How to Start a Successful Blog
Everybody has something they'd like to tell the world. Whatever your message has to do with, your existing business, a new venture or your favorite hobby... Clearly define your target audience, so you can develop the right content... ...the easier to attract your 'tribe." Include demographics... Give your blog a twist or angle... Chances are there's a blog on your topic already... Make it look professional... Avoid hard-to-read color combinations, excessive pop-ups... ...to establish a command readership...publish regularly. Be patient as your audience builds. Unless you're already famous... ...grab a copy of Start Your Own Blogging Business... - YOU Magazine, 2/2016It follows that logic, deduction...are absurd and misleading. Man must...not try to break...things...down into the wretched rabble of language. He must apprehend...through contemplation, not analyze everything out of existence... "The four seasons observe clear laws, but do not discuss them," says the Taoist. "Those who talk do not know, and those who know do not talk - a man should know without knowing how he knows. ...there is no truth to be explained in words." Dreadful damage was done when man split the universe...this mental scratching in the dust...
All girls between thirteen and sixteen were eligible... ...eunuchs were responsible for weeding out the non-starters until only for thousand girls were still in the running. Vital statistics and voice tests cut this number down to about two thousand candidates, who were then examined on their deportment, and the successful among them stripped naked, pinched, prodded, carefully scrutinized, and their points noted. The three hundred who survived this...their characters were studied. ...fifty...became Imperial concubines. ...the Imperial concubines injected a fine flow of vulgarity into the veins of the Imperial family, and introduced something of the spirit of the millions outside into the...palace... ...pairs caught in adultery were sometimes strangled under the law, but this...was designed to protect the family. ...sex was part of the system ; it had nothing to do with sin. ...nunneries became brothels... Chastity counted for nothing...and incest was common. In earlier centuries, peasants mated freely at festival time and only set up house together if the girl becomes pregnant. There is a description...under the last king of the Shang dynasty at which men and women pursued each other stark naked around a pool of wine and among trees hung with meats. ...the disillusioned young woman who had learned to drink...was not seeking anyone's commendation. ...she teamed up with an ugly deal of a poet, a great drinker and brawler and kicker of convention who led her an exciting dance...hailed by topers and vagabonds and pursued by gypped landlords... ...she sank into the sediment of rascals and whores and tippling, unwashed failures of the city. - Bloodworth
Football is given a high priority everywhere because millions of fans... ...the Denver media for their "embarrassing" ways...happens all over the country when a local team gets on a championship run. Like it or not, successful sports franchises galvanize communities like nothing else...there's a national opportunity for positive community representation. Some say sports franchises reflect their communities. The Broncos have always represented the Denver psyche...always discounted, always ignored and underrated, always a smallish entity wanting to be recognized as a big one, always wanting to be included in the national conversation. - Westword, 2/4-10/2016
"Look at their faces," a Singapore politician once murmured to me while we were watching pro-Communist youth meeting... ...contingents from the...girls' schools - lines of intent, immobile, snub-nosed faced under black fringes cut so sharply that they looked as if they ought to bleed, their unsmiling expressions as stiff as their starched white blouses and skirts. "Yes," said the politician, "They're the ones I'm really afraid of." - Bloodworth
...it's really easy...to replicate patterns...in historic movements in which very charismatic black males - often church-based males - take the leadership role, and in such a way that the working contributions of others especially...women get lost in the shuffle. ...there is a shortage of groups that are centered around leadership by women of color, or queer women of color. That's a problem everywhere. ...the response of our senior...community, knowing that we were bringing change to a long-held treasure in our community. My hope was that people would be able to get...that we were speaking truth...truly voicing community concerns...
...Mayor Hancock...emphatically countered your claims by stating, "I have not turned my back on this city."
I don't know how he can explain the realities on the ground... And I don't know how he explains things getting worse and worse instead of getting better if his back has not been turned. And perhaps the term "back turned" is not the right phrase; maybe "too busy selling Denver to the highest bidder" is the right phrase.
One of the other things Hancock said was, "We...celebrate all lives." Do you think that "All lives matter"...marginalizes or trivializes your movement?
I think it's a direct assault. I don't believe it's just flipping a slogan around. ...you saying "Black lives DON'T matter."
In your speech, you mentioned...development and affordable housing, ending the camping ban, demilitarizing the police...providing mental health services...
There are highly paid elected officials - who have administrations and agencies and well-paid staff and researchers - whose literal job is to...serve the City of Denver. - Westword, 2/4-10/2016
...four Colorado's [sic] universities...share common belief that having a diverse student body and faculty enriches the educational experience. ...challenges stereotyped preconceptions; encourages critical thinking... Sustaining the nation's prosperity in the 21st century requires us to make effective use of...all our citizens, in work settings that bring together...diverse backgrounds and cultures. - asian avenue, 2/2016
...to a new generation...after...1968... ...at some seminars between senior Shell managers and radical students... The Shell men had come back from...Venezuela, Indonesia or Brazil, and looked for recognition and acclaim. ...in the face of nationalist forces abroad and a watchful government at home. But the students...saw the Shell men, not as heroic Troubleshooters, or even as exciting villains, but as dull, decent...trapped in a giant system of exploitation, who had wrecked the ecology...and who were by-passing democracy... ...'I don't hear you,' a...Shell man kept sadly repeating... The oilmen were baffled and hurt... - The Seven Sisters, by A. Sampson, 1975
Hello "tribe."
Hmm. Psyche of the municipal population, or malaise of the nation's municipalities? Is the currency of the American dream weighed by the power of a city's message? But I digress. Tuesday. The snow which began falling on 1/31, and continued all day yesterday, finally stops in the afternoon. After work, I am at the train station around 8:30 PM, where I catch a bus back to my street. A guy who appears as if he could be twenty years younger than myself is talking to a young couple about the dynamics of prison. The girl is asking him about a five-year sentence for escape. "No," he replies. "Escape is...15 months. Unless you never show up, or show up and leave. Then they'll hit you with some hard shit. They can't give you more than your original sentence. They told me, 'We're going to give you 15 months.' I said, 'For what? I did your 2 1/2 years probation. I tried.' They said, 'Okay, we'll give you 8 months.' What are you gonna say, no? It sucks, but it ain't that bad." He has a voice which sounds as if he's had one too many cigarettes. Our bus comes and takes me to my street. I cross the avenue to the stop for my last bus home. Houdini is back, in his wheelchair at the corner of a Vietnamese restaurant, bundled up against the frigid air.
Wednesday. I don't trust the trail conditions. And I need more transit system coupons. So I am off toward downtown at 11 AM, across the street to the bus stop. On the sidewalk is a drunk who looks like an old prize fighter. I haven't seen his since at least last summer, if not longer. He looks abandoned, waiting for some mysterious sign. He heads over to the gas station, and a popular panhandling spot. Close to 11:30, I step out of a train at the city's heralded cornerstone transit hub. Anyone who may be here this morning, from parts unknown, are treated to a kind of communication between a couple of men, each from what I am assuming are differing neighborhoods. The first one to 'speak' exclaims, "WHAT'S UP NIGGAAAA!!!" To which the second replies, "Westside, nigga. Westside, nigga. Westside, nigga." Westside? Hey, that's where I live. ...and I don't recognize either of these two fellas. I enter the station to purchase my coupons. On the way out, I pass someone in a seat, who is nonstop growling. He follows me out.
Thursday. I'm at my bus stop of yesteryear, back when I worked the morning shift for ten years. It's now 8:30 AM. I run into my neighbor, who I speak with about our HOA. The bus whisks me off to my dentist. I have an hour to kill before my appointment. I head over to the supermarket, where I purchased groceries during the 16 years in which I lived here. The neighborhood is hoppin' with post-recession construction. There are somehow even more new condos here now than there were when I lived here. Inside, it's an eclectic mix of the usual suspects, lycra-clad cyclists and women in camelhair coats and residents in a perpetual hurry; and construction guys all in orange vests and helmets, the ones speaking English complaining about having to "take a shit!" and others speaking Spanish. After my appointment, I jump on a bus to work. When we pull into a train station, a passenger comes on to ask the driver which direction he goes. He has to check the map. I don't know why he doesn't just check where the mountains are. Down the road, we stop for a passenger with a walker. He asks for a wheelchair ramp to be extended. The driver gets out to tamp down the snow where the ramp will come out. The passenger, a grey-haired guy in a jacket with "EVENT STAFF" on the back, tells the driver concerning tamping down the snow, "That ain't gonna help." The ramp indeed comes out and Mr. Event Staff is onboard. At his stop, another passenger comes on, and he doesn't wait for the guy to clear the way, he squeezes past him. The new passenger is quizzing this poor driver about the schedule for another bus route. Event Staff asks, "Can you lower this?", referring to the hydraulics on the suspension. I arrive at the shopping center where I work, and I head over to a cozy little Italian bistro for lunch. At one table are four guys who strike me as college students. Though I can't figure out what they're doing here in the middle of a February day. I listen to them discuss family, taxes for those who earn $200,000, and one mentions that, "My six iron snapped off."
Eight hours later, I am at the stop for my last stop home. Houdini is nowhere to be seen. There is a younger guy here in a wheelchair this evening, at the stop. Instead of a jacket with colors of the city's football team, he's in a 49ers coat. "Smoke some weed, bro?" he asks me. A Blackhawk is thumping across the overcast sky. Another guy comes along, asking, "Anyone got a cigarette?" Seven hours later, I am up and out the door, across the street at the bus stop. At 4 AM, these streets are dead quiet. But not for long. This is the end of the calm before the storm. How long has it been since I've come out here at this hour, six days a week? The winter or spring of last year? Twenty minutes later, I'm on a bus up the street with a lady I haven't seen on the bus for a year or more. Off this one and on to a crosstown bus, and on to a train to the station where I catch my last bus to work at a quarter after 5 AM. One of the three passengers is in a tweed sport coat and a British cap. Standing next to the driver is a training supervisor. He's in tactical pants and a Polo shirt. On his belt is a ring of keys, in his hand a travel mug, and in a tiny pocket on his right sleeve a pair of pens. He is giving the driver details in long monologues. Friday. I'm on a bus home from work, shortly after 8 PM. We stop to pick up a passenger in a wheelchair. The ramp won't deploy. I watch something I've never seen in my years on the transit system. The driver is attempting to pry the ramp out with a metal bar.
The former Chinese Nationalist soldier, now a refugee in Hong Kong...the old colonel...has a good job now selling entrance tickets at the Happy World Amusement Park... The general will help the lieutenant, the professor his former student, the ex-official his junior clerk even when they are all hard up in Hong Kong and Mao has been ruling China for nearly twenty years. A good employer hesitates to dismiss anyone, for his family will suffer... - Bloodworth
...this strange gathering of rulers and revolutionaries. This was the first summit meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The conference, boomed the president of Venezuela, was...concerned with..."moral energy." Oil, said Major Jalloud, must be the foundation of a new economic order. It must, said the Shah, be the means of making 'a world in which it will be an honour for us to live.' And President Boumedienne reiterated his favorite theme: oil was...the source of life itself. The oil producing countries must be the spearhead of the revival of the Third World, and the means to an equitable new system of world justice. The Majesties sat next to the Brothers, the Africans congratulated the Arabs. Would this be...a strong cartel controlled by sovereign states, rather than consumers? ...the seven giant corporations known as the Seven Sisters...it was hard to believe that they had lost their power and influence. ...they were institutions that had appeared to be part of world government. Their executives could fly between...Kuwait...and...Saudi Arabia, as casually as across their own state. Their computers could analyse the supplies and demands of half the countries of the world. Their boards could allocate hundreds of millions to bring into being...a new harbour, or a new trade-route. Each of the seven had lasted...longer than many of their nation-clients. Their skyscraper headquarters...seemed to evoke a new world where nations themselves were obsolescent. - Sampson
Huddled in a ditch by the border next to her husband and her three children, while explosions went off all around them, she was certain that even if her body survived, her mind would forever remain trapped in that ditch. Zarqa, know as the home of the late Al Qaeda leader Abu Musah al-Zarqwai, is in northeastern Jordan. Zarqa suffers from...Islamist factions... It is kept under tight control by government authorities in fear of political destabilization. "Psychosocial services and protection are what people demand most." - Denver Voice, 2/2016
To address the barriers facing the refugee community, we must educate and empower the community. We met with elected officials and representatives from various government agencies to educate them about...the refugee community. We do...workshops...so that...the refugee community...can advocate for themselves. "You see the Vietnamese grocery stores and restaurants...the legacy of refugee resettlement."
..."why are you here tonight?" "To turn my brain off." "We're seeing more and more people coming to our center to seek change in their lives." - asian avenue, 2/2016
Signing in at the Welcome Desk...helps us...get an accurate count of our numbers for fundraising and grant writing and...reinbursement for meals served. The staff...have a main philosophy that we call "Trauma Informed Care." ...many of our members have experienced difficult situations...and we try to shape our policies and procedures around that understanding. ...it guides most of our decisions. We encourage members to write articles in the TGP Post detailing community resources they have discovered. Members (who do so) (...don't have to do a chore to eat lunch there.) ...we recognize that many of the people we serve struggle with addictions and my be triggered by discussion about marijuana, the smell of marijuana, or support around the use of marijuana, even if it is medically necessary. ...one member asked if the TGP Post would want to do a write-up about their own success story. Another option would be...to join the DU Writer's Group...you could...share it...in a creative way.
Get to Know TGP Staff:
Over the last 10 years...I received my bachelors in social work and psychology. ...I worked as a school social worker...for students...with emotional and behavioral disabilities... ...I obtained a masters certificate in culturally responsive teaching. I...worked for Volunteers of America in their youth rapid re-housing program. - TGP Post, 2/22/2016
Saturday. I'm on my way home after work. This morning, I spent my ride to the train station explaining the dynamics of the printed ticket, known as the "transfer", to someone on the bus who speaks no English. At 6 AM on a Saturday, 'twas an empty bus. Some twelve hours later, I am now on a bus back to my neighborhood. In front of me is a Chinese girl with groceries. I think that I spot "Chinese" writing on a box of cookies. It turns out to be English upside down. I'm so tired, I think I'm upside down. The next morning is Superbowl Sunday. One of the participating football teams, the AFC champions, is from this city. At the supermarket, the clerk bagging my groceries warns the checker, 'if we win, when the celebrating begins, just stay away from'...the boulevard on which I live. The morning before the game, out on this very boulevard, a endless procession of pickup trucks rumble along. Tied across the front grill and hood of one enterprising pickup, someone has an effigy of a player from the opposing NFC championship team, perhaps the quarterback. Some ten hours later, our team is victorious, and this boulevard is one long line of headlights and one long collective car horn. One the way home, someone with a lit Roman candle runs in front of the car I am in. They set it on the sidewalk, and it erupts in sparks.
...Write Denver...a special walking tour and writing workshop that focused on the ideas of space and time. ...gave us writing prompts. ...we took refuge in a community garden...while we thought (and wrote) about the evolution of place. ...Denver is going through growing pains. ...even people who have only lived here for a few years might already be nostalgic for little pockets of it that no longer exist. - Denver Voice, 2/2016
6/25/2015 Sometimes the 24 pack of paper towels isn't enough. Wholesale club Costco is adding its first Colorado store...in a former Lowes store around October. "At a Costco Business Center, you buy it by the flat (pallet)." Costco is hoping to have its business humming by Halloween. The property sold in May 2015 to Alameda Square Investors LCC... Costco Business Centers...lack a Costco pharmacy, optical center and food court. ...Costco has yet to decide if Alameda Square's business center will have a gas station. At...an Athmar Park Neighborhood Association...meeting...neighbors asked if Costco could include a small grocery section, reasoning the nearest grocery stores are a few miles away. - Nextdoor Westwood, 2/8/2016
(Another post from this network mentions that city permits have finally been completed, and it hopes to open in April.)
On Jan. 1, in celebration of the new year, the Colorado Chinese Club hosted a ceremony to raise the flag for the Republic of China (Taiwan) at the Pacific Ocean Marketplace in Alameda Square. - asian avenue, 2?2016
(This is just up the street from the soon-to-be Costco Business Center.)
The new Southwest Denver health Clinic at...Federal Blvd. Several...community identified needs are...the first urgent care unit outside of Denver Health's main campus. ...making its conference room available for community uses, hiring bilingual community navigators... You can help complete the new clinic...by making a contribution... Decades of underdevelopment, little public investment, and poor land use has left many West Denver neighborhoods with a lack of food access. Although...many amazing, mom-and-pop ethnic grocery stores, specialty food and corner stores...there are only two supermarkets in a district of over 55,000 residents... ...an agreement with Costco Wholesale to have their new business center opening in Alameda Square carry groceries. - Viva District 3
The...two giants, Exxon and Shell, who for the past sixty years had bee the prototypes of the sophisticated international company. Their rivalry across the continents had been a long sub-plot to modern history, financing whole nations, fueling wars, developing deserts. Their commercial ambitions were fraught with diplomatic consequences: the revolutions in Iraq, the separatist movement in Scotland or the civil war in Nigeria. They had seemed often enough like private governments to which the Western nations had deliberately abdicated part of their diplomacy... For they represented much more than themselves: they were a central part of the whole economic system of the West. ...Exxon's international headquarters...inside the high entrance hall is hung with moons and stars. On the twenty-fourth floor is the mechanical brain of the company...a system proudly named LOGICS (Logistics Information and Communication Systems). They record the movement...160 different kinds of Exxon oil...with the names of ships, dates and destinations across the world. From the peace of the twenty-fourth floor, it seems like playing God...perfectly rational and omniscient...surveying the world as a single market. - Sampson
...there is a realization that Europe, its cities, and all of those institutions predicated on unending peace are now vulnerable to bewilderingly rapid developments. I arrived in Brussels on the Eurostar at midnight to find only homeless people and camouflaged military on the streets. ...as if...in some indigent colony, not...the de-facto capital of the European Union. I dined in the empty Le Petit Boxeur...the only restaurant I found open. I walked the spookily deserted streets... So many have drowned trying to reach Europe that the island's morgues and cemeteries are full of corpses that may never be identified. ...in the shadow of Mytilene's castle...young Morocans, Tunisians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Ethiopians, and one from Mali. An entire generation seems to be on the move. ...young people aged between 15 and 24 constitute about 20 percent of the populations in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. ...the Mediterranean Sea...was a pleasure ground for the last half century...a place where thousands drowned and vacationers found themselves springing from beach towels to help refugees. The apartment in St. Denis where three terrorists...were killed in a seven-hour gun battle is a five-minute walk from the great Basilica of St. Denis, the birthplace of European Gothic style and once the burial place of French kings. Europe ignored what was going on beneath its nose, possibly because it did not give a damn about these young men of Arab descent, but also because the nihilistic religious fantasies of ISIS were in some way beyond the secular imagination of modern Europeans. - Vanity Fair, 2/2016
Squeeze means that wealth goes percolating down from pocket to pocket, through a series of increasingly fine strainers... ...they have no tradition of charity toward a stranger, whose approaches they will treat with suspicion until he has proved himself innocent. ...as a family man the Good Samaritan is suspect... The Chinese...have no civic sense. ...so real conception of the common weal. ...he did not feel that the law protected him... The early Chinese republicans claimed that they ,managed to break through the fine mesh of...loyalties, yet they did not succeed in weaving a strong fabric of national feeling in its place. And Mao still faces this problem in a Communist China... There have been men who had nothing more to loose, or who burned with indignation, or who yearned for revenge or adventure, or for that mystique...ever ready to accord...the hero and the champion of the downtrodden. And throughout the long history of his country...has indeed proved that such men are dangerous. For every dynasty has fallen when he has played the catalyst, converting the inert mass compounded of the...millions and their misery into a violent and unstable explosive of appalling destructiveness. - Bloodworth
"It has its own personality of forwardness and freedom. I believe it's the artists who make a city a smart and hip and desirable place to live. ...Denver is like Prague: It's far enough the big cities that it's neither East Coast nor West Coast. A unique creative growth has emerged. ...John Hickenlooper. His platform was partly based on the book The Rise of the Creative Class... ...but...the super-wealthy no longer invest in the culture and infrastructure of the city. I have woken up to nail guns and concrete trucks backing up for the last 25 years. ...if we had any idea what was coming to the northside ghetto. There's an out-of-control run of overpriced, cheaply built and mind-bogglingly poor-quality "slab-and-four" structured going up. ...of fake - or worse, poorly faked - architectural styles... WTF is with all this weird fakery? ...buildings built in the last ten years are all popping apart now. The city is now under great pressure by big money and lobbyists protect the developers from the avalanche of lawsuits. About ten years out, we are going to wonder where all the local artists and galleries are. Where the cool went. It's going to be a different town. We are already romancing the past of the golden art years on Larimer Street. Now it's not just happening to neighborhoods; it's happening to whole cities. It's gentrification on steroids!" - Westword 2/18-24/2016
"In Denver, we box way above our weight class when it comes to art, culture and science. ...taking our content into the community through "outposts"..."
"The Denver arts scene...responds to the influx of new residents... The large concentration of millennials...is driving cultural entertainment...to a nationally recognized level."
"...these new audiences...oftentimes want more informal, immersive arts experiences. (Skeptical? Check out research from Denver's cultural plan...)" - Westword Winter Arts Guide 2016
This week is looking at highs in the sixties. Wednesday I ride my bike to work in the early afternoon, in my shorts. I haven't been on a bike in my shorts since 2008, the last time I rode a bike. Thursday. On the way home, I'm just off the last trail. At a street light, a couple of male high school students on bikes, girls on the back, pull up to the red light. No one is wearing helmets, but the guys are looking tough. Friday. With the sun and good weather, everyone and their grandmother is out on the trail, including a young, tall guy with a beard. He is slowly taking small steps down the trail, staring ahead, bewildered. During the day, the trail can seem almost crowded. On the way home, between 7 and 8:30 PM, I imagine what a long haul trucker must feel like. There is nothing on the trail but the moonlight as it stretches out in front of you. Nothing but lights in the distance. Just you and the road. A certain relationship.
Saturday. Thursday I had to open with not enough sleep. Both the following morning and this one, I woke up too early. This morning, I decide that am too tired to get out on the trail. When I step out of the door, I am surrounded by fog. I don't recall the last time I rode my bike in fog, if I ever did. I didn't plan it this way, but it appears as if I have made a wise choice. The bus whisks me to the train station. When I get out in front o the bus, the headlight beams are making widening lines of vapor coming right at me. What a day to forget my camera. A couple of train stations down the line, I sit down on a bench. Behind me, I hear a couple of bangs. Someone is looking inside the trash cans and letting the lids drop. He checks every can just in time as a transit system employee comes along to empty all the trash.
...the women's buses get back into the city later in the morning, which means they miss the best free breakfast, at the Denver Rescue Mission. The women's side also doesn't have a TV anymore...because it was moved to the men's side after the Denver Rescue Mission and Catholic Charities took over...from the Salvation Army... ...most of the men who have been selected for the E-Shelter eat as quickly as possible. For each pair of buses Conrad doesn't get on...he'll have to wait another 45 minutes for them to return. ...a man...wearing a "Star Wars" Tie Fighter shirt...complains how his unsanctioned "grocery store" inside the E-Shelter was shut down... "I was the biggest and most independent store in this joint! Now what am I supposed to do?" he asks to no one in particular...trailing a string of obscenities. - Westword, 2/11-17/2016
...I've smelled vomit...on the bus before. ...if you've ever ridden ...(East Colfax) or...(South Broadway). Headphones are a must... And bring a book... And if you ever hear someone on the bus talking (or screaming) to himself, do not make eye contact.
"We are finding that people...can't access...[public transit]"... ...neighborhoods like Westwood...have few sidewalks... - Out Front, 2/3/2016
You know, light flashes can be received all over the brain, even after the visual cortex has been destroyed. Maybe ecstasy is a white luminescence that is experienced with the eyes closed. Picture the brain as a bubbling chemical pool of continually changing colors. White would be for euphoria and hope. Black represents depression and despair. Red is alertness - and attacking, escaping, protecting, and mating. Yellow is afraid of red. Blue stills the racket outside. Magical drug cures... They're like churches that bring relief by forgiveness, with implicit blame and guilt. There's a movement these days...toward a transcendency... In Zen metaphysics the "householder" is supposed to have special problems maintaining enlightenment if he cares too intensely, too possessively, about his house, his family... You know, the Bhadavad Gita says that transcendent action is possible through detachment. And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead the road to mental health is said to lie in gradual detachment from things of this world. That's a brain state. - OMNI Magazine, 11/1980
...Terraza del Sol, is currently under construction. It will be...mixed-use... Mi Casa's new offices will be housed on the first floor. Located in southwest Denver's Westwood neighborhood...expected to open in the spring of 2017. Westwood has over 15,000 residents and the population is approximately 80 percent Hispanic. Ms. Lovato...CEO/Executive Director...hopes the project will be a beacon for the community, and serve as a catalyst for further economic development in southwest Denver. ...Ms. Lovato was director of Corporate Giving at Xcel Energy...managing the Xcel Energy Foundation. - Life on Capitol Hill, 2/2016
We believe our lives are lived best while enjoying the rewards of membership here - our private slice of heaven that provides ample opportunity to relax, connect, and savor Mother Nature's majesty. It is our personal four-season playground, and it feeds our passion... Our spirit is grounded in the variety of our communities - each uniquely situated at its own elevation...to provide the ultimate...mountain living experience.
...a frustrating helicopter ride... Hovering above an undulating 13,000-acre parcel... "The only way this can happen is with no internal roads. All the houses need to be on the perimeter. The residential component always drives design." ...debunks the club as a closed-door, elitist enclave. "You have to be here to understand it. The place has consumed my interests ad emotions... ...of people - the most interesting, the mot entrepreneurial... They all check their egos at the door." ...Bill Gates, Justin Timberlake... "I play in jeans all the time. You're in Montana, for God's sake. It's still the Wild West." ...the nationwide recovery of resort real estate... Riding to the rescue was [an] adrenaline-junky... - Colorado Avid Golfer, Spring 2016
Sunday. At the supermarket in the morning, I watch young guy after young guy, circling the Valentine's Day display, flowers and balloons in hand. All of them appear the same, as if they may be thieves and cutthroats. It's Valentine's Day in the neighborhood. Later on, after lunch, I am in the dollar store across the street. One of the day's couples is shopping. The lady has a crooked baseball cap. I am looking at razors as the guy speaks to the lady in low tones. "I need fuckin' razors, but I don't know about these fuckin' razors. The razors at (the) Arapahoe (County Jail) were better than these fuckin' razors..." He's a big deal because he was in county jail. For dinner, I step out just behind where I live, to a Vietnamese restaurant. I'm seated next to a table with a pair of chubby guys who look, like all the Caucasians in this neighborhood, unlike anyone else here. Both appear to be dressed all in black. I don't want to try to guess who they believe they are supposed to be. One of the pair has mostly stubble with a goatee, a black knit cap, black shorts, sandals, and an earring. It's been a week with highs in or close to the sixties (degrees F). The one in shorts is talking about going to Hollywood for auditions, which he makes sound as if they are a chore. I'm sure that they can be. He spends the rest of the time talking about riding on a train with a sleeper car, being served food onboard. The other one responds to everything with, "That's rad." When they decide to depart, the rad one says, "Well, shall we..."
Monday morning is another restaurant interlude. I am at a place for breakfast with my sister. When she goes to the ladies' room, I listen to two women in the next booth. A mom in her thirties is talking about the politics of "snitching," a gang term for reporting a crime. A crime perpetrated by a gang. I then notice what may be a scar running from the bottom of her right cheek all the way to the top. Her toddler sits across from her, with her friend. Wednesday. On the ride to work, from the trail I spot a fire paramedic vehicle and an ambulance parked in front of a medical marijuana place, calling itself an "alternative wellness" facility. I wonder what the meaning of this scene is? This afternoon, bikes, joggers, even a rollerblader is out on this unseasonably warm day. Today and the next, someone has a big tent out on the back of the Platte River. On the following afternoon, the bikers are all uniformed, and riding in formation. On the river is some guy standing on a paddleboard. And yet, 'tis the ride home eight hours later which strikes me as apocalyptic. It's windy when I leave work. Earlier this week, somewhere in the state, winds were clocked at 100 m.p.h.. As I approach a fork in the trail, it suddenly begins spitting rain. Some kind of a front is blowing through. I react to this in an odd way, with fear. I don't remember the last time I was afraid. I like rain. I notice that traffic on the passes over the trail has vanished, or is moving slower than I ever remember it. Further down the trail, a couple of guys on BMX bikes come up behind me. They are both wearing black hoodies, and appear in this tempest as some kind of twin grim reapers. They ride down the trail next to each other, one in each lane. They make it ahead of me before I come upon them stopped on the trail. I climb the bank to the road and down again as i go around them While ahead of the pair, I come upon a guy standing in the middle of the trail, who appears to be reattaching a handle to a rolling suitcase. He asks me, "You alright, buddy?" His voice sounds vaguely familiar. He takes off toward the street, before pausing there to go back to work on the handle. The BMX grim reaper pair then pass me again and head across a bridge. I watch their lights as they disappear in the distance. Shortly coming off the trail, I pass a home with an awning laying on the front lawn. At home, the local TV news reports power lines going down. The next morning, I notice missing street signs.
Saturday. After a 12-hour shift on five hours of sleep, I am up and back from the dead. It's a chilly morning. Close to work, I come up behind a guy who just got on the trail for a walk. He has with him a transistor radio. On the way back home some 12 hours later, I am coming up behind more leisurely strollers on the trail. Further on, there is a guy on a fat tire bike riding back and forth, up and down one stretch. Sunday. I'm on a bus for a short jaunt to the supermarket, sitting across from a young woman. She is on her phone relating her frustration with social services, and her and her children's dependence on their schedule (or lack thereof.) There is a court date involved. I begin thinking that it can't be easy for a single mom navigating the social services system, when I hear her say, "There was no knife. Where's the knife? Where's the knife? Where's the knife? There wasn't any. They're offering an F5 instead of an F4." "F" for felony? When I am out of the supermarket, I head over to a bus bench. A couple of guys come along and sit down. One asks the other how to get downtown. He says he's from New York. Lived there for 25 years, he says. The other says that he's trying to get downtown himself, and he's from Tennessee. The first one says that he has been walking all night for reasons which he does not explain, and that he "works for the homeless," in multiple states. Meanwhile, up and down the sidewalk in front of us, a guy on a bicycle is running his dog up and down the street.
In the afternoon, I am out at the bus stop across the street from where I live, on my way to a movie. Unless you're not from 'round these streets, it's just another day in the neighborhood. Standing out by the street, a woman watched down the boulevard for the bus. As happens when a fire engine comes out of the firehouse next to the stop, all light at the intersection go red. The woman notices this out loud as the fire truck makes its exit. As traffic waits for one light or another to go green, one hot rod pickup truck careens out from around a corner and into the middle of both lanes. The woman steps back from the street and says, "Crazy son of a bitch." The bus cometh, hooks me up with a crosstown route. As we roll past a liquor store, I watch a handful of people in the parking lot. One guy is wearing a blanket. Another guy shaking hands with someone is a wasted, grey-haired guy with his other hand on a full stolen shopping cart. A short distance from there is a small, isolated, grey building. The sign over the entrance reads, "Colorado Guardian Angels." The one in the window says "Day Labor." At sundown, I'm out of the movie and on a bus, listening to a woman talking to a grey-haired guy in a cap with flame designs on each side. "If you hurt my dog," she tells him, "I'll kill you." Flame hat guy mentions something about being in front of a judge. He has missing teeth. I change buses again, as I move from the east to the west side of downtown, and we are headed back to my own boulevard of crazy sons of bitches. One of them must be here on this bus. Yet a third grey-haired guy, this one in a fishing hat, claims that the driver missed his stop. When we pull into an old transfer station, he disembarks, yelling, "Fuck!" I must get up an embankment and cross a bridge over a highway to get to the stop for my last bus home. Wedged between the bars of a tall metal railing on the bridge are pieces of posterboard. They announce in magic marker the death of what appears to be a grade school child named Mikey. One of the signs reads, "Stop street racing."
The Triads have a complicated system of hieratical tattoo marks and a multitude of slogans and test phrases, secret finger and hand signs...ways of holding...tea cups and umbrellas and chop sticks, or arranging matchsticks or cigarettes or saucers...in obedience to an established code. - Bloodworth
Wednesday. I should be rolling along the bike path in the early afternoon sunshine. Instead, I'm wandering a corner of downtown, looking for a medical office where I am supposed to pick up some medication for an upcoming appointment to get a camera up by butt. Because I am age 50. The third building I enter is the first one I was in, and turns out to be the correct one, and I exit with medicine in hand. A kid outside of what appears to be a soup kitchen asks me if I "want to buy some cheap cigarettes?" I still don't smoke. I realize that I am a few blocks from a women's shelter, where I used to make deliveries of donated clothes as a regular part of my job. Or it was under my company's previous owner, who began collecting these donations as the sole source for this shelter. He and his wife won an award from a local TV station for this effort. After more than a year now with the new owners, I believe that my company neither has nor shall ever more make a delivery to this shelter, and I want to hear from the shelter's end. On the way there, I stroll past a guy who appears to be leaning on a cane and sleeping standing up. Next to him is a 60-year-old woman in a wheelchair. She says to he, "Hey, Mafia! Can you spare a quarter?" She is the second person this morning to ask me for a quarter. The first one did not to refer to me as "Mafia." Instead of answering her, my brain is too busy wondering what the hell she means by "Mafia?" She raises her left arm all the way up. "A quarter?" she asks. A quartah? From d a mafia? Forggetaboutit...
An hour later, I am in the shopping center where I work. It's in an upper-class neighborhood. I mentioned this last night to someone who I occasionally ride the bus home with. She's a Salvadoran native who speaks no English. "Many Caucasians in your restaurant?" I ask. "Many Caucasians who like pizza," she answers. She's not a fan of pizza. It's just an occupation in a foreign culture. This afternoon, I am grabbing lunch at an Italian place here. I listen to a couple of ladies behind me. "Heart disease in women, oh!" one of them mentions. Then she says something about cannibalism in "far flung corners of the world!" The other recommends an historic downtown hotel for a nap. Thursday evening. I arrive at my last bus stop home. There is someone on the bench, sitting next to a grey-haired guy in a wheelchair, who is staring straight ahead. The one on the bench asks me if he can use my "phone for two minutes." I don't have a phone.
Many twentieth-century Chinese revolutionaries were convinced...a system of general elections and parliamentary rule...would naturally give their country...a Western democracy. ...and turn her into a formidable military power and a rich, modern industrial state. ...Western democracy...failed miserably... Which is one of a hundred reasons why Mao Tse-tung is where he is today. In the nineteen-twenties a succession of Chinese Communist leaders Kowtowed to Marxist doctrine...which laid down that the industrial proletariat must lead the revolution and that the cities must be seized first. They were well aware that underdeveloped China could hardly be said to have anything so sophisticated as an industrial proletariat of any consequence... ...Mao cut through this...and - to the fury of the orthodox - rallied the peasants...instead of attacking the towns. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek suddenly broke his uneasy alliance with the Communists... In perpetual memory...Mao has harbored a deep distrust of all nationalist movements...found it expedient to tolerate non-Communist leaders in the emerging African and Asian continents, he sees them as only as rotten rungs on the ladder to the revolution, to be left behind as quickly as possible. ...simultaneously feeding flattery to their prime ministers and fire power to their rebels. - Bloodworth
Again. Saturday night, someone raced down [the avenue I live on], swerved,...careened into my fence...and hit my car. - Nextdoor Westwood, 2/28/2016
Sunday. The morning is taken up with grocery shopping. A half hour waiting for a bus. Two hours at a copy shop, where I leave a hat, glasses, and camera. Another hour riding my bike back to get them. Back on my corner, I decide to put some air in my front tire. The guy in the gas station with the air pump lets me know that they no longer own the pump, and that he can't even get free air from it as he used to as an employee. I head out to the pump, where some bald guy dressed all in black strolling down the street lets me know that this particular air pump does not work, but that the one at the gas station across the street does. I put quarters in this one, and it starts right up. Bald death man is running to the other side of the street.
Monday. At sunrise I am down the street to catch a bus to go and workout. I show up at the bus stop where a guy waits. He's a road construction flagman. On the ground are his stop sign and helmet. His helmet is orange with tan splotches on it which appear almost as if they are blobs of glue. He paces back and forth as we both wait. "Five more minutes," he tells me. "The bus will be here in five minutes. At least it's not cold. I mean it's not freezing. You headed to work?" I tell him that I am on my way to work out. "This is a good time for it," he replies, before he steps into a car which has pulled to a stop. Four hours later, I am on a bus, headed toward the same corner. Standing up is an overweight guy in a T-shirt and sweat pants which are torn half way around the ankle on one cuff. I ask the driver if his route takes him past the bank. he emphatically lets me know that it does not, but a bus at the transfer point definitely shall. he pulls to a stop in front of the bus of which he speaks, so that it can not move forward. I have a vague memory of odd occurrences during leap year, but my life is already odd enough without Mad Max at the wheel. This driver must have seen the remake clean up at the Oscars last night. I have just enough room to squeeze between the exit of this bus and the driver's side window of the other. The other driver is looking at this one like WTF.
A half an hour later, on the way to work, I am on a train with a woman who suddenly makes a call and begins speaking into her phone. "I'm calling to check the status of an appointment I had with you, a ha-ha." At a crossroads for a couple of train lines, I jump trains to go back down the other line. As I wait for the other train, someone else who got off the train I came up on, a kid with stubble and a knit cap, asks me, "Where is the validator?" The validator is used to time stamp transit system coupons, used as a fare. Unless he has been on the train long enough for his previous coupon to expire, which would be at least three hours, and is unlikely, he never did get his coupon stamped. And was caught by a transit system official checking fares. During some eight decades past, these employees may have been refereed to as "railroad dicks." If the kid was lucky, he got off with a warning. If they didn't already have him in the system. On the train I get on are a couple of guys, one with long hair including a top knot. He mentions to the other, "I moved here to study web design." The other begins to give him a monologue about the details of studying web design. Eight hours later, I am sitting in a bus shelter, waiting for the bus to transport me back to my boulevard. A fierce wind is howling as it blasts a great cloud of dirt all around the place.Hobbling along comes a grey-haired guy with a brand new cane, brand new jeans, and brand new tennis shoes. Over his left eye is white cheesecloth.
