I'm home from work last night, headed across the street to the Chinese place. Out front is another panhandler, a guy I haven't seen before. He's tall, lanky, and young. He appears as if he should otherwise be downtown in a shirt and tie. But he's here. His hair has that matted appearance and his skin is covered in dirt. He mumbles to himself until I pass him, when he instantly becomes lucid and asks me clearly for a dollar. Thursday the 1st, August proper. I'm at work when a customer comes in. She's in denim cutoff hot pants and has her blouse tied in front. Topped off with a mesh Fedora. It appears as if she forgot to put her sexuality away. She makes a joke and touches my hand. This is no Daisy Duke. She has this trippy, stoner way she moves. She drops off some alterations, one of which is an old Army jacket with a smiley face patch. On the patch, the eyes are marijuana leaves. When she emphasizes a point, she opens her eyes wide, as if she's terrified. Her voice slithers like movement underneath a bedsheet.
Friday is my birthday. I do some dishes, water the flowers. I'm rolling down an alley behind my old bus stop. In the shade of a big tree, hung over a vine covered chain link fence, is an old television antenna. Out of the alley and around the corner. I'm rolling past the park, where a tall and golden-haired female Caucasian is in a long white sleeveless blouse. She's angel-like as she walks her dog. These are hot mid-summer days. I turn onto the trail just before going under the bridge. Yesterday morning, there was a sandwich sign here on the side of the trail. It warns cyclists about the blind spot in each direction and to watch for other cyclists. This morning, the sign is gone. Has the problem been solved? I'm under the bridge without colliding with anyone else, and off the trail. I'm on the bridge I just passed under, headed across the river. Immediately after is the bridge over the interstate. To proceed from one to the other, I must cross the off ramp from the interstate to the avenue. Traffic predominantly looks left toward oncoming traffic, not to the right to see me. This morning, there is a cyclist coming from the direction of the street traffic. She's a curvy female in a bright green tank top. She catches the attention of the male driver waiting to turn in front of me. He stops for her, allowing me to cross as well headed the opposite way. I work a full day before having a nice little dinner with the sister on the way home. We decide to close down our late mom's checking account. For me, there is something especially final about this single act.
Saturday. That was possibly the fastest birthday I've ever had. And with my birthday gone, I feel like we are headed toward the end of the summer. I must ensure that I get the last swims in at the water park. But not so fast. I don't have time to get to all the festivals going on today, and I get a late start. I suspect that the two are related. I check yesterday's mail. I have my next door neighbor's tax refund. I ring my neighbor's bell and the wife answers. She's been waiting for this check. All well that ends well...from the IRS. I head out to grocery shop, hit my usual diner along the way, tell them yesterday was my birthday. I haven't finished reading a weekly newspaper at work and must skip ahead to the events section to see what's up for the weekend. There's an Ethiopian Festival. It's almost all the way to the airport. They offer me a free piece of pie. I take a rain check as the day is already getting away from me. I'm back from shopping and look at my festival options, including swimming. I pass on the Ethiopian Fest. Though it's only going on today, it appears to be very small, and may take all afternoon to get to. And back again. I was in this same movie a week or two ago. I elect instead to return to the pool at my rec center and elect to check out an "International Festival" in the park downtown. Along the way, I grab a late lunch at a darkly lit diner I've been to a while ago. It's just outside of the city center. It's a kind of sports bar with nineteenth century wallpaper behind the bar. Decades old punk rock plays from the sound system. I'm listening to The Descendants for the first time in thirty years. The hostess is in a low cut dress with spaghetti straps, revealing the tattoo right between her breasts. It is quite a hot day. This has been a sexy kind of birthday weekend. She has black combat boots, to match the music I guess. After lunch, I'm off to grab a doughnut at the doughnut place.
Then I'm off to the pool, where half the families are Caucasian. It's new apparently middle-class Caucasians with the long time residents. Sitting and waiting for the three o' clock break to be over, I have a brief conversation with a woman I a wheelchair. She knows the lady behind the desk at the gym. "She knows a lot about computers. Have you heard the blonde joke about computers? A blonde's computer is the one with white out all over the screen." she tells me. From there, I head over to the fest in the park. I pick up a free pinwheel at a belly dance booth, to replace the one which I would put outside each summer, and finally fell apart. I watch some beautiful Persian dancing in the amphitheater. Some kind of security guy hangs out at the top of some stairs. I can't decode the acronym on the back of his shirt. On the way home, I'm coming down one of the streets along the interstate, it's old immigrant homes being replaced by hipsters and others with a lighter skin tone. At one corner, the street is blocked off. The neighbors are having a block party. I navigate the blockage by going up onto the sidewalk. The only neighbors I notice are Caucasian. If they weren't, every day would be like a block party. With an open street. Along the way, I realize that, I left downtown just about the time I would have if I had worked this Saturday. And I'm taking the same route home. I'm looking for a men's room. I know of a 7-Eleven along the way. When I go inside, the clerk tells me that a customer broke the key off in the lock and it's closed and locked. When I arrive back home, I'm watering my flowers in the courtyard when one of my neighbors comes outside. I mention that an unknown neighbor has been spraying the weeds for me, and it's appreciated. I also take the time to tell her that my mom is no longer with us.
...computerized polling...eliminated...canvassing... ...the televised campaign commercial...eliminated the issues and, hence, the arguments. Throughout the eighties [Democratic] party leaders kept the voters at bay with the catchwords "growth," "strength" and "family"... [The Democratic] party chairman announced a meditative retreat in search of "new ideas," which optimists interpreted as a code for "white male voters." ...no voters a all were being sought. Loyal rank-and-file members...were asked to bur their voter registration cards and withdraw discreetly into private life. ..."liberal" was not always...a loose way to cover everyone from sex educators to socialists. hen the liberals went underground, it was left to...the feminists, peace activists, rainbow coalitionists, socialists, union militants...to defend social programs... - Ehrenreich
…"the city seems to be less interested in housing the people who live here and more interested in housing for people who have yet to move here. ...they're less concerned about people...currently in the street than...preventing people...in housing...from going out to the street." …"so the city has kind of doubled down on enforcement...moving people around...to make the visible homelessness go away." - Westword, 8/8-14/2019
...an increasingly concrete Denver, maintaining green space...should be an urgent priority. ...being a developer is "probably the most hated profession...people automatically don't like you if you're a developer, in Denver at least." ...to go through...a "beautiful" area plan drafting process led by the city. - Westword, 8/1-7/2019
Skyscrapers are eating up the downtown view, devouring independent coffee shops, mom-and-pop Italian restaurants and small corner stores. Which makes it more exciting than ever to support your own favorite new ventures, celebrating the independent spirit of living here. - Elevation Outdoors, 8/2019
...Denver has started to grow... The black community is...starting to move out of the neighborhood. Denver's black community needs...black-owned businesses...to survive. They become a refuge... "We've kind of become the anchor. You can develop this space and still include us." ...the feeling in Denver right now is to scrape and start fresh... "I feel like the belief is, in order to improve something, you gotta erase what's there. You don't have to erase us. We don't have to be carnage in that process. It's kind of a nightmare that we're losing all these spaces"...where Denver activists meet. ...the Whittier café hosted a fundraiser...for...a 17-year-old girl who was...killed by Denver Police. ...after a different coffee shop refused... Since then...activists consider the café to be a home base when talking about progressive candidates or violence in the community. ...when minority-owned businesses start to close down. Where will those people go to find members of their own communities? - Life On Capitol Hill, 8/2019
The most famous man in the state of Colorado looked like he had just finished playing 18 holes... Hell, he may have. Wearing khaki shorts and a colorful, fitted Polo... From the TV guys to the writers, to the shock jocks on the radio, no one was going to turn down free food courtesy the organization that was just valued at $2.65 billion... - Mile High Sports, 8/2019
...younger people now...don't have much hope. It's impossible to move out. It's impossible to buy a car. It's impossible to pay insurance. It's impossible to rent a place. - Out Front Magazine, 7/3/2019
...there are...all of these amazing younger artists who are working here. But it's harder for them to find...studio space throughout the city. ...and it's harder for them to thrive. It's just a more expensive city. A recent body of work...was...looking at the border between a gentrified house or a new home and an old one and pulling out - calling out - the contrast, and calling out the rapidity with which things are changing in certain neighborhoods. The one area that everyone...that's a part of the art world...in this city...recognizes could be strengthened is the opportunity for critical discussion. I really see MCA [the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver] being able to occupy that role more fully, and there are many ways we can go about that. But artists are hungry for it. - Westword, 8/29 - 9/4/2019
The following Wednesday morning, I'm on the way to work, headed through the underpass just onto the bike trail. There is a homeless guy who spots another guy approaching us from the other way. The homeless appears to recognize him and tells him so as a pigeon flies past my face, so close that I can feel the wind of its wings. The other guy says hi, "but I don't have a cigarette." The following evening, I'm on my way home form work. I'm back in the neighborhood between my own and the bike trail. I'm rolling past a house with several additions built onto it and repainted. Standing in the driveway, next to a U-Haul trailer, is a group of perhaps ten twentysomethings. One guy with a beer is in overalls, and appears to have a mop of white hair inside a headband. I hear a young woman giggle. I crawl up a steep hill and turn a couple of corners before I am down the way and at the park with the Caucasians with dogs. This evening, a big inflatable movie screen sits in a corner. A woman with a microphone is raffling prizes in Spanish to a crowd in lawn chairs, before The Incredibles 2 begins. In the near distance, lightning flashes from a dark horizon. Thunders quietly rumbles and rain spits. Saturday is my turn to work. Ahead of me will be a 9 1/2-hour day. This morning I make the trek through the neighborhood between my own and the bike trail, the neighborhood with the rapidly changing demographics. Past the park and down a hill, I'm rolling up on a young Caucasian woman in a workout top and hot pink shorts, walking her little dog. Approaching her is a young bearded guy in a college T-shirt, walking his own dog. Can this pair find love in a place of Mexicans racing pickup trucks and little cars with spoilers and damaged bodies? On this same corner, another Caucasian goes past. He's on his own bicycle with saddlebags and a radio playing music. He himself is in black Lycra under his neon yellow vest. Some ten hours later, I step out of the front door of work and lock it behind me. It's 7:30 PM. Just a few yards away, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, is a balding guy with what little hair he has tied back in a pencil thin pigtail. Groovy. He's organizing papers on the concrete. As I climb past him uphill, he asks me, "Got a light?" Is he going to burn some documents? In the next block is a old guy in a green camouflaged long-sleeved shirt and pants. He's hustling the restaurant patrons on the outdoor patio. A half hour I'm climbing the steepest hill on my way home. It's twilight, and I just passed a long white-haired and bearded guy. He's going my way on an electric bike. He's in a Dish TV T-shirt. He passes me uphill with the electric motor.
Sunday. I'm once again at the downtown Chilis, after a swim at the waterpark. At the Chilis across the boulevard from where I drop off film, the host and servers are on the ball and quick. I never have to run them down. But I'm not at that Chilis. I'm downtown. I come inside right before a couple, and the tree of us stand at the front. The host comes out and welcomes me. She waves an index finger around. I assume she's asking if we are together. "Just me," I reply. "Dining room, bar, or patio?" she inquires. I ask for the dining room. It looks like rain. She smiles and points to my bike helmet, and says nothing. I mention that I said "dining room." I'm seated at a wobbly table which I keep my foot on.
...give them a few hours and a sympathetic face...and they'll be telling you about the Bermuda Triangle, or a personal appearance by Jesus or a deceased relative, or what they were doing three hundred years ago... When social life lacks a transcendent dimension, people start...hustling the occult. ...the problem is not just the emptiness of the middle-class, American life... ...to rise above the depoliticized culture... ...the vocabulary for collective moral discourse. ...that is, "socialism" - or more properly "'democratic' socialism." ...it is the only word we have that attempts to bridge the gap between our private notions of...morality and the...political economy. ...it is still the only vision we have - the only modernist vision...in which individual desire might be reconciled with collective need. The alternative [to a] technocratic approach...is to rediscover socialism itself as an evangelical, visionary cause... [Together, using conversation as art, the] sharing of personal experience, the weaving of the personal into the general and political, the adventure of...speculation unrestrained... - Ehrenreich
On Monday, I'm on my way to the bike trail through the neighborhood between there and my home. I'm coming down the steepest hill before I make a turn. I watch from around the corner come a tall young Caucasian guy on a skateboard. He's in a black T-shirt and black pants, and his hair reaches to the middle of his back. I'm home after work as twilight falls. I'm on my way across the street to the Chinese place. I pass the apartments across from where I live. In the parking lot, sitting on the edge of the bed of a pickup, are a pair of young Caucasian women in these odd dresses. The kind of dresses you might see on school children. The way they are sitting, demure and waiting for someone to take them by the hand. A couple of young Caucasian guys come out in shorts and T-shirts. On the way home, I've been watching a gathering thunderstorm as the sun sets. As I'm looking at the screen of my camera, lightning begins to flash at the base of this storm. It begins to push the air ahead of its path as a wind arrives. I collect my Chinese food and return to my own parking lot. I watch a young Caucasian couple running together past me.
Tuesday. Out of the door a couple of hours earlier than usual. On my corner is a Caucasian guy with a backpack. He appears to be a student. Perhaps a half hour later, I'm at the downtown supermarket. Next to it is a kind of covered plaza space in place of where the first story of a building would otherwise be. A grey haired police officer appears to be giving directions to a homeless guy who he has just woken up. The officer is gesturing with his arms. The homeless guy is wearing a T-shirt with "Class of 2022" on the front. He'll be a returning sophomore this fall. After the supermarket, I swing past a gas station where a younger homeless guy is seated with his own bicycle. He asks, "Need any bike lights, brother?" The following evening, I'm on my way home after work. A downtown homeless guy, a little guy, is hidden behind a stone wall of a bridge over an underpass. He appears to be one of these guys who have been disconnected from society and culture for some time. He tells me, "I like your purple socks." I'm wearing pink dress socks. The bridges, one after the other over first the interstate and then the river, are my final passages out of downtown. Then it's across the tracks and up what seems as nothing but hills. My last turn onto my street is past the park down said street. This evening, I see the neon green frisbee being used kind of as a football. Then I hear English. Then I notice the group of young men with the frisbee are Caucasian.
Thursday evening. I'm just off the bike trail and across some railroad tracks. A Caucasian guy is out running with his dogs. One begins barking at me when he immediately addresses the dog. "Shut up!" Twenty-three hours later, I'm headed crosstown through the same neighborhood. In the setting sun, I can spot a Caucasian guy from a block away. His long blonde hair is backlit in the last rays. He's out...walking his dog. I make one of my last turns up a long hill. Approaching a parked minivan is a young mom holding her grade school aged boy. "I want water," says the boy. "You want water?" she replies. I wonder if his dad is the young guy I see running from door to door. He's in slacks and a Polo shirt, and he's holding what appears to be some kind of leather notebook. The following day is my turn to have Saturday off. I'm on the bus home from grocery shopping with a grey-haired drunk who is going on about someone he thinks is an asshole. The passenger behind him says quietly to him, "I'm going to say this once. I'm going to say this once. Shut your fucking mouth." Later on, on the way home, I have dinner at a deathburger on the boulevard which I used to live. A homeless guy appears to be able to sit inside in exchange for wiping down tables. He mentions something to the women behind the counter about not having his back teeth. I had stopped on this corner to get a card from a metaphysical book store. The entire strip mall is gone. In its place is a brand new condo development. The following morning, I have a late breakfast with the sister, celebrating this Monday's birthday of my late mom. She's back from a trip to Taos, where she was outside of a store with the Mexican shop owner who spoke no English. A truck with a couple of white guys drove past them, and one guy told the shop owner to go home. In the early evening, I swing past the home of a former coworker. I sit with her and her sister, also a former coworker. Everyone there is Mexican but myself. I attempt to explain in Spanish, and translation with the help of a daughter, the craziness of the final days our former company existed. A third coworker drops by with her family. I play with a two 1/2-year-old.
Monday. I stop at a gas station before work for breakfast, and some 12 hours later, I am back there after work for dinner. A nut comes by on a bicycle. He has shoulder-length dreadlocks and he's wearing underwear and shoes. He's yelling at his bike to stand up. He complains to no one that some random clerk has no respect for him. Or his underwear, I suspect. An extra disc brake dangles, attached from a backpack around his shoulders. A female street person arrives on her ow bike. I've never seen her before. She tells me that she ran over her plastic cup from the gas station by mistake, that this morning she argued with the clerk inside over a free coffee. The underwear guy tells her that clerks in general have no respect. I'm reminded of a joke, which somehow no longer appears to be a joke, made by a comic I heard on the radio. A homeless guy asks for money from a guy passing him on the street. The guy passing by replies with the standard, "Get a job." The comic then goes on, "I don't think it will be that easy for this guy to get a job. He was wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants. I predict trouble during the interview. I think that even McDonalds has a policy of wearing your underwear on the inside." Two days later, I'm at the gym in the morning, where a woman in a wheelchair threatened to run over me two mornings earlier. I'm changing my shirt outside as a trio of high school-going-on-30 guys approach. One is headed inside as he tells the others, "Catch me at lunch time. Lunch is 11:35, right? Oh, and Sayeed says tell everyone, 'What's up?' He most likely gets out in September." Six and a half hours later, I'm out of work early. I decide to take a roll of film across town to the camera shop.
I take a popular bike trail from downtown into my old neighborhood. On a corner, a young woman on her phone asks me where to catch a bus. She does not appear to understand English well, and does slightly better with Spanish. I continue to attempt to motion her off the bike lanes and onto to the grass. This is like a bicycle interstate highway and she will be hit. I point across the boulevard where a bus is stopped. She makes her way toward it, still having difficulty comprehending that bikes are always around the corner, waiting to flatten her. I stop at the mall for dinner before heading over to the camera store. My tall, photographic, hippie goddess is on a months-long trip around Cambodia, and she may not come back. I was not informed that my club membership expired a couple of months ago and I renew it. From there, I stop by where some old coworkers now work to leave a greeting, grab some ice cream from a popular shop, and I put on my poncho at the sound of thunder. I ride toward home as hail begins. Lightning and thunder is not far overhead. I cross a park and join a soaked young female runner waiting at a light. I mention to her that, "There's nothing like a milk shake in the hail." I arrive at a train station and grab a bus. On the short bus ride back home, I ride through heavy hail which beats the windows and loud thunder and lightning. I eventually notice, as I drink my milk shake, melted ice cream runs down the front of my poncho. Are you freaking kidding me? I disembark in some of the heaviest rain and hail I remember being in. Thunder and lightning follow me the last yards home.
Two days later. It's been a summer of waiting for my late mom's hospital bill, of an oral surgeon contradicting my regular dentist, of my primary care physician ordering tests for me, of my having to sit down with my doctor's referral person during a separate appointment to communicate a code number to my insurance company which it is able to recognize, of my doctor's faulty fax machine requiring me to physically walk the fax info to another medical office which it turns out is not in my insurance company's network in the first place, and so on. I wonder if I should be surprised at this point that the summer is almost over? After completing one of said tests, I stop into the downtown deathburger homeless central for a bite before work. Inside are the usual street folk, the occasional downtown office employee, and a trio of folks who appear to be "in character" for some comic convention. Rounding out the menagerie are a pair of outpatients, indeed on an outing with their minder. The day after I have off. One week later is my Saturday to work. Past the park down the street, I see more Caucasians walking dogs than I ever have here before. On the trail through the underpass, a young guy with no shirt and dreadlocks is stopped on his bike. Out through, up and onto the street over the young guy with dreadlocks beneath, over the river, and onto the next bridge, which is over the interstate, a young street-dwelling couple, each on a bicycle, are stopped on the bridge arguing with each other. At work, I stay an extra three full hours after close so that we have no work to walk into on the coming Monday. Sunday I do a little grocery shopping, and then it's off to the waterpark. This may be my final trip there this season. Next week is Labor Day weekend, and I may not make it. As for this early afternoon, I'm headed down my street for the train station. I have a transit pass which is still good for another hour. Down my street, a couple of Harley riders have to stop for a woman crossing the street with a walker. Neither of them have helmets, but they never forget their leather vests. I see more Harleys down the street and still no helmets. I guess it wouldn't be a Harley with a helmet. Live fast and die with your brains hanging out. After my swim, I disembark from the train, grab lunch at a deathburger, and go on another wild goose chase for a non-existent outdoor market before swinging by a theater close by. I check what's playing and when before I decide to head home. I'm back on the bridge over the interstate when I end up behind a woman on a bicycle with bags hanging off every part of the frame.
"[The centralized state structures of] Syria and Iraq will, in the final analysis, be undermined by regionalism." ...a grimy rising plain...merged with the leaden clouds. Kurdistan was more real than several score of the nation-states officially recognized by the world community. "Leh, leh, leh-leh-leh" blared from the scratchy cassette. This was the music of the Kurdish guerrillas, the Pesh Mergas - "Those that walk before death." Before the 1980s. There was nothing here but the usual mud and dust. ...from the stone age to shopping malls without any intermediate steps... The third world town of the future - a free zone of creative chaos where regionalism had replaced nation-statism. - Kaplan
Friday is the last day of the week before Labor Day weekend. I have a dentist appointment before work. It's one which has been waiting for more than one financial shoe to drop. I now know what my late mom's hospital bill is. Finally. I have a good idea of my share for the cost of two tests my primary care physician wants me to have. Finally. And I've made a decision concerning oral surgery my dentist wanted me to have, reversing my original decision 180 degrees. It's been something of a contrast, a long summer which has flown past. It's my new life. Before going to my appointment, I stop by the current place of employment for a couple of women I worked with for a decade. The owner of their current place is thin, wears a back brace over his dress shirt and slacks, and appears nervous that I am around. I then hit an organic grocer for a buffet breakfast before crossing the street to pick up some photos. Around the corner is yet another woman I worked with, before I worked with the first pair. This one is just about the age I was when we worked together. She is still tall and thin with long blonde hair, and perhaps the most beautiful woman I know. We discuss the homeless around her store. I'm glad she and I are still friends. Then it's off to the dentist, who now wants to see me every four months instead of six, for a more frequent cleaning of my teeth. Hey, why not. I will be coming here even more often now, even though the last three homes I lived in here have long since been "scraped." I didn't realize until my last trip to the gym, the public pools probably shut down the middle of this month. This weekend is the final one the waterpark will be open. How did such a long month disappear? Because I practically live at work now, we are so busy. I will soon be staring down the end of the year as well.
