed out when his apartment went co-op... If...he goes...for the baby bass en route, he may have a Harvard MBA and a flair for currency speculation... - The Worst Years of Our Lives, B. Ehrenreich, 1990
Saturday I am working what would otherwise be my Saturday off. I run into the downtown supermarket before work. When I come out I see a homeless guy with his stolen shopping cart...pushing back tot he supermarket. The day after, I return to a pool across town, where I lived for fifteen years over the previous couple of decades. Along the way I grab lunch and yogurt at the mall where I used to live. The mall I stop into more than when I lived up the street from here. The woman at the yogurt counter sounds French. She tells me she's from Turkey. I pedal out to the pool, on the same bike path I rode to work, two years shy of 20 years ago. In the pool, I listen to a mom and the young woman who is her daughter. I ask the daughter if they are Russian. They are Bosnian. Tuesday of the following week. Somehow, June was nonexistent. It must have been the chilly mornings. Now, the 4th of this month has blown past. And we are standing in the middle of the summer, just like that. And in the middle of the year. On my way to work, I've just turned onto the bike trail. Approaching me is a middle-aged homeless woman. Her hair is dyed pink, her skin is burnt umber, and she pushes some kind of wide red cart. She is a reddish summer specter. I'm at work in the afternoon when a young woman comes in off the street. She's in a black summer dress and she's holding a laminated flyer for something known as the Arise festival. It's a hippie music and truth, goodness, and beauty kind of happening up in the mountains. She walks as if she may be stoned. All she wants is a lollipop. Later in the day, another young woman comes through the door. She is from Ukraine, she says. She is a missionary, she says. Nice to meet me, she says. She opens a hinged box of trinkets for sale, or in exchange for a donation.
Wednesday. A guy comes into work. He's in a T-shirt and he wants his measurements taken for a suit. He doesn't say he needs a suit. What he says is he needs the measurements for an application he's filling out. Later on, I'm taking out the trash. A wiry little young guy with big glasses approaches me from the alley. He wants to know if I can go inside and charge his phone for him wherever I work. When I get home after work, it's a bit early, around 7:30 PM. I see a guy poking around the small front lawn before he strolls slowly toward the back parking lot. I hear him mumbling to himself. He carries what appears to be a short length of television cable wire in his hand, and a folded outdoor patio umbrella over his shoulder. Either he works for our property management company, or he's homeless. Some 24 hours later, I am on the way home from work. I've just come out from the underpass on my short ride on the bike trail. Approaching me very slowly is a homeless guy with grey hair. He's standing on a skateboard attached to the back of a stolen shopping cart, the size of one from Whole Foods. It's packed full of stuff. He creeps along toward an incline.
"Mubarak can only move slowly toward privatization... He...concluded that Gorbachev fell...because he moved too fast." ...Americans had taken on the character of the Russians during the Nasser era...too big and too isolated... ...the new United States embassy in downtown Cairo, built in the 1980s...relocating the official residence inside the walls. ...the architecture suggested how much [the U.S.] feared the Egyptians. The diplomats...eating American food in the embassy cafeteria. When I mentioned this to the diplomat, he was annoyed. "The fundamentalists say we are propping up Mubarak from inside this building. But Mubarak is seeking to champion an apolitical Islam. Is that so bad?" "We are an occupied people. Look at Bosnia, look at Kashmir, look at Palestine. They are killing Moslems everywhere and the West supports the dictatorships." ...can the...U.S. embassy accept moderate Islam? Of course, the Near East has long since ceased to be an exotic backdrop for literary-minded Westerners. An urbanized peasantry...has withdrawn into religion... Central power can deteriorate only so far before another gravitational force emerges. …"the state will either fragment or it will become more authoritarian"... - Kaplan
Hungry vs Future Hacker
Friday. It's early in the evening. The sun casts its long shadows across pavement. I'm out of work a half hour early and rolling alongside a huge abandoned building next to the interstate. I came past this same building this morning, headed the opposite way, when I saw a homeless guy in a kind of alcove. As I roll past the same alcove, he sits with his hands behind his head. The sun's last rays shine on his face and shirtless torso. Over the wide sidewalk, a black plastic grocery bag floats on a breeze. Out of downtown, over the interstate, and onto the trail along the river. At one trailhead sits an old woman. She's flying a sign which reads, "HUNGRY." Another old woman who appears as if she could be her sister is at the edge of the road. She is attempting to stop vehicles to panhandle. I don't remember ever giving anything at all to anyone who is homeless. I got some cash back at a grocery on the way home, to purchase the local homeless newspaper. I give my change to the seated woman. I've never see anyone so desperate as to stop passing vehicles for money. I'm across the tracks and am finishing the climb of a steep hill. At the top is a Mexican family huddled around a sedan. Among them is a middle-school kid in a black T-shirt which reads, "FUTURE HACKER." Just a jog and halfway down the street are a couple of Mormons who appear very familiar, one with a red buzz cut. I think it was last month when I incorrectly referred to both of them as Jehovah's Witnesses. They are listening to a woman speak to them in Spanish as she leans on a wrought iron fence. I creep past them. I never hear the Mormons respond, in Spanish or English. Behind the trio is a two-story apartment building. On a second-story balcony hangs a big beautiful bright red quinceanera dress.
Saturday. I wake up way too early. Unable to go back to sleep, I decide to do my grocery shopping this morning. I'm already out of the supermarket and waiting for the 7:21 AM bus. Coming down the sidewalk are a trio of slow-moving guys. One of them takes a seat in the bus shelter. He's young, younger than me. He has trouble walking. He asks me for money. He wants to know if I have any food. Yeah, I just went grocery shopping. It's then he asks me for a light for his cigarette. I wonder about a guy this young walking with two older slow-moving guys, one with a cane? I wonder why he has trouble walking, why he has no money or food? Both of us step aboard the bus up the street. The driver lets him on with no money. Soon, we are past where he told the driver he wanted to disembark. He gets up from his seat to stand at the front. I step out at my corner, drop off the groceries, and get on the bike to work another Saturday. I'm scheduled to finally have the following Saturday off. Along the way I stop at another supermarket for some beverages to take to work. When I come out of this one, a different street person awaits me. He totes a suitcase on wheels, with a milk crate and his coffee balanced on top. He gives me a rambling story about a bike shop somewhere. My ride home from work is during a heavy rainstorm, with lightning streaking over my head.
The following day is a busy one because I have it crammed with plans. And it's why I did laundry and grocery shopped during the week instead of today. I awake late (for me: 7:40 AM. Insanely late.) I begin with a trip to the diner on the way to the waterpark. The hostess is in a T-shirt with "HEY" on the front. I tell her I like it. After a late breakfast, no sooner am I out on the bike trail to the water park do I stop to take a photo of the sunlight sparkling on the river. I know what will happen next, and it does. The trail is full of grey-haired cyclists. A senior female whizzes past and, seeing that I am stopped, asks me, "Everything okay?" She is neon-colored and spandex-clad, with pockets in back of her blouse for her phone. It's some kind of unwritten rule: ask anyone stopped for any reason if they need help. These cyclists are never here, nor is any cyclist, in the winter months. Nor were they when I did need help before sunup when I worked the morning shift. But this issue is like the river: it's water under the bridge. In jig time, and some exertion on the bike, I am at the water park. I'm standing in line at the concession stand when a woman introduces herself as a promo person for the place. The employees recognize me as a frequent guest. I reply that I am flattered. She tells me it's the bike helmet which gives me away. She feels bad that I am here so often and gives me info on a season pass. Though I had a season pass a couple of summers ago, I'm still impressed. She mentions the rec center where I may purchase a pass, and I tell her I used to work out there a few years ago. I'm there for an hour before everyone must get out of the swimming pool. (The rest of the park pools can still be used.) I decide I have a big day ahead and take off.
From the municipality of Englewood to Littleton, I follow the trail past where I worked a couple of years ago, and I keep going off the trail, down residential streets I began riding when I worked this far south almost fifteen years and a long story ago. I arrive at the Southglenn Library for its annual used book sale. It's outside in front, and I'm not there for long before an elderly woman approaches me with a book by a familiar conservative author, on the subject of President Trump. She tells me it's a great book and asks me if I've read it. "I don't know if you're conservative," she says, and the tells me that I can bring a list of book titles into any branch library, "And they will bring the books out. Even if they're new." At first, I thought I was pegged as a conservative. Now, I think she may be insane in the membrane. I find more books than I thought I would before I grab a late lunch at a grill across the street. I'm not far from the big drycleaning plant where I worked for a few months shy of a decade. Every Saturday I spent there, and most other days. I make the trip, detouring through a new and growing condo complex across the street, the beginning of which the original owner for whom I worked had been waiting. It began just as he sold the business. I grab a bite at the old gas station in front, where I purchased many a snack between 2005 and the end of 2014. I knew a middle-aged Iranian couple who owned it for some years. I was the very last person to clock out of the old plant before the new owner shut it down, and after laying off the plant's employees after lying to them about restarting another plant for them to work in. After my snack, I venture the last few yards around the corner. It's open on a Sunday. It's now some kind of place where you can make a project yourself, using their wood and tools. The wood is some kind of prefabricated log slices with the bark still around the edges. I never would have guessed. I greet a man and woman behind a counter made of one of the slices. They strike me as married. The heard something of the saga of the sale of this place, and the rest of the business.
From there, I make my way up the avenue and turn down one of the roads I rode years ago. After I turn onto the street to the train station, I pass a graveyard. On the other side comes the sound of live music. A band is playing a song by the Eagles. At the train station is an old snack and gift shop with an owner I used to know. The train whisks me downtown, where I ride a city block to the Black Arts Festival. After the fest, I head along a busy avenue to a intersection downtown. I catch a bus headed for my own boulevard. A middle-aged woman is turned away for lack of fare. We head out and make our way to the stop for a downtown community college campus. A loud drunk woman gets out. She appears as if she may be Native American. She's yelling at the world, flipping everyone off, telling them they are "all immigrants." As the song says, you may lose or you may win, but you'll never be here again. The bus pulls into the station where I cross the street to catch my last bus home. It's a notorious stop across the street from the football stadium. Somehow, shortly after I get there, the middle-aged woman turned away from the bus comes shuffling up. I notice a cloth bandage completely covering her left arm, complete with butterfly clip. Next to both of us and the bus stop sign are a couple of guys asking passersby if they "want any weed?" One of them asks me. An elderly guy come shuffling through the crosswalk on a red light. Street racers must slow down until he makes it all the way across. When he gets to our bus stop, he appears to know the woman with the bandage. The stop is in front of a liquor store parking lot. They discuss prices for liquor at this store.
On the evening of the following Tuesday, I'm on my way home past the huge abandoned building. I roll past a couple of homeless guys standing on the sidewalk. One is telling the other, "Say something, like 'Have a good day,' or 'How's your day going?'" The following morning, I'm at the doughnut shop on the way to work. I'm behind a customer with a grey buzz cut and boots, who is behind a gabby airhead. I listen to him tell her how he used CPR to save the life of a guy having a heart attack. "I'm giving the guy mouth to mouth, and suddenly I've got gum in my mouth." She tells him that's "awesome." I wonder if he asked the guy how his day was going. She tells him that she would like to take a CPR class but can't fit it into her schedule. Behind me is a customer in a dress shirt and slacks. I watch him animatedly jerk from window to display window, picking out individual doughnuts. When Saturday rolls around, once again I have two days of the weekend instead of one in which to cram a ridiculous number of events. After breakfast and grocery shopping, the sunscreen goes on and I'm off to the train for a quicker trip to the waterpark, after a quick lunch at the retro diner. I spy more than one thunderhead the direction of the mountains. At the pool, I'm in line behind two beautiful women in bikinis who appear as if they may be a decade younger than myself. One is shorter with short dark wavy hair and slightly darker skin. She's one fantastic-looking mom. I wonder if they are sisters. They aren't doing anything but simply waiting in line, shooting the breeze. She isn't flaunting anything. Can she know how good she looks? I can't linger, either on this question or at my favorite swimming hole. I must be back to the train into downtown.
Raindrops spatter the train before I disembark and grab a snack at the deathburger homeless central. It's unusually empty in here today. This does not discourage the usual mayhem. A kid is rolling something to smoke as he wanders around the place loudly conversing with his pal. A middle-aged guy in line and a younger guy are threatening each other. I step into the men's room, where one guy is using a urinal like a sink. The toilet stall in closed for repairs. He leaves, and as I am using the urinal, another guy comes in behind me and thinks I am the first guy. He begins complaining that I'm taking too long. I come out and he comes out after me. He's passing around a couple of DVDs to see if anyone wants to purchase them. While I am eating, lightning, thunder, and pouring rain and hail appear. An assortment of the usual characters, along with myself, wait for it to stop. One is a woman with a couple of other guys. She never stops stepping moving, dancing, singing. One guy walks around in a shirt with "SECURITY" on the back. He steps out to check on a handful of derelicts waiting in the foyer. It lets up and I ride down to the stop for the bus to the Denver County Fair. I wait with four more derelicts. I arrive at the fair and stand in the ticket line behind a couple of thirtysomething Caucasian guys rattling off precise technical details of football offense and defense. It's a smaller fair this year. I chat with one woman from Missouri who occupies a booth for window replacement. After the fair, I have a short wait at the stop for the bus back downtown. A trio of middle-aged street goofballs are there. One is telling me how terrific the design of my bike is. After I've told him I got it at Walmart. "It's not a $1,000 bike?" On the bus ride home, more thunder, lightning, and rain.
Sunday is the usual race against (what appears to be budding thunderheads, with) rain to get in a swim. I hope to include a postponed art fest, a food fest, and a global bazaar. First I have film to drop off. I leave the house without breakfast. Such are my summer weekends. A few blocks away is a stop for one crosstown bus to the camera shop. It's next to a church, which has been on this corner since I moved here in 2007. The church, surrounded by the usual ominous chain link fence, has been "scraped" (as they say in real estate parlance.) Its remains reside inside the walls of its exposed basement. Parked stoically in the parking lot, looking like nothing so much as a great dinosaur skeleton, is a steam shovel. I wonder if my neighborhood's stretch of this boulevard proper will have the first condominium? Only time, money, and the speculation of what the late Hunter S. Thompson referred to as the "wizards" can tell. The bus arrives, and soon it has as one of its passengers someone telling another passenger, "...well then act like it." I couldn't hear the beginning of his sentence. I wonder if he's related to the guy behind me in the men's room yesterday, who was yelling at me to piss faster? He than asks the other one if he has a job. Or was that a question uttered by the derelict goofball I rode the bus back toward downtown with yesterday. I feel as the aforementioned Dr. Thompson, having awakened with his reel-to-reel tape recorder around his neck, going forward and back again, in an attempt to reconstruct the past several days. I've sat next to twelve years worth of these guys and distinctions between them are coming loose. The bus driver curses the drivers in the traffic all the way across town.
I disembark upon my boulevard of old, some eighteen minutes after stepping aboard, and soon I'm at the camera shop. Helping a woman at a computer monitor is the young woman who enjoys winding my film camera. Her tall and willowy frame is bedecked in flowing clothing. She sees me approach with camera in hand, and she mentions to another employee that I am "the only one who lets me rewind his film, because he know that I like how it feels." The place is enjoined with laughter. Has she just public revealed her feelings about me? My tall photographic hippie goddess? And didn't I yesterday only just finish fantasizing about a middle-aged beauty in her bikini? Of course. But I saw this one long before the woman at the water park. And I have this one's business card. Apparently, heterosexual male fantasy comes with rules. Having said that, rewind my film she does. Yeah, baby. But this time, she says I must load my own film. No worries, baby doll. She's telling the customer whom she is assisting about a previous customer, who had 176 apps open on her phone. "And she didn't even know what an app is." I drop my film at the counter, with a terse-looking employee. He's in a Polo shirt with the store name embroidered on the breast, and has glasses and a little beard. She had better not be dating him, though they are most likely almost the same age, which is far from my own. I pick up another roll of film and bid her farewell. "Mark, right?" she asks. She may call me anything she likes...
I grab breakfast/lunch across the street, ride to the pool for a nice swim. I then proceed to waste another bus trip up the street and a ride to this "art festival". It's actually five tents, a few square yards, and hip hop music from a sound system. I don't even get off my bike. This stretch of the infamous Colfax Avenue appears to be home to an array of shady-looking hotels, full of residents who appear as if perhaps they can't afford apartments. Which is no crime here in the Mile High City. This doesn't stop the print media from quoting that tired line from Playboy, about Colfax Avenue being "the wickedest street in America." America must have been more attractive itself when it was younger. Since then, every college junior and her grandmother have written books about going "undercover" as part time strippers. On the way here, pedaling through the established middle-class homes down the street from old apartments, I imagine this neighborhood surrounded. Ahead of me, to the east, is the train and new "development." To the north, past neigborhoods like this, I wonder how close development is. To the south, better neighborhoods. And behind me, to the west, developing downtown. I grab a bus back that way. I can't complain about the air conditioned ride in exchange for a long ride in 90 degree F heat. It strikes me that, if not the businesses, then at least the undemolished small brick storefront architecture never changes along the Avenue, all the back to the Capitol. Perhaps Colfax Avenue is the last original street in the entire metro area. I end up back at the downtown deathburger homeless central. Again, it's relatively empty compared with other days. Inside, the piss-complainer/DVD hustler is in a seat. He's making grunting noises as if he's in pain. He gets up to wander around with his sweatpants falling down. I've seen people in the July heat, wearing sweatpants and hoodies, flannel shirts. This afternoon, he's hustling a single can of Axe body spray. He's letting it go for $5. When he gets around to my own table, I tell him that I already have one on my bathroom shelf. "One of these?" he asks. "Yeah." He spots my salad. "What's that? Chicken?" he inquires. "Yeah." "Not from here?" he asks. "Yeah."
From the Deathburger Bizarre, I decide to make the Global Bazaar my final stop today. I don't want more food from a food festival, and I suddenly remember that I need new shoes. In fact, there are handmade shoes from Peru at this little gathering off the pedestrian mall. I try some on. Alas, just a size too small. Yes, even here in what I've recently heard described as "the world's greatest economy," my own small feet continue to leave too great a footprint. I'm off to s shoe outlet, where I find a pair which fit. With all due respect to the great nation of Peru. In the checkout line, I am in front of a young woman speaking with friends in a language I can't place. (And I am behind an impatient hipster.) I ask her, "That isn't French you're speaking. What is it?" It's Turkish. They are exchange students from Turkey. She also mentions a language called Ottoman, from the old empire. They are here for the summer doing "Work and Travel." She works at the baseball stadium. I don't ask, but I'm sure she now knows the English words, "hot dog," "men's room," and "vomit." They decide where they want to travel in the United States, and apparently this includes Las Vegas and California. If you ask me, they are already as American as the rest of us. She tells me that Americans have already asked her if the Turkish speak Arabic or Farsi (as in Iran), and if the Turkish women wear the hijab. I ask her if they've been to the mountains. She doesn't like the altitude. And she doesn't like thunderstorms.
...Kickales [in Turkey is a] holiday camp for the working class on...package tours. 'We are...peasants trying on our own to figure out what tourism is. The government is nowhere." Trashy...hotels were in various stages of completion, separated by murky, garbage-strewn paths... The hotel where I checked in...was...filled with pink-faced German factory-workers... They shouted, banged the Formica tables... In winter the population...was three thousand. But from May through October it was tens of thousands. The visitors [didn't] care - where they were. Redbrick high-rises rose behind...Roman remains dated from the first centuries... Refuse floated in the water. [One local resident, a] man [who lived] between cultures [with his] tight pants... He apes the West, is frustrated by it, and often winds up hating it. [Such men] became foot soldiers for the fundamentalist risings in Iran and Algeria. They are the product of the new Mediterranean and Near Eastern landscape: package-tour hotels, late-night discos, and the weird fields of neon signs. - Kaplan
...the music-video ad from the real estate pros at Team Denver Homes, who up until last week were Kentwood Real Estate's number-one-selling agents. Just weeks after a vitriolic mayoral race largely divided by the city's housing crisis, these realtors posted [a] video in which they treat rapidly gentrifying Denver like their playground... ...a spokeswoman...saying that Kentwood Real Estate had cut ties with Team Denver Homes. - Westword, 7/25-31/2019
Tuesday morning. I'm out of the door in the morning, off to work. On my corner, right next door to my condo complex, is a small mechanic garage. It appears as if a steam shovel is tearing it down. On my way home, it appears as if the parking lot is being carefully removed. By Thursday evening, the entire lot has been raised. The small garage itself is still standing. Thursday morning, I am out the door and rolling past my old bus stop across the street. A young guy stands outside the shelter, holding his crotch. Next to him is a little white-haired guy in a long-sleeved camouflaged shirt. The young guy asks me, "Got a shigarette?" I'm around the corner and all the way down a street when I spot a turtle in a gutter. This is the first turtle I remember seeing here in the state. It's the exact color of the road, and makes it's way across. It's indistinguishable except for the shadow between it and the street. Some eleven hours later, I'm on my way home through this same neighborhood, a handful of streets north of here. It's twilight as I'm rolling down my last long crosstown stretch of residential street. Walking my direction are four young guys. Two are Mormons in black slacks and white shirts. And plastic name tags. The pair are strolling in the street. Next to them are a couple of young guys in long sleeved T-shirts. The four walk along in a horizontal line. One Mormon is recounting a tale about death to the other pair. As I cruise past, the other Mormon raises his hand in a wave and gives me a nervous smile. He has big, round, horn-rimmed glasses.
It's the things you "don't" see around Denver Public Schools [on my boulevard, and] Colfax Avenue... ...Keep Denver Beautiful (KDB)...volunteers to eliminate litter, junk, and graffiti... ...residents...clean up that areas that they see as important...resident's [possess] knowledge of where litter is actually located... ...West Denver Cleanupalooza. - Colorado Parent, 8/2019
On Thursday at work, I watch out the front window the busy avenue leading the remaining few blocks into the center of downtown. A trio of middle-aged guys shuffle past. One has a walker. They all appear to be homeless and bald with a lot of stylized facial hair. They're like homeless bikers. They give me the sense that they each look out for each other. They are followed by the obligatory office types. Twenty-four hours later, I'm at work the following afternoon. A guy comes in with a laminated sign. It informs me that he is deaf, and would like a "5, 10, or 20 dollar donation." It also suggests the donation of a "gift card." We don't have gift cards. I don't have any of my own. When I decline these suggestions, he asks if I can take him next door to the restaurant after we close to get something to eat. "I want chicken," he mentions. I can't believe this is happening, and yet I am thoroughly unsurprised. I have to tell him twice that, when we close, I'm headed home. The next day is my Saturday to work. I wake up earlier than usual with enough time to grocery shop before work. Groceries in hand, I'm at the stop in front of the supermarket. The Jehovah's Witnesses silently pull up in a black SUV. A middle-aged woman in a dress sits with a young woman in the bus shelter. The elder one has what appears to be an I-Pad. Minutes later, she and the SUV have evaporated. Sunday is a blazingly hot mid-summer day. This has been very unlike the freakish sixty degree F days which plagued last summer, ruining my outdoor swimming. I'm out the door for a late breakfast at a diner along the way. On the table I unfold the bike map I finally remember to bring along. I think I find a trail to an art fest. What appears to be trending at the fest are renderings of wild animals. And warm soda. And heat. After the heat fest I roll up to the downtown deathburger homeless central. I swing past the state capitol where a couple of state troopers are poking around among the homeless under the shade of the trees. I cross the avenue past the terminal for local buses. A couple of police are rousting a woman outside. "This is bullshit!" she yells. At the deathburger, a couple of officers are inside the front door. One is collecting personal information from a guy sitting at a table. In line if a guy with a tiny white string of whiskers under his chin. On this hot day, he's decked out in black leather: hat, boots, and chaps. He says a single word to someone sitting in the booth next to where he stands. "Broken," he utters. The guy in the booth tells him, "I don't care," and instructs him to look away. Another guy is running around the place, in a hat with a brim, a tie-died T-shirt and leather Grateful Dead vest. I escape this fast food cosplay and roll the short distance to a Native American comic con, after which I finally try out the pool at my rec center. Late in the afternoon, I go looking for a Peruvian festival which does not appear to be where it's advertised.
Monday. I'm at the gym. A rec center employee is working out. He's telling another regular that he was bitten by a scorpion. Also, he was working out when he was stung by a bee. He isn't having the best luck. He says his daughter had some "marijuana hand cream." As the week progresses, I notice that not only has the auto mechanic garage on my corner been stripped if its parking lot. The surrounding fence has disappeared, as have the mounds of tires contained within the fence. All that remains is the tiny building itself. Of what portent this omen be, I know not. Another unexpected sign. One evening after work, I head over to the Chinese place for dinner. I notice my old bus stop across the street. Two Buddhist monks in bright orange robes are sitting with the usual riff raff. Missionaries have been known to move among the unwashed yet inevitably digitized masses. And there are Buddhist temples in the neighborhood. As well as Jesuit monks complete with rope belts, Jehovah's Witnesses complete with SUVs and office attire, and Latter Day Saints sometimes on bikes and with helmets. And let's not forget the Protestant Evangelical masses who take over this corner a couple of times a year, with a bullhorn and one weird long white-haired motherfucker who does his own thing. Can any of these godly devotees tell me where my summer is disappearing to? The good news, I've enjoyed it so far. My mom told me that she used to love the summer, but came to hate it. Summer is still my season. It's been a long month. I hope July gets some rest until next year.
The new apartment stock coming into Denver is largely for luxury renters... ...about 5,600 homeless people [live] in the Front Range. Some housing is...not close to stores or bus routes. "A lot of people get housing, but lose it. In Denver, people can't really afford to live where they work."
[Candi CdeBaca is] the first democratic socialist to serve on Denver's City Council. "We've never had representation from Globeville or Swansea on City Council." ...long...home to some of Denver's most vulnerable populations of people. The district saw more displacement during early development in the city than any other area in Denver. - Life On Capitol Hill, 7/2019
...we soon learned that social media post does not warrant votes...except (I think) one highly publicized race. Congratulations to Candi CdeBaca. ...we have had our challenges. ...we have lost major advertisers [to online sources.] ...I refer to...the Dubious Seven (D7). Talking Black and walking white does not sit well with me. [Of seven publicly visible local African-Americans campaigning against incumbent African-American Mayor Hancock,] this [is a] form of "Black on Black Crime"... I hope the D7 (and the others who were quietly outspoken) revisit their values...and ancestral heritage... There is no way today, in this Black America, we should we witnessing this form of castration of a Black Man from Black men. - Denver Urban Spectrum, 7/2019
In October 2018, my partner and I quit our jobs in Denver, ended the lease we'd held... We'd been in the city for a while...we'd developed...friend groups, professional networking groups...social justice causes. I'd been struggling with Denver's rapid growth... Like most metropolitan areas that become popular, tech in Denver is on the rise, neighborhoods [gentrify and are] renamed, and folks are either losing the housing battle and falling into homelessness, moving to the...outskirts, or leaving the city... ...most new Denverites are too green to...care... - Elevation Outdoors, 7/2019
...under the weight of higher property taxes. "I'm concerned that something like this could eviscerate the entire district in a year. It's how you kill cities. ...like seeing gentrification in print." A letter of protest to Mayor Michael Hancock, Denver City Council and other city officials was drafted with the help of [the head of] both the neighborhood Business Improvement District and the resident Community Development Corporation... .."we have a vested interest in...attracting small business, building new jobs... ...we see longtime people leaving... It's...systematic." ...the city hasn't been proactive in supporting small businesses in the corridor... ...Denver...eliminated its business support offices four years ago in favor of creating BIDs... "But BIDs are hard to establish, and don't...replace support offices in what they do." [Denver county has six arts districts left.] All report rapidly rising assessments and little useful advice from the city on how to deal with them. "It's damaging the character of the city... ...there's no champion for us at the city..." "Maybe we need to shut down Santa Fe Drive in protest during rush hour.." - Westword, 7/11-17/2019
...Raven Canon...launched the "Echo" [homeless newspaper in Colorado Springs] in January 2017...acting as head editor and lead writer...was also homeless, was found dead on the streets on a cold morning in March 2017. "I got tired of being hunted like an animal at night." - Denver Voice, 7/2019
Tuesday. Less than 48 hours after a guy was shot and killed some yards from where I work, I am taking out the trash to the alley. It's the alley which was blocked off last week because artists are painting a mural of the building opposite the one in which I work. Yesterday, the alley was closed due to a dead guy, which also resulted in the artists taking the day off. They are back today. I hear one ask the others what they want for lunch. I awoke with a splitting headache, and I never get headaches, and not enough sleep. The following day, the headache is gone but I'm still without enough sleep. Okay, so Caucasians are not the only ones who walk their dogs. I've see three Hispanics walk dogs, one couple this morning. But Caucasians are still the only Latter Day Saints who I have seen directing an SUV out of a parking space. On my way to work, I pass cross a bridge over the river. It rolls along lately from afternoon rains. This morning, it sparkles in the sunlight. After a couple of turns, I'm on a street of old and disappearing homes. I read about this street from an author who grew up here, and who has seen people she knew sent along their way. On this same street I keep passing young Caucasian couples who strike me as new residents. I passed one along this street yesterday evening, loading an SUV. I pass them again on my way back to work this morning. They are still loading an SUV. Up the street, another Caucasian young couple carry bags and boxes to their car. They come out of a little home with a brand new front door. I remember the suggestion of a new front door as a way to increase the value of your home. If you are a homeowner. They live next to another old home being demolished. A couple of Caucasian cyclists roll past. A guy comes into work. He's homeless and, as many homeless, wears an orange reflective vest. I've seen him come in here once before. He spoke to the manager. He stands with his bottom lip protruding. I ask him if he is looking for the manager. He turns and walks a few steps away before he returns and gestures with one figure, asking another employee to come up to the front counter. The other employee tells him that the manager is not here. He shakes the other employee's hand. After he exits, he tries to shake a passing a stranger's hand before he rolls away his lawn mower. We have no grass to mow.
"Four o July"
A restaurant across the street from where I leave has a sign posted on their door, notifying patrons that it will not be open during "Four o July". My own Four o July begins with breakfast at a diner on the way to the waterpark. This is the diner with orange plastic upholstery and waitresses in white uniforms. On the other side of the window over my booth is a young woman, at an outside table. She's in a summer dress and has tattoos and false eyelashes. She's filling out an application to work here. This is my first assumption. These days, the clientele here include a purportedly "healthy" dose of young Caucasian hipsters. Semi-urban, but urban enough that they can be recognized as homogenized urban. I make my second assumption, that these homogenized urban hipsters, or HUH (I like that. HUH. My first acronym.) reside not much farther than a block from here, in any one of a myriad of new condominium complexes which now occupy the space where once a mighty rubber plant once stood. The employees of which this diner, still open 24 hours, was built to serve. I'm sitting next to a foursome of Indian nationals. Next to them is a young couple, and the guy has some kind of permanent grin. Behind me is the register, where the owner sits in a shirt the same color as the upholstery. Customers are lined up to pay. "You from Chicago?" he asks one. "You like to fly fish?" he asks another. One guy paying his bill is in a U.S. flag shirt, a bandana around his head, and tights.
The Indians and the couple with the smiley guy clear out. Another hipster trio arrives. A young red-haired woman with freckles is in a tie-dyed T-shirt. I've seen the shirt for sale at more than one summer outdoor festival. The vendor calls himself the Tie Dye Guy. My waitress takes their order and mentions to them that she will be heading up to a local speedway today. The trio tells her that they are headed up to Boulder to hang out. I hear a customer tell the owner, "We've had a big Fourth of July party since '98. We buy everything. (?) The problem is the kids. They're not kids anymore. They maw through the house like locusts." After breakfast, I'm bummed because it's overcast and not exactly warm. Not the most encouraging swimming day. The trailhead for the bike trail to the water park is on the other side of the river. I must traverse a sidewalk on a bridge, with a low cement wall on one side and the railing with the river below on the other. Approaching from the other direction is a homeless guy on his own bike. He stops along the way to let me pass. When I do, he says, "You're welcome." The trail is full of July o Four riders, some with their own flag gear. At the waterpark is an employee in flag socks. And the clouds have burned off and the sun is out. And I am encountering both wisdom and parental outrage.
I hear a father tell his child while in the pool that "Water is water." Hmm. Very Eastern. NOT. I watch a young, lanky guy with a blonde mop of hair come down the steps toward the pool. His T-shirt reads "FRICK". But I spend my hour at the pool between the pool and the drop slide into the deep end. And it's during one exit from the pool to the slide when I look up and see her. I call her Golden Mom. Her tan is perfect, her hair is blonde, and she is curvy and idyllically beautiful in her bikini. One would think that she would be satisfied with this. She is in fact gesturing animatedly as she berates her fifth-grader for not going down the drop slide. Apparently, her daughter has already been down one of the much longer and higher slides across the park. Golden Mom is at a painfully visible loss as to her daughter's reluctance to go down such a relatively short slide. She tells her daughter that she will be on the other side of the pool to "video" her daughter going down this slide. The child is behind me. I say to her, "Your mom sure wants you to go down this slide." She responds that, she tried to last year, and the lifeguard told her she was taking too much time. I go ahead of her. She climbs the steps and sits at the end of the tube. She comes back down. Golden Mom is beside herself. She goes up with her daughter, the daughter stays, and she comes back down. The daughter is still too scared and descends the steps crying. The pair calls it a day. Golden Mom would, rather continue to try her hand at parenting, be of more use to her daughter if she were stuffed and mounted.
After an hour at the pool, I decide to head out to find Four o July lunch. Down the trail to a connecting trail along the river, I run back into the cyclist traffic and more U.S. flag gear. The bike trail must be the place to be seen in your flag shirt. Along one stretch of trail are people carrying tubes with which to ride the river. Just over a hill, along a wooded bank, is a homeless couple. the lady is decked out in clothes and colorful scarves. She tells the guy, "Okay, I'm going to wash up." The trail has the bike traffic and the river has the tube traffic. I am making better time on the trail than the tubers moving with the current. I don't know why I am surprised when, as usual, it rains and hails in the evening. I step outside to watch fireworks together with lightning.
[Of] fourteen Afghan [local police] officers. Six...were not qualified to have weapons. Of the other eight, only three said they had been to the main police training center. The Afghans mimicked the Americans raising their weapons. "They could have shot everyone." The police officers without weapons aimed their fingers and laughed hysterically. Another police officer stuck his rifle butt between his knees, pointed the weapon at his head... On a walk through the village, an Afghan police officer waved his gun at a baby. ...a video of the Afghan army trying to do jumping jacks...resembled...an incurable disease. "...we asked them, 'Do you ever arrest anybody?' 'No.' 'What do you do?' They're like, 'Eating, sleeping, nothing.'"
...Karzai wanted to make a deal with the Taliban... ...Karzai finished his speech... He called me "ma'am," pushed his way toward the door, and...a loudspeaker burst into flames... I...watched Karzai run toward one of the helicopters...to fly the lonely three and a half mile back to the presidential palace. The journalists were...hungry, new to Afghanistan... ...like I had once been. I...didn't want to scrub any more people off the bottom of my shoes. I soon finished packing. In the corner, I left a gray plastic trunk...with things I needed only in Afghanistan. ...gathering dust almost as soon as I shut the lid, in a house filled with similar boxes in different rooms... - Barker
I am a proud American, and I like to think of myself as a good American. But I can be better... I vote... At games, I stand and applaud when...the military are honored, but I need to say "thank you"...in more personal ways. I appreciate the freedoms we enjoy, but probably not as much or as regularly as I should. I'm not proud of that… - Mile High Sports, 7/2019
Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of "traditional values" installed. In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on...the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated...the Shi'ite fundamentalists. ...our "traditional values" have always been bigotry, greed...buttressed by wanton appeals to a God of love. Thanks to..the upwardly mobile, pita bread and salad bars have sedimented down to Burger King... ...occupations that pay well - corporate law, international banking, cocaine retailing - involve almost zero energy... ...exercise is to eating as contraception was to sex in the sixties... ...uncoupled gluttony from obesity... Does your date still think sushi is stylish? Then he probably has been passed over for a promotion and squeezed out when his apartment went co-op... If...he goes...for the baby bass en route, he may have a Harvard MBA and a flair for currency speculation... - The Worst Years of Our Lives, B. Ehrenreich, 1990
Saturday I am working what would otherwise be my Saturday off. I run into the downtown supermarket before work. When I come out I see a homeless guy with his stolen shopping cart...pushing back tot he supermarket. The day after, I return to a pool across town, where I lived for fifteen years over the previous couple of decades. Along the way I grab lunch and yogurt at the mall where I used to live. The mall I stop into more than when I lived up the street from here. The woman at the yogurt counter sounds French. She tells me she's from Turkey. I pedal out to the pool, on the same bike path I rode to work, two years shy of 20 years ago. In the pool, I listen to a mom and the young woman who is her daughter. I ask the daughter if they are Russian. They are Bosnian. Tuesday of the following week. Somehow, June was nonexistent. It must have been the chilly mornings. Now, the 4th of this month has blown past. And we are standing in the middle of the summer, just like that. And in the middle of the year. On my way to work, I've just turned onto the bike trail. Approaching me is a middle-aged homeless woman. Her hair is dyed pink, her skin is burnt umber, and she pushes some kind of wide red cart. She is a reddish summer specter. I'm at work in the afternoon when a young woman comes in off the street. She's in a black summer dress and she's holding a laminated flyer for something known as the Arise festival. It's a hippie music and truth, goodness, and beauty kind of happening up in the mountains. She walks as if she may be stoned. All she wants is a lollipop. Later in the day, another young woman comes through the door. She is from Ukraine, she says. She is a missionary, she says. Nice to meet me, she says. She opens a hinged box of trinkets for sale, or in exchange for a donation.
Wednesday. A guy comes into work. He's in a T-shirt and he wants his measurements taken for a suit. He doesn't say he needs a suit. What he says is he needs the measurements for an application he's filling out. Later on, I'm taking out the trash. A wiry little young guy with big glasses approaches me from the alley. He wants to know if I can go inside and charge his phone for him wherever I work. When I get home after work, it's a bit early, around 7:30 PM. I see a guy poking around the small front lawn before he strolls slowly toward the back parking lot. I hear him mumbling to himself. He carries what appears to be a short length of television cable wire in his hand, and a folded outdoor patio umbrella over his shoulder. Either he works for our property management company, or he's homeless. Some 24 hours later, I am on the way home from work. I've just come out from the underpass on my short ride on the bike trail. Approaching me very slowly is a homeless guy with grey hair. He's standing on a skateboard attached to the back of a stolen shopping cart, the size of one from Whole Foods. It's packed full of stuff. He creeps along toward an incline.
"Mubarak can only move slowly toward privatization... He...concluded that Gorbachev fell...because he moved too fast." ...Americans had taken on the character of the Russians during the Nasser era...too big and too isolated... ...the new United States embassy in downtown Cairo, built in the 1980s...relocating the official residence inside the walls. ...the architecture suggested how much [the U.S.] feared the Egyptians. The diplomats...eating American food in the embassy cafeteria. When I mentioned this to the diplomat, he was annoyed. "The fundamentalists say we are propping up Mubarak from inside this building. But Mubarak is seeking to champion an apolitical Islam. Is that so bad?" "We are an occupied people. Look at Bosnia, look at Kashmir, look at Palestine. They are killing Moslems everywhere and the West supports the dictatorships." ...can the...U.S. embassy accept moderate Islam? Of course, the Near East has long since ceased to be an exotic backdrop for literary-minded Westerners. An urbanized peasantry...has withdrawn into religion... Central power can deteriorate only so far before another gravitational force emerges. …"the state will either fragment or it will become more authoritarian"... - Kaplan
Hungry vs Future Hacker
Friday. It's early in the evening. The sun casts its long shadows across pavement. I'm out of work a half hour early and rolling alongside a huge abandoned building next to the interstate. I came past this same building this morning, headed the opposite way, when I saw a homeless guy in a kind of alcove. As I roll past the same alcove, he sits with his hands behind his head. The sun's last rays shine on his face and shirtless torso. Over the wide sidewalk, a black plastic grocery bag floats on a breeze. Out of downtown, over the interstate, and onto the trail along the river. At one trailhead sits an old woman. She's flying a sign which reads, "HUNGRY." Another old woman who appears as if she could be her sister is at the edge of the road. She is attempting to stop vehicles to panhandle. I don't remember ever giving anything at all to anyone who is homeless. I got some cash back at a grocery on the way home, to purchase the local homeless newspaper. I give my change to the seated woman. I've never see anyone so desperate as to stop passing vehicles for money. I'm across the tracks and am finishing the climb of a steep hill. At the top is a Mexican family huddled around a sedan. Among them is a middle-school kid in a black T-shirt which reads, "FUTURE HACKER." Just a jog and halfway down the street are a couple of Mormons who appear very familiar, one with a red buzz cut. I think it was last month when I incorrectly referred to both of them as Jehovah's Witnesses. They are listening to a woman speak to them in Spanish as she leans on a wrought iron fence. I creep past them. I never hear the Mormons respond, in Spanish or English. Behind the trio is a two-story apartment building. On a second-story balcony hangs a big beautiful bright red quinceanera dress.
Saturday. I wake up way too early. Unable to go back to sleep, I decide to do my grocery shopping this morning. I'm already out of the supermarket and waiting for the 7:21 AM bus. Coming down the sidewalk are a trio of slow-moving guys. One of them takes a seat in the bus shelter. He's young, younger than me. He has trouble walking. He asks me for money. He wants to know if I have any food. Yeah, I just went grocery shopping. It's then he asks me for a light for his cigarette. I wonder about a guy this young walking with two older slow-moving guys, one with a cane? I wonder why he has trouble walking, why he has no money or food? Both of us step aboard the bus up the street. The driver lets him on with no money. Soon, we are past where he told the driver he wanted to disembark. He gets up from his seat to stand at the front. I step out at my corner, drop off the groceries, and get on the bike to work another Saturday. I'm scheduled to finally have the following Saturday off. Along the way I stop at another supermarket for some beverages to take to work. When I come out of this one, a different street person awaits me. He totes a suitcase on wheels, with a milk crate and his coffee balanced on top. He gives me a rambling story about a bike shop somewhere. My ride home from work is during a heavy rainstorm, with lightning streaking over my head.
The following day is a busy one because I have it crammed with plans. And it's why I did laundry and grocery shopped during the week instead of today. I awake late (for me: 7:40 AM. Insanely late.) I begin with a trip to the diner on the way to the waterpark. The hostess is in a T-shirt with "HEY" on the front. I tell her I like it. After a late breakfast, no sooner am I out on the bike trail to the water park do I stop to take a photo of the sunlight sparkling on the river. I know what will happen next, and it does. The trail is full of grey-haired cyclists. A senior female whizzes past and, seeing that I am stopped, asks me, "Everything okay?" She is neon-colored and spandex-clad, with pockets in back of her blouse for her phone. It's some kind of unwritten rule: ask anyone stopped for any reason if they need help. These cyclists are never here, nor is any cyclist, in the winter months. Nor were they when I did need help before sunup when I worked the morning shift. But this issue is like the river: it's water under the bridge. In jig time, and some exertion on the bike, I am at the water park. I'm standing in line at the concession stand when a woman introduces herself as a promo person for the place. The employees recognize me as a frequent guest. I reply that I am flattered. She tells me it's the bike helmet which gives me away. She feels bad that I am here so often and gives me info on a season pass. Though I had a season pass a couple of summers ago, I'm still impressed. She mentions the rec center where I may purchase a pass, and I tell her I used to work out there a few years ago. I'm there for an hour before everyone must get out of the swimming pool. (The rest of the park pools can still be used.) I decide I have a big day ahead and take off.
From the municipality of Englewood to Littleton, I follow the trail past where I worked a couple of years ago, and I keep going off the trail, down residential streets I began riding when I worked this far south almost fifteen years and a long story ago. I arrive at the Southglenn Library for its annual used book sale. It's outside in front, and I'm not there for long before an elderly woman approaches me with a book by a familiar conservative author, on the subject of President Trump. She tells me it's a great book and asks me if I've read it. "I don't know if you're conservative," she says, and the tells me that I can bring a list of book titles into any branch library, "And they will bring the books out. Even if they're new." At first, I thought I was pegged as a conservative. Now, I think she may be insane in the membrane. I find more books than I thought I would before I grab a late lunch at a grill across the street. I'm not far from the big drycleaning plant where I worked for a few months shy of a decade. Every Saturday I spent there, and most other days. I make the trip, detouring through a new and growing condo complex across the street, the beginning of which the original owner for whom I worked had been waiting. It began just as he sold the business. I grab a bite at the old gas station in front, where I purchased many a snack between 2005 and the end of 2014. I knew a middle-aged Iranian couple who owned it for some years. I was the very last person to clock out of the old plant before the new owner shut it down, and after laying off the plant's employees after lying to them about restarting another plant for them to work in. After my snack, I venture the last few yards around the corner. It's open on a Sunday. It's now some kind of place where you can make a project yourself, using their wood and tools. The wood is some kind of prefabricated log slices with the bark still around the edges. I never would have guessed. I greet a man and woman behind a counter made of one of the slices. They strike me as married. The heard something of the saga of the sale of this place, and the rest of the business.
From there, I make my way up the avenue and turn down one of the roads I rode years ago. After I turn onto the street to the train station, I pass a graveyard. On the other side comes the sound of live music. A band is playing a song by the Eagles. At the train station is an old snack and gift shop with an owner I used to know. The train whisks me downtown, where I ride a city block to the Black Arts Festival. After the fest, I head along a busy avenue to a intersection downtown. I catch a bus headed for my own boulevard. A middle-aged woman is turned away for lack of fare. We head out and make our way to the stop for a downtown community college campus. A loud drunk woman gets out. She appears as if she may be Native American. She's yelling at the world, flipping everyone off, telling them they are "all immigrants." As the song says, you may lose or you may win, but you'll never be here again. The bus pulls into the station where I cross the street to catch my last bus home. It's a notorious stop across the street from the football stadium. Somehow, shortly after I get there, the middle-aged woman turned away from the bus comes shuffling up. I notice a cloth bandage completely covering her left arm, complete with butterfly clip. Next to both of us and the bus stop sign are a couple of guys asking passersby if they "want any weed?" One of them asks me. An elderly guy come shuffling through the crosswalk on a red light. Street racers must slow down until he makes it all the way across. When he gets to our bus stop, he appears to know the woman with the bandage. The stop is in front of a liquor store parking lot. They discuss prices for liquor at this store.
On the evening of the following Tuesday, I'm on my way home past the huge abandoned building. I roll past a couple of homeless guys standing on the sidewalk. One is telling the other, "Say something, like 'Have a good day,' or 'How's your day going?'" The following morning, I'm at the doughnut shop on the way to work. I'm behind a customer with a grey buzz cut and boots, who is behind a gabby airhead. I listen to him tell her how he used CPR to save the life of a guy having a heart attack. "I'm giving the guy mouth to mouth, and suddenly I've got gum in my mouth." She tells him that's "awesome." I wonder if he asked the guy how his day was going. She tells him that she would like to take a CPR class but can't fit it into her schedule. Behind me is a customer in a dress shirt and slacks. I watch him animatedly jerk from window to display window, picking out individual doughnuts. When Saturday rolls around, once again I have two days of the weekend instead of one in which to cram a ridiculous number of events. After breakfast and grocery shopping, the sunscreen goes on and I'm off to the train for a quicker trip to the waterpark, after a quick lunch at the retro diner. I spy more than one thunderhead the direction of the mountains. At the pool, I'm in line behind two beautiful women in bikinis who appear as if they may be a decade younger than myself. One is shorter with short dark wavy hair and slightly darker skin. She's one fantastic-looking mom. I wonder if they are sisters. They aren't doing anything but simply waiting in line, shooting the breeze. She isn't flaunting anything. Can she know how good she looks? I can't linger, either on this question or at my favorite swimming hole. I must be back to the train into downtown.
Raindrops spatter the train before I disembark and grab a snack at the deathburger homeless central. It's unusually empty in here today. This does not discourage the usual mayhem. A kid is rolling something to smoke as he wanders around the place loudly conversing with his pal. A middle-aged guy in line and a younger guy are threatening each other. I step into the men's room, where one guy is using a urinal like a sink. The toilet stall in closed for repairs. He leaves, and as I am using the urinal, another guy comes in behind me and thinks I am the first guy. He begins complaining that I'm taking too long. I come out and he comes out after me. He's passing around a couple of DVDs to see if anyone wants to purchase them. While I am eating, lightning, thunder, and pouring rain and hail appear. An assortment of the usual characters, along with myself, wait for it to stop. One is a woman with a couple of other guys. She never stops stepping moving, dancing, singing. One guy walks around in a shirt with "SECURITY" on the back. He steps out to check on a handful of derelicts waiting in the foyer. It lets up and I ride down to the stop for the bus to the Denver County Fair. I wait with four more derelicts. I arrive at the fair and stand in the ticket line behind a couple of thirtysomething Caucasian guys rattling off precise technical details of football offense and defense. It's a smaller fair this year. I chat with one woman from Missouri who occupies a booth for window replacement. After the fair, I have a short wait at the stop for the bus back downtown. A trio of middle-aged street goofballs are there. One is telling me how terrific the design of my bike is. After I've told him I got it at Walmart. "It's not a $1,000 bike?" On the bus ride home, more thunder, lightning, and rain.
Sunday is the usual race against (what appears to be budding thunderheads, with) rain to get in a swim. I hope to include a postponed art fest, a food fest, and a global bazaar. First I have film to drop off. I leave the house without breakfast. Such are my summer weekends. A few blocks away is a stop for one crosstown bus to the camera shop. It's next to a church, which has been on this corner since I moved here in 2007. The church, surrounded by the usual ominous chain link fence, has been "scraped" (as they say in real estate parlance.) Its remains reside inside the walls of its exposed basement. Parked stoically in the parking lot, looking like nothing so much as a great dinosaur skeleton, is a steam shovel. I wonder if my neighborhood's stretch of this boulevard proper will have the first condominium? Only time, money, and the speculation of what the late Hunter S. Thompson referred to as the "wizards" can tell. The bus arrives, and soon it has as one of its passengers someone telling another passenger, "...well then act like it." I couldn't hear the beginning of his sentence. I wonder if he's related to the guy behind me in the men's room yesterday, who was yelling at me to piss faster? He than asks the other one if he has a job. Or was that a question uttered by the derelict goofball I rode the bus back toward downtown with yesterday. I feel as the aforementioned Dr. Thompson, having awakened with his reel-to-reel tape recorder around his neck, going forward and back again, in an attempt to reconstruct the past several days. I've sat next to twelve years worth of these guys and distinctions between them are coming loose. The bus driver curses the drivers in the traffic all the way across town.
I disembark upon my boulevard of old, some eighteen minutes after stepping aboard, and soon I'm at the camera shop. Helping a woman at a computer monitor is the young woman who enjoys winding my film camera. Her tall and willowy frame is bedecked in flowing clothing. She sees me approach with camera in hand, and she mentions to another employee that I am "the only one who lets me rewind his film, because he know that I like how it feels." The place is enjoined with laughter. Has she just public revealed her feelings about me? My tall photographic hippie goddess? And didn't I yesterday only just finish fantasizing about a middle-aged beauty in her bikini? Of course. But I saw this one long before the woman at the water park. And I have this one's business card. Apparently, heterosexual male fantasy comes with rules. Having said that, rewind my film she does. Yeah, baby. But this time, she says I must load my own film. No worries, baby doll. She's telling the customer whom she is assisting about a previous customer, who had 176 apps open on her phone. "And she didn't even know what an app is." I drop my film at the counter, with a terse-looking employee. He's in a Polo shirt with the store name embroidered on the breast, and has glasses and a little beard. She had better not be dating him, though they are most likely almost the same age, which is far from my own. I pick up another roll of film and bid her farewell. "Mark, right?" she asks. She may call me anything she likes...
I grab breakfast/lunch across the street, ride to the pool for a nice swim. I then proceed to waste another bus trip up the street and a ride to this "art festival". It's actually five tents, a few square yards, and hip hop music from a sound system. I don't even get off my bike. This stretch of the infamous Colfax Avenue appears to be home to an array of shady-looking hotels, full of residents who appear as if perhaps they can't afford apartments. Which is no crime here in the Mile High City. This doesn't stop the print media from quoting that tired line from Playboy, about Colfax Avenue being "the wickedest street in America." America must have been more attractive itself when it was younger. Since then, every college junior and her grandmother have written books about going "undercover" as part time strippers. On the way here, pedaling through the established middle-class homes down the street from old apartments, I imagine this neighborhood surrounded. Ahead of me, to the east, is the train and new "development." To the north, past neigborhoods like this, I wonder how close development is. To the south, better neighborhoods. And behind me, to the west, developing downtown. I grab a bus back that way. I can't complain about the air conditioned ride in exchange for a long ride in 90 degree F heat. It strikes me that, if not the businesses, then at least the undemolished small brick storefront architecture never changes along the Avenue, all the back to the Capitol. Perhaps Colfax Avenue is the last original street in the entire metro area. I end up back at the downtown deathburger homeless central. Again, it's relatively empty compared with other days. Inside, the piss-complainer/DVD hustler is in a seat. He's making grunting noises as if he's in pain. He gets up to wander around with his sweatpants falling down. I've seen people in the July heat, wearing sweatpants and hoodies, flannel shirts. This afternoon, he's hustling a single can of Axe body spray. He's letting it go for $5. When he gets around to my own table, I tell him that I already have one on my bathroom shelf. "One of these?" he asks. "Yeah." He spots my salad. "What's that? Chicken?" he inquires. "Yeah." "Not from here?" he asks. "Yeah."
From the Deathburger Bizarre, I decide to make the Global Bazaar my final stop today. I don't want more food from a food festival, and I suddenly remember that I need new shoes. In fact, there are handmade shoes from Peru at this little gathering off the pedestrian mall. I try some on. Alas, just a size too small. Yes, even here in what I've recently heard described as "the world's greatest economy," my own small feet continue to leave too great a footprint. I'm off to s shoe outlet, where I find a pair which fit. With all due respect to the great nation of Peru. In the checkout line, I am in front of a young woman speaking with friends in a language I can't place. (And I am behind an impatient hipster.) I ask her, "That isn't French you're speaking. What is it?" It's Turkish. They are exchange students from Turkey. She also mentions a language called Ottoman, from the old empire. They are here for the summer doing "Work and Travel." She works at the baseball stadium. I don't ask, but I'm sure she now knows the English words, "hot dog," "men's room," and "vomit." They decide where they want to travel in the United States, and apparently this includes Las Vegas and California. If you ask me, they are already as American as the rest of us. She tells me that Americans have already asked her if the Turkish speak Arabic or Farsi (as in Iran), and if the Turkish women wear the hijab. I ask her if they've been to the mountains. She doesn't like the altitude. And she doesn't like thunderstorms.
...Kickales [in Turkey is a] holiday camp for the working class on...package tours. 'We are...peasants trying on our own to figure out what tourism is. The government is nowhere." Trashy...hotels were in various stages of completion, separated by murky, garbage-strewn paths... The hotel where I checked in...was...filled with pink-faced German factory-workers... They shouted, banged the Formica tables... In winter the population...was three thousand. But from May through October it was tens of thousands. The visitors [didn't] care - where they were. Redbrick high-rises rose behind...Roman remains dated from the first centuries... Refuse floated in the water. [One local resident, a] man [who lived] between cultures [with his] tight pants... He apes the West, is frustrated by it, and often winds up hating it. [Such men] became foot soldiers for the fundamentalist risings in Iran and Algeria. They are the product of the new Mediterranean and Near Eastern landscape: package-tour hotels, late-night discos, and the weird fields of neon signs. - Kaplan
...the music-video ad from the real estate pros at Team Denver Homes, who up until last week were Kentwood Real Estate's number-one-selling agents. Just weeks after a vitriolic mayoral race largely divided by the city's housing crisis, these realtors posted [a] video in which they treat rapidly gentrifying Denver like their playground... ...a spokeswoman...saying that Kentwood Real Estate had cut ties with Team Denver Homes. - Westword, 7/25-31/2019
Tuesday morning. I'm out of the door in the morning, off to work. On my corner, right next door to my condo complex, is a small mechanic garage. It appears as if a steam shovel is tearing it down. On my way home, it appears as if the parking lot is being carefully removed. By Thursday evening, the entire lot has been raised. The small garage itself is still standing. Thursday morning, I am out the door and rolling past my old bus stop across the street. A young guy stands outside the shelter, holding his crotch. Next to him is a little white-haired guy in a long-sleeved camouflaged shirt. The young guy asks me, "Got a shigarette?" I'm around the corner and all the way down a street when I spot a turtle in a gutter. This is the first turtle I remember seeing here in the state. It's the exact color of the road, and makes it's way across. It's indistinguishable except for the shadow between it and the street. Some eleven hours later, I'm on my way home through this same neighborhood, a handful of streets north of here. It's twilight as I'm rolling down my last long crosstown stretch of residential street. Walking my direction are four young guys. Two are Mormons in black slacks and white shirts. And plastic name tags. The pair are strolling in the street. Next to them are a couple of young guys in long sleeved T-shirts. The four walk along in a horizontal line. One Mormon is recounting a tale about death to the other pair. As I cruise past, the other Mormon raises his hand in a wave and gives me a nervous smile. He has big, round, horn-rimmed glasses.
It's the things you "don't" see around Denver Public Schools [on my boulevard, and] Colfax Avenue... ...Keep Denver Beautiful (KDB)...volunteers to eliminate litter, junk, and graffiti... ...residents...clean up that areas that they see as important...resident's [possess] knowledge of where litter is actually located... ...West Denver Cleanupalooza. - Colorado Parent, 8/2019
On Thursday at work, I watch out the front window the busy avenue leading the remaining few blocks into the center of downtown. A trio of middle-aged guys shuffle past. One has a walker. They all appear to be homeless and bald with a lot of stylized facial hair. They're like homeless bikers. They give me the sense that they each look out for each other. They are followed by the obligatory office types. Twenty-four hours later, I'm at work the following afternoon. A guy comes in with a laminated sign. It informs me that he is deaf, and would like a "5, 10, or 20 dollar donation." It also suggests the donation of a "gift card." We don't have gift cards. I don't have any of my own. When I decline these suggestions, he asks if I can take him next door to the restaurant after we close to get something to eat. "I want chicken," he mentions. I can't believe this is happening, and yet I am thoroughly unsurprised. I have to tell him twice that, when we close, I'm headed home. The next day is my Saturday to work. I wake up earlier than usual with enough time to grocery shop before work. Groceries in hand, I'm at the stop in front of the supermarket. The Jehovah's Witnesses silently pull up in a black SUV. A middle-aged woman in a dress sits with a young woman in the bus shelter. The elder one has what appears to be an I-Pad. Minutes later, she and the SUV have evaporated. Sunday is a blazingly hot mid-summer day. This has been very unlike the freakish sixty degree F days which plagued last summer, ruining my outdoor swimming. I'm out the door for a late breakfast at a diner along the way. On the table I unfold the bike map I finally remember to bring along. I think I find a trail to an art fest. What appears to be trending at the fest are renderings of wild animals. And warm soda. And heat. After the heat fest I roll up to the downtown deathburger homeless central. I swing past the state capitol where a couple of state troopers are poking around among the homeless under the shade of the trees. I cross the avenue past the terminal for local buses. A couple of police are rousting a woman outside. "This is bullshit!" she yells. At the deathburger, a couple of officers are inside the front door. One is collecting personal information from a guy sitting at a table. In line if a guy with a tiny white string of whiskers under his chin. On this hot day, he's decked out in black leather: hat, boots, and chaps. He says a single word to someone sitting in the booth next to where he stands. "Broken," he utters. The guy in the booth tells him, "I don't care," and instructs him to look away. Another guy is running around the place, in a hat with a brim, a tie-died T-shirt and leather Grateful Dead vest. I escape this fast food cosplay and roll the short distance to a Native American comic con, after which I finally try out the pool at my rec center. Late in the afternoon, I go looking for a Peruvian festival which does not appear to be where it's advertised.
Monday. I'm at the gym. A rec center employee is working out. He's telling another regular that he was bitten by a scorpion. Also, he was working out when he was stung by a bee. He isn't having the best luck. He says his daughter had some "marijuana hand cream." As the week progresses, I notice that not only has the auto mechanic garage on my corner been stripped if its parking lot. The surrounding fence has disappeared, as have the mounds of tires contained within the fence. All that remains is the tiny building itself. Of what portent this omen be, I know not. Another unexpected sign. One evening after work, I head over to the Chinese place for dinner. I notice my old bus stop across the street. Two Buddhist monks in bright orange robes are sitting with the usual riff raff. Missionaries have been known to move among the unwashed yet inevitably digitized masses. And there are Buddhist temples in the neighborhood. As well as Jesuit monks complete with rope belts, Jehovah's Witnesses complete with SUVs and office attire, and Latter Day Saints sometimes on bikes and with helmets. And let's not forget the Protestant Evangelical masses who take over this corner a couple of times a year, with a bullhorn and one weird long white-haired motherfucker who does his own thing. Can any of these godly devotees tell me where my summer is disappearing to? The good news, I've enjoyed it so far. My mom told me that she used to love the summer, but came to hate it. Summer is still my season. It's been a long month. I hope July gets some rest until next year.
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