...a landmark settlement between [Denver] and Denver's homeless population...asks the city to provide certain resources that homeless advocates have long been asking for, such as storage lockers...portable toilets and needle dispensaries. The city will also stop using inmates on work release from the county jail to assist Public Works in the [removal of homeless camps in city parks, and] also requires the city to set up a committee of people experiencing homelessness to advise its follow-through practices. All city departments that make frequent contact with homeless people will be required to undergo annual "sensitivity training." [An] Assistant City Attorney...said...the settlement was born out of almost-daily phone calls between the city, plaintiff's attorneys and Denver Homeless Out Loud. - Westword, 10/3-9/2019
...a family company that doesn't define families... ...everyone from poly family units...to "traditional" families... ...I want everyone to have an amazing experience... ...from...showing the right properties but...listening to how are they going to use that property... ...that's where the magic happens... Is real estate personal? ...imagining what life could be. ...these amazing communities...the fabric and the threads of these things coming together. - Out Front Magazine, 10/2/2019
...millennials...have given us a spirit of adventure... ...Breckenridge Ski Resort's new Gravity Haus hotel...offer[s] a variety of bedding configurations for every kind of unconventional relationship...group cross-fit-type activities and... The hotel's...high-tech recovery center boasts a hyperbaric chamber and infrared sauna. - Elevation Outdoors, 10/2019
...some builders are taking orders for homes months before they can deliver them, some of the fastest-selling...come with practically no maintenance responsibilities whatsoever. these dazzling models deliver so much space, without any grass to mow... …"some people selling older houses, some moving up from condos, and some from apartments making a first buy." ...buyers are...already sold of its lifestyle... - The Denver Post, 10/5/2019
"Someone needs to proclaim and declare a cease and desist on the declining rates of Black homeownership. Someone needs to bring some programs and highlight this epidemic, this crisis in our community..." ...the 2019 State of Housing in Black America (SHIBA) report - released this week...researched primarily by the Urban Institute and released annually by NAREB, in order to "shed light on the public policies, private sector practices and other systematic disparities preventing Black Americans from purchasing a home of their choice," reports this week that "all gains in Black homeownership that had been achieved between 1968 and 2004, had been erased by 2018. This is a moment in our history to demand a cease and desist in the denial of equal access to mortgage credit and homeownership"... - Denver Urban Spectrum, 10/2019
The Quest for a Narrative With Order
Thursday evening of the first week of the month. I'm pulling into my parking lot after work, just before 8 PM. Parked in a fire lane is a small chrome trailer which I've seen here once before. The following morning, I'm out of my door on the way to work. The trailer is still there. Only now it's hitched to a pickup truck. On the other side, between the trail and truck, is a homeless guy I've seen on the bus which travels my boulevard. He's talking to a Vietnamese woman. I have not the first clue what he is doing within yards of my door, next to a trailer which could be a prop for a UFO movie and conversing with someone who I am sure is my neighbor. For all I know, he could very well live in my condo complex. I will find out more the following evening. Saturday morning. I arrive at the back door to work. I see what the manager has been talking about. Our back door, and the back door of the other business in this small building, each have a metal staircase with a small landing at the top. These make handy shelters if you put some cardboard on the landing. In our small parking lot are perhaps six homeless people. Most are asleep under plastic tarps. They have blankets and bikes and a shopping cart. One guy is awake. He's perhaps in his thirties. I'm taking the bag off of my recently repaired bike rack. He asks me if I'm okay. I ask him if he's okay. I'm okay, he's okay. He and another woman are still there hours later after the others have left. Saturday evening. I'm on my way home after work. I pass down a busy one-way thoroughfare. It has an onramp to the northbound Interstate. The corner where I turn onto the thoroughfare, headed home, is before the onramp. However, between where I join the thoroughfare and the onramp are railroad tracks. Trains are often passing along this line. This early evening, right after sunset, a long train is making its way along. I watch as it slows to a crawl before it finally stops. There is a line of train cars now blocking the way of another line, of Saturday evening traffic coming out of downtown, and headed for the northbound interstate. This isn't happy traffic. After a few minutes, cars are pulling out of line onto the wide sidewalk next to a long building. The sidewalk is easily wide enough for two or even three vehicles abreast. I'm sitting on the corner, my bike leaning against the light pole. The cars are headed my way before they turn onto the side street. It's the first time in recent memory I've seen traffic turn onto a sidewalk, much less toward myself. I get home just as one of my next door neighbors steps out of his door. He's our HOA president and in the know, as well as a good guy. When my mom passed, his sister brought me a plate of cookies which she made from scratch. I mention the chrome space trailer, Vietnamese woman and the homeless guy. The lady is indeed our neighbor. The trailer belongs to a visiting family member of the neighbor. The homeless guy? He has no idea. He must have wandered up to her in a randomly. It's a random life, and confounds the quest for a narrative with some order to it.
Sunday. I'm downtown at a showing of a documentary about Miles Davis. Afterward, around 6:30 PM, I'm at the deathburger homeless central. There is one kid behind the counter. First there are two, but the more experienced one disappears. The one who is left is from another country. He has a haircut from the 1990s. He isn't physically slow, but conceptually, he does not appear to have any idea how to move a long line along. He's asking customers to repeat their orders. A couple of times, he jumps up and down with apparent excitement, saying, "Let's go let's go." Yeah, let's go, Junior. The place appears to have a security officer, a middle-aged woman who can't be over 5 feet. She has on what appears to be a bullet proof vest. She is the first person I've ever seen run loiterers off the sidewalk. I get home and eventually off to bed. The weather has been cooler overnight and I have had yet to hear my furnace kick on. Overnight, I wake up to hear it reassuringly make its first firing of the season. As I sleep in my basement, I turn to see the blue natural gas flame. In the morning, I'm at the gym before work. It's in a rec center in a big park, where high school kids appear to congregate during lunch break. One pair of girls walks past the gym. One suggests to the other that they proceed a certain way. The other responds, "Nigga, we goin' 'by my house' way." She yells something to a group of perhaps thirty African-American teenagers gathered by a park bench. Across the street is an elderly Caucasian resident of the new apartments, his phone in his hand. He stares at the group of kids. It looks to me like some kind of raucous school gathering. In a couple of days, I will be back at the gym. I will be conversing with my pal behind the desk. She will tell me that the youth are from an alternative high school next door. The youth are two sides of some unknown school conflict, and after I left, two sides were posturing to begin fighting with each other. Some took off their shirts in preparation. I will be told that the police arrived and stayed for some time. I'm out of there and rolling up behind work, where more homeless are camped out. One young girl there picks up a can and asks me, "Is this your spray paint?" I let her know that I don't currently have any spray paint which I keep unattended behind where I work. Peace out.
On Wednesday, I will also be told that the pair of gangs return to the same park next to my gym for a retaliatory confrontation on Tuesday, with the police intervening once again. Tuesday morning, I'm headed across town to purchase yet more of a low carb desert available at a single location within any kind of reasonable distance. It would appear to be the current story of my shopping life. I attempt to catch a crosstown bus and find myself at my old bus stop of years past. I wait for the bus along with a woman in a long denim dress. She carries with her a Ouija board. After work on Tuesday, I'm on my way home, past the homeless enclave along a long stretch of building. At least two individuals are there. One guy is yelling at someone and gesturing agitatedly. "You never fucking take responsibility for anything!" he rebukes the other. I'm shortly across the tracks, over the interstate and the river, through the underpass beneath the busy avenue, and crawling up my first hill in the neighborhood between my own and the bike trail. Over my shoulder, I hear a guy outside talking to I know not who. "Fuck it," he intones. "My gun's loaded." Wednesday. At my gym, my pal brings me up to speed on the week's extracurricular police interventions. Directly afterward, I step outside to discover my rear tire is flat. My pal inside is nice enough to hook it up to an electric pump. I'm then off to the bike shop. A guy there has been a lot of help. He keeps describing myself "riding the hell out of" my bicycle. He inspects my worn tire to discover a couple of glass shards, two pieces of wire, and a thorn, demonstrating the hard work the sealant inside the tube has been doing to keep it inflated. He recommends a better pair of tires. During the initial tube replacement I go next door to a café. I order a breakfast burrito when I am told that breakfast ceased being served a half hour ago. Instead I get a Diet Coke. Cup in hand, I head for the soda fountain, where a woman is filling a big pitcher with nothing but ice from the ice dispenser. I ask her if she works here, to which she replies in the affirmative. I reply, "That's good to know." Fuck it. Her pitcher's loaded.
"Coffee is a beautiful, sacred product, naturally found on earth, and decaffeination is just offensive. It's one of the most popular drinks in the world and the second most traded commodity being exported from developing countries." - Asian Avenue Magazine, 10/2019
Elway's Cherry Creek [restaurant] is a charming and manly meat market (though less so since New York's Le Bilboquet came to town, luring all the cougars away). ...these are very community-oriented places, involved in...many charities. [Such establishments influence] what constitutes a comfortable dining experience, what needs to go into a proper takeover, why alumni diners are a welcome blast from the past... [They also send] their employees out into the world to do more great things...
...labor shortages and rising wages require new ways of serving guests with fewer employees. Even food prep and delivery are becoming more automated to help manage labor costs.
1996. ...LoDo, a then sketchy part of downtown...was finally starting to come around. The train station was the literal end of the line for all safe activity in the city. We were blazing a path...living life to the fullest. ...from our kitchens came...fierce talents. Their raw passion and talent fed the engine that powered the whole machine. Phenomenal humans...there was no equation...pushed on to build empires. - Westword Bites 2019
[In 1993,] the old Communist system was falling through the floor... [The currency] was worthless. Credit cards were unknown, and God help you if any of your dollar bills had...too many creases... ...some thugs tried to break into the [hotel] room occupied by an attractive blonde from the U.S. embassy, her calls for help to the hotel security men went unanswered. Everywhere in Baku there was decay. There was...a confused wariness to this place. Armed soldiers...begged for cigarettes. ...the democratically elected president...fled Baku when a self-declared militia leader...marched on the capital forcing the return to power of the former Soviet party chief... The Azeri Turks of Azerbaijan [have a heritage,] but it wasn't congealing into a focused sense of nationhood. It couldn't. There was no middle class. [Long gone since the end of WW II was] a nascent bourgeoisie. Now there were only those who were acquiring...mafia connections and urbanized peasants...waking up, shell-shocked, for the first time since...1920... Nor were there any obvious geographical borders to create an identity... Rather than weld the population into a solid mass, the war...weakened the new state by strengthening local clan-based militias. ...seven decades of collectivization, regime terror, and enforced poverty... ...a disorienting tyranny that divided inhabitants rather than uniting them... You tread upon a diseased earth. The Rothchilds and Alfred B. Nobel made fortunes [in] Baku. A cosmopolitan metropolis emerged - the Hotel de Ville, an opera house... Rather than "Eastern Approaches"...set in the 1930's and 1940's by [a] British diplomat...I found the most evocative guide..."Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege," by...a professor...and...a former Moscow bureau chief for "Newsweek". - Kaplan
On the subject of gentrification, it perhaps began right here in downtown. We at work, including the owner, learned recently that the entire block upon which our shop sits has been sold to a new owner. This guy has raised our lease 2 1/2 times. A surprise, perhaps, but hardly a new story. To see the inside of where I work is to wonder about the previous businesses which have occupied the space. The floor has seen better days. The guy I work for has almost closed a deal on leasing a space a block and a half away, in a new condo unit. Talk about surfing history, or perhaps jumping out of one side of gentrification right into the opposite side. Just like that. This move could happen in weeks. We leave behind an army of homeless who have, inside two weeks, taken over our entire parking lot. On Thursday of the following week, a week from today, I'm at work alone for the final hour before close. The owner comes in to attempt to download some software for our new location. I mention to him that I am familiar with new property owners raising the leases of businesses on their newly acquired properties. I ask him why a new property owner would rather have an empty storefront rather than keep a paying tenant. He replies that he talked about this with the leasing agent at our new location. He was told that it sometimes has to do with "ego." To accept a monthly lease amount as a property owner from a business on your property, which may be seen as low, could make the property owner appear "weak." This suggests that image is a tactical part of business negotiation. This tangled web of property investment; is it the engine of gentrification?
Friday. I get out of work early, due to logistical circumstances. On the way home, I stop into a supermarket which has a low fat cheese which my usual supermarket does not carry. I don't see it in the cheese aisle. I stand in a line before I can ask a customer service clerk if there is any in back. A quick phone call lets her know that it's there, but it's unpacked and inaccessible. Before I successfully find it in a natural grocery along the way home, I stop into a deathburger for a very late lunch. At some point, a homeless customer places an order with a homeless employee. A manager announces that his order is ready by its number. The homeless customer appears not to know what his order number is, or what he in fact ordered. "Hey, bro," he asks the homeless employee, "is this mine." The homeless employee, the only one in the joint who knows the answer, peers down into the bag to affirm that it is in fact what, to be more accurate, was ordered for the homeless customer. I'm out of this scene, pick up my low fat cheese at a natural grocery in a new condo complex full of Caucasians where a turn of the previous century rubber factory used to employ a previous generation, and home again, home again. I decide to do grocery shopping. On the bus back up the street, I'm sitting in front of a Caucasian, listening to a conversation which I identify as a sign of my changing neighborhood. Living on this boulevard for what will be thirteen years in April, for the first time I hear someone mention in a sentence, "...what I'm going to do with the grant money." The following afternoon, I will return to my neighborhood supermarket for a few more groceries. I see the homeless customer from yesterday's deathburger. I come out and sit at the stop for the bus home. I watch him slowly amble down the sidewalk. He appears remarkably alone.
Tuesday of the following week. I roll up at work where I see, packing up his tent into his shopping cart with a bicycle wheel on top, the same guy who asked me last week if I was "doing okay?" This morning, he asks me how my ride into work was. I just stare at him. My ride into work "From where?" I ask. He tells me he knows how a ride into work is, "weaving in and out of traffic," he suggests. It sounds as if I don't ride the same way he does. Inside, a guy comes inside to ask, "Can I use your bathroom? You know, to piss?" Of the odd customers at work, there are two who stand out today. One comes in to use our phone. Twice. I suppose he does not qualify as a customer exactly. He says that someone is supposed to pick him up, that he's from out of town. He may be in his sixties. His hands shake when I hand him the cordless phone. He begins dialing before he turns it on. I alert him to this. I don't know how he can dial with his shaking hands. When he finishes with his first call, he asks me, "Is that (the local CBS) TV (station) across the street?" I tell him, "It appears to be." "I'm not from the city," he attempts to explain. It seems as if it's directly after him when the other actual customer comes in. A young guy brings in some clothes to be cleaned. He tells me that the last shop he went to was shaped like "a little box." He claims that this should have been an obvious sign to him not to take his clothes there, for they failed to remove a small spot. He points out a couple of other stains, which he says are coffee. "I was in a car accident (and spilled my coffee.)" Then he admits it wasn't an accident. "I'm a shitty driver. I should never drink coffee again."
The following day at work, I get glimpses into the lives of a couple of people I work with. One lady is new. She's my age, and she lives in proximity to some kind of out-patients. She lives on my side of town, some seventy blocks north of where I do. She mentions something about having to call the police on a neighbor with a two-by-four beating another resident in her sixties. She talked about being on the phone with the dispatcher, who was going down a list of questions apparently on a list while this assault was taking place. The employee previously worked at a 7-Eleven, and one of the out-patients is a former customer who she continues to encounter. The customer/outpatient throws bananas at her when she sees her. This same employee I heard the day before talking about considering attacking someone else with a baseball bat because they stole money from her. It's difficult to follow her stories because she talks quickly and convolutedly. At the end of this month, the owner would like to be out of our current location. I will be working with the second employee I am about to mention, along with a brand new one, at a nearby new location. The three of us will be the only ones at this new location, and I won't see the first employee mentioned anymore. I've worked in this old building since December 11 of last year, along with the second employee who was hired a couple of months before me. He's recently told some vague stories of his family's own connection to gang violence. A middle-aged guy in white pants and a white tank top wandered by the shop on this temperate autumn afternoon. He looked like just another homeless guy, carrying his large soda cup. This second employee I mentioned went outside to hang out with him for a few minutes. He came back inside to tell us the guy is an acquaintance of his who belongs to a gang known as the Aztecas.
Saturday is my turn to work. As I approach work in downtown proper, I notice certain streets are blocked off with police working traffic detail. I pass a sandwich sign which reads, "Run like someone called you a jogger." I make it to a gas station where I purchase a couple of taquitos. I wind my way back behind where I work. The taquitos have fallen out of their wrapper in my pocket and are nowhere to be found. Vehicles are entering our alley from both ends, as well as coming around the side of our building, to converge in our back parking lot. One woman yells at a vehicle for attempting to pass her instead of backing up back onto the street. "NO! You motherfucking jag off!" An elderly couple has parked behind our shop, apparently awaiting either the alley to clear or the apocalypse to lift them out of downtown. One of my coworkers inside tells me that the street is blocked off for a foot race called the Rock and Roll 5 and 10K Race. A friend who works at the restaurant next to us is running in it the day after. No jag offs here. The guy we work for has the keys to the new space he just acquired, out of which I will soon be working, and is already at work on the inside. He comes in and takes me down to briefly show it to me. It's a former art gallery and it's beautiful. Black carpet with a small tile patch in front of the entrance.
Tuesday. I arrive home after work, a little after 8 PM. There are two police SUVs in my parking lt. An officer is patting down a big guy. I wonder if he's the guy from a unit across the way, who I met a year or so ago. This guy introduced himself as having "three domestics." Since then, I've seen another big guy, who I suspect is a different one, who also smokes outside like the other one. Whichever guy this is, he's telling the officer something being 'not always bad.' I take my bike inside and come back out to check the mail. The SUVs are gone, along with the guy. Two big U-Haul trailers are now parked in one corner of the lot.
In the spring of 1994...as we approached Tehran one Persian woman, and then another, and another wiped away her rouge and lipstick and hid her long hair and her leotards or miniskirt beneath the..."chador." ...the transformation of an airplane cabin into a veritable mosque... ...the secondary causes of the [Iranian] revolution [or 1979] (modernization, overcrowded cities, etc.) are more intense than ever. - Kaplan
Some people live in climate-controlled condos where the windows cannot even be opened from the inside; others live in doorways. Some people spend their winters in the Caribbean; others go to the steam pipes under Times Square.
...from the Potomac valley...it's all right, once again, for important men to talk about the Family... It was, in the old days...impolite to blame poverty on the sleeping arrangements of the poor... In those days, white men felt inhibited about castigating [another race's] family... But, hey, this is the eighties and it sure is fun to reflect on what the poor are doing in...their tenements or street-side cardboard shelters... Are they...promiscuous, underage, depraved? Whole books, conferences...speeches are now devoted to these questions... The black intelligentsia...produced their own...neoconservatives and...decided to reclaim the Problem of the Black Family for themselves. ...that the black family does not have enough grown-ups I it. ...only by adding three...black males...can we hope to clear the median U.S. family income...about $28,000 [in the 1980s]. If our hypothetical black family is to enter the middle-class mainstream, which means home ownership, it will need at least $36,596 - or four black men. ...I am convinced the upper-middle-class white (the politically pivotal group in our society) are already warming to the notion of the six-parent black family. - Ehrenreich
Sunday. Yesterday I called the photo place across town, looking for some overdue photos, when they claim that they left me a voicemail a couple of weeks ago. I have no idea what good fortune I have when I arrive there late this morning. Behind the counter is my tall photogenic hippie goddess. She's back working here, returned from her East Asian adventure. She visited not only Angkor Wat but surrounding temples, she learned some Khmer. I have a chance to sit next to her, each of us in front of a monitor. We chat about Vietnam. At one point, she rolls her chair next to mine and shows me how to access the samples of photo Christmas card designs. Her slender fingers tap the face of the monitor. I want to ask her about her ring. The hell with the ring, I want to kiss her kind face, meet the gaze of her almond eyes, smile back at her own warm smile. Hold her in my arms. Compliment her fresh hippie gear. Another customer overhears her far eastern travels. He comes over and mentions his own trip to Hong Kong. He speaks quickly. Some other guy is always moving in on myself and the object of my desire...who I am sure is some three decades my junior. He illustrates one point with some kind of repressed pantomime. Actually, she's genuinely interested in people; asks him his name and shakes his hand. During his self-cathartic monologue, she mentions that she is an artist. I return to conversing with her between her assisting other customers at their own monitors. She keeps returning to her state of mind, which is the shock of returning to her routine now that she's back home. She also mentions something about no one caring about her experience. I tell her that I care, and that she may call me anytime to come down and talk about her life, before I head home. I tell her that I shall return to make my Christmas photo cards. She lets me know when she works. With the low lighting in the camera shop and the intimate atmosphere, I feel as though I'm in some kind of noir movie. I am shortly back in my own neighborhood. I take some more of my late mom's stuff to an ARC up the street before I have dinner at my old deathburger of years past, nearby. Inside is a homeless guy following around a teenaged female employee, who is spraying down and wiping tables. He's rambling on to her about his "room" and a roommate who "smokes dope." He pulls out dollar bills which he waves in her face as he offers to purchase food for her, which she declines. The manager asks him to leave. "Give me ten more minutes," he asks. Before he shoves off, he converses with another homeless guy with a long grey beard, who smells like urine and sits in a wheelchair. "Life's hard then you die," the wheelchair guy says to him. The asked to leave then goes over to a silent middle-aged woman and mentions something rambling about his economic prospects before he makes his exit.
And then it's Monday. Three days before Halloween. Three days of snow are predicted. It has begun overnight. I'm on the way to work over streets full of snow plowed, maneuvered, and residual. I am making my way down a steep hill through a neighborhood between my own and the bike trail. I can feel my wheels trying to incrementally slip out from under me, toward the right. I will be at this exact same spot 24 hours later when I will dismount my bike. I will discover that the street is almost too slippery even to stand on. On this morning however, I make it down the steep hill and turn down a shallower hill. Suddenly my bike goes out from under me, toward the right. I land on my stomach on a patch of residential street so slippery, before I stop, I turn all the over onto my back and slide to a stop. Again, when I stand, I can barely keep from slipping. I'm on my way to the gym before work. When I get there, an employee comes out from around the side of the building. He has a broom to sweep snow. He tells me that all city employees are on a 'snow delay' of two hours. My gym won't be open until noon. I start work at eleven. I am not even at work yet, my bike has already gone out from under me, and now I can't work out. When I get to work, my manager will tell me that I am "a beast." But before I arrive at the gym to discover it won't be open on time, I stop at a 7-Eleven along the way. AS soon as arrive, a guy comes from around the corner of the building. He's in a coat with colors and a design from the 1980's. It does not appear warm enough for this morning which may not yet be 20 degrees F. He stands at one end of the building before walking to the other end, only to return to the one end. He adjusts his knit cap. A homeless guy with a cane and his coat open comes slowly along. The first guy appears to know him. He sarcastically says to the guy with the cane, "I need help I need help." The guy with cane ignores him. The first guy jokingly calls him an asshole. A couple of guys come out of the store. The first guy asks them if they will help him load a generator into his vehicle, "to take to a job site," he claims. He does much begging, bent over looking at them after they are back in their car. They come out briefly before telling hi that they need to get back to work. He goes over behind a beer truck. The guy with the cane goes inside and comes out with a doughnut.
The following morning, I am making my way through the same neighborhood on the way to the bike trail. It's even slipperier this morning than yesterday. The usual din of traffic is muted. I can hear the wind blowing through the trees. Twelve hours later. I'm home and headed out for a doughnut. I see employees from the formerly closed Chinese scoop restaurant for the first time in weeks, clearing the snow from their car windows. One of them tells me that they have been open again since this past Saturday. I'm then headed across the boulevard for my doughnut. A trio of thin young guys are coming around the corner. In their skinny pants and reserved winter gear, they smell Caucasian. My fears are realized when one says to me, "Excuse me, sir. We're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints..." These are the first of these guys, who live in the apartments full of other Caucasians directly across the street from me, who have spoken to me. At this point, I've seen plenty of them here before. I respond that I've seen where they live. They walk back to their apartment building. My doughnut in the bag, I'm headed back across the boulevard when I see they have returned to the edge of the parking lot of the Chinese place. What are they doing out here in the dark, in an empty parking lot, when the temperature has dropped from today's high of 21 degrees F? I watch them coming across the boulevard to the gas station where I got my doughnut.
