The car centered development of year's past has created streets that promote speeding and discourage people from using other modes of transportation. - Viva District 3, vol. 9, issue 1, Winter 2017-2018
...single...dads' frustrations with doing their daughter's hair... After feeling intimidated by YouTube hair tutorials...stumbled upon a video from...Daddy Daughter Hair Factory in Florida. ...decided to start a Denver chapter of DDHF... - Colorado Parent, 1/2018
The Rocky Mountain Pony Herd is offering...unconventional community. ...they...do a Munch event where the group meets up at a restaurant in street clothing... They usually put out some kind of a token, like a horse calendar... In the realm of the pony, things like bills and day jobs don't exist. - Outfront Magazine, 12/6/2017
An interesting start to the new year. This weekend was my turn to have Saturday off, making this a three day weekend. By New Year's Day, I somehow have finished everything including laundry and grocery shopping. I decide to go see the new Star Wars movie. Before the show, I have lunch across the street. It's another cold day and I am riding my bike in ski pants. In the men's room, someone asks me if I have been snowboarding. On the way home I am coming down a sidewalk. A bus pulls up to a stop, and I shake my head that I don't need to get on. I am passing the back door when it springs open and a young woman jumps out, who I almost run over. For dinner, I walk up to a Vietnamese place which has a kind of crepe. I walk in and they tell me that they are closing early. They were so busy, they ran out of food. I guess that's a kind of compliment. I opt for the other Vietnamese place, just behind where I live. Its busy, but they have a table. The usual Caucasians, including college-looking kids are here. I bring with me a magazine from an old collection, titled OMNI. A grey-haired customer spots it after I pull it out. "Haven't seen an OMNI in a while," he tells me. Someone who remembers this magazine, not just anyplace...but in my neighborhood? And his first language isn't Vietnamese or Spanish.
Tuesday. Back to work. I'm out of the door around mid-morning. A small car pulls up to the curb of my townhome complex. The driver is a woman who is neither Vietnamese nor Hispanic. She's a Caucasian who looks like a college sophomore. This is a first in the decade I've lived here. She smiles at me, another first around here. Perhaps she will meet a nice young guy with a backwards baseball cap, rocking the bottom end of his sound system while he makes a jackrabbit start in his car, which almost certainly has a rear spoiler regardless of make or model. It's not a neighborhood known for its smiles. Or perhaps she would be interested in getting to know any one of the three guys at the front of the bus I am taking up the street. One is entertaining the other two in Spanish, making them laugh. On his shaved head is a pair of gold tinted ski goggles, backwards. Around his neck is a big silver chain, such as semi truck tires might use to navigate the mountain roads this time of year. He has with him a beat up wooden skateboard with the obligatory stickers covering the bottom. He also has the rear wheel of a bicycle, with a small red strip of cloth tied around one point at the circumference. I wonder if he is from the creative class of which our mayor speaks so highly. After the three each depart, another guy gets on. He is middle aged and has a tattoo covering the back of one of his hands. he has a bicycle with him. As the bike rack at the front of the bus is full, the driver lets him bring it on, keeping it up front. We both get out at the same stop. When he is outside, he immediately begins shouting, "HEY! HEY!" He noticed another passing bike rider drop his jacket, and was trying to alert him. I see my connecting bus and, after a short run, catch it. Not long after, we pass a familiar condo complex. Once again, I see a guy on the sidewalk in front of this place. He has long spandex pants on and no shirt. He perspires as he appears to be cooling down from some kind of cardio workout. Further down the street, the driver misses the stop for a passenger. I've never heard anyone alert the driver the way this guy does. "Guymissmystop, missmystopguy!"
Wednesday. On the bus up the street is a guy with a weathered face and tousled hair. he's looking all around and licking his lips. he asks someone the time. I notice his boots. They happen to be U.S. Army tanker boots, the kind worn by soldiers who operate armored vehicles. Some eleven hours later I am off work and headed for the stop for my bus home. Getting up from the bench is a little guy with a grey Hulk Hogan moustache. From what I can make out of his narrative at first, he strikes me as some kind of wandering aimless interstate goof. He claims to have been at this stop for an hour, watching buses go past as all the drivers wave at him. He wants to know the name of this municipality, and if it's a "white" area. He says he's from California but sounds as if he's from the opposite coast. He mentions that he smoked a joint and is freaking out. He was supposed to meet a "friend" some twenty to sixty blocks north of here, but the friend turned him down with a simple text. His friend lives in another town altogether. He claims to be trying to get to Boulder, and "where is that?" Forty minutes northwest by car, longer by bus. Another "friend" lives there. I wonder how many towns are left to cross off the list. he claims to have a pass which is good till midnight. A "day pass" is good until 2:59 the following morning, so I'm not sure what he means. We both board the bus when it arrives. Along the way, a woman with straight blonde hair and a Mexican loose weave hoodie, in hippie colors, sticks her head inside the front door. She's been walking down the avenue for some time looking for a southbound bus. The driver tells her to cross the street at the corner where we are. I listen to the friendless guy tell someone that he's originally from Boston, "But Colorado had ahold of me for two years. I just got out of jail."
Jalalabad was a dusty brown city of mud-and-wood houses, unpaved earthen streets...with the...smell of charcoal and horse manure. There were donkeys and stallions and Indian-style "relo" rickshaws and Victorian bicycles...Dodge City transferred to the subcontinent. Two...local guerilla commanders had turned up for their haircut at the same time...and shot dead the barber...before deciding who was first... A third of all children in Jalalabad hospitals were the victims of joy-shootings [in the air] at weddings. It was a city ripe for Islamic discipline. ...four years after the communist government...had been overthrown, the Afghan mujahedin...were slaughtering each other in Kabul.
The United Nations had a force of just two soldiers observing the chaos in Afghanistan...both of whom stayed at the old Spingher Hotel. ...a relic of the old Afghanistan hippie trail... [On an air conditioner in the author's room at the hotel, he spots] the dragon's head of a giant lizard looking at me from the cooled bars of the machine. I had hidden In the same hotel sixteen years earlier...when I...watched the Russian armoured columns grinding past the front gates. Their helicopters thundered over the building, heavy with rockets...
I might have expected the purist bin Laden to be involved with the eradication of drugs. You can see...in the Jalalabad bazaar, young men with withered black arms and sunken eyes, the addicts returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan... ...we arrived next to...the ruins of an old Soviet army base, a place of broken armoured vehicles with a rusting red star on a shuttered gateway. There were three men... One...clutched a grenade launcher along with rockets held together with Scotch tape. A two-way radio hissed and crackled...as another truckload of Afghan gunmen drove up behind us. We drove off along a broken highway...the guns in the back of the truck bouncing on the floor... We travelled like that for hours, past half-demolished mud villages and valleys and towering black rocks, a journey across the surface of the moon. Out of the grey heat, there loomed the ghosts of a terrible war...upended, dust-covered guns and the carcass of a burned-out tank in which no one could have survived. Amid the furnace of the late-afternoon, there emerged...ancient castellated mud fortresses, their walls shot through... Wild naked children were playing in the ruins. ...the shadow of women cowled in the Afghan burqa standing in the alleyways. ...guerrillas, all bearded... They were the Arab mujahedin, the Arab "Afghans" denounced by the presidents and kings of half the Arab world and by the United States... Very soon, the world would know them as al-Queda. They came from Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait. I knew these men...thought themselves spiritually pure...were inspired...by dreams which they had persuaded themselves came from heaven.
Within nine months...a...still more sinister Afghanistan...governed with a harsh and ignorant piety than even bin Laden could not have imagined. The [airline] crew was all Afghans - bushy bearded to a man, since the Taliban had just taken over Afghanistan and ordered men to stop shaving... "The women can no longer be educated. It's back to year zero." ...(the Union Oil Company of California)...was negotiating with the Taliban...in September 1996, the U.S. State Department had announced that it would open diplomatic relations with the Taliban... ...one of the Algerian gunmen...telling me that...in Algeria he would cut my throat but that he was under bin-Laden's orders to...give his life for me. ...the wreckage of a kind [foretelling of] yet more suffering in the coming years.
Hills and rocks and water and ancient trees and old mountains, this was the world before the age of man. ...where the Taliban had stored their captured arms...shells, automatic rockets, Stinger missiles...exploding in an earthquake...sprinkled us with...torn pages from American manuals...on how to aim missiles. More than ninety civilians were ripped to bits by the accidental explosion... The Algerian...in tears...told me that his best friend had just perished in the explosion. Bin Laden's men, I noted, can also cry. ...comet...Hale-Bopp...was soaring above us now...moving at 70,000 kilometers an hour... "Mr. Robert, do you know what they say when a comet like this is seen?" It was the Algerian. "It means there is going to be a great war." - Fisk
Thursday. 6 AM. Someone called in to work and I am needed as soon as possible. I am listening to a couple of guys in the back of a quiet bus up the street. One tells the other that, when he breaks up with his girlfriend, she goes running home to her momma. he runs to his godmother. He mentions that her kidneys failed during her pregnancy. He offers this bit of wisdom, "Most women, 30 to 35 [years of age], reevaluate their lives." Saturday. I take an early morning bus up the street before sunrise. I'm after a workout and breakfast before work. This bus, at 6:30 AM on a Saturday, is standing room only. I'm lucky there's an open spot on the bike rack. I know that many of these passengers are headed for the train. Middle-aged bundled up people with faces full of suspicion. One guy in a seat next to me has his head in his hand. This is not an audience on the edge of their seats, waiting for a message of hope from beaming politicians. It looks more like s crowd of dust-covered lives just trying to crawl from one day to the next. I disembark where I catch a connecting bus, in a sleepy neighborhood on a busy street. It's quiet at sunrise, save for a lone yapping dog. Through the wall of a home comes the sound of an alarm clock. The next bus arrives to collect myself and my bike. A stop or two later and a couple of men in hoodies come aboard. They glance at the seats before one asks the other, "Sit here?" They take a seat and begin looking at a phone. They are followed by a woman with a small dog on a leash. She is giving commands to the dog.
Some nine hours later, it's after work. I'm at the stop for my bus home. On the bench are a couple of guys, a young one and a middle-aged one. They look like North Denver street people. When the bus arrives we all climb aboard. The pair sits in back and i hear the older one tell the other, "I just got fired today. So I took my apron into the office. They told me, 'You're fired. We want you to go home.'" Sitting up front is a second middle-aged dude. He's bald with a baseball cap, with a big "c" on the front. It's not a Cubs cap. The city is chocked full of merchandise made out of the state flag, but this is not one of those. He's in slacks, dress socks, and slip on dress shoes. On the right corner of his right eye is a tiny tattoo, and on his neck is an Illuminati tattoo. He turns to me and asks me, or the woman behind me, either one if we know where "Qfax" is. I ask him if he means Colfax Avenue. That's the one. As he goes on, it sounds as if he is familiar with downtown but apparently still can't pronounce the name of the city's largest and busiest, and the nation's longest, street. He tells me that he is looking for subsidized housing here in the municipality through which we are rolling. Downtown, he has decided, is "too much drama." He's a tow truck driver on disability, which is diabetes. He gets a $900 check each month for it, he claims. He also works now but is trying to get tow truck work, once he gets his license and his birth certificate. (?) His son used to live out here, but he does not know if his son still lives here. I notice that he also has a letter lightly tattooed on each knuckle of his right hand. (Hi, I'm your tow truck driver and I'm into the Illuminati...) He tells the woman behind me that she looks familiar. She tells him that he looks like a guy she has seen in a wheelchair downtown. He replies that that guy is his brother, whom he lives with. She tells him and he confirms that his brother's name is "Monster."
On Sunday, I have a date with my girlfriend. We have a motel room reservation not far from where I plan to catch the bus to work, where we shall be spending the evening. A handful of blocks away, I am grabbing a quick lunch before we are to meet. It's a place called "Crapes and Crapes." 'Tis a lazy Sunday in Denver's Highlands neighborhood. Young Caucasians living in new condos sprinkled among the postwar bungalows. I watch young couples stroll past. One pair pulls up and parks, and take out their dogs for a short walk. Afterward, they put the pups in the car and come inside for crapes, presumably followed by more crepes. One is enough for me. I have mad business with an exotic woman of color. The pre-meeting trouble begins with a couple of police cars parked in the motel lot. I go inside the lobby, following two officers and two men hauling a couple of huge and heavy pieces of luggage. The bags go on the floor in front of the motel desk. One civilian asks the other if there is anything else he needs. He asks what the police officers are doing here. The officers reply that they are there in case of any trouble. The other civilian then replies, "I'd like a hug because I still consider you family." I don't notice if a hug is given. I am replying to a text from said exotic woman, asking directions to this place, when she calls. As I am speaking to her on my phone, The first civilian tells the other to "get some help." He responds, "Well, I was getting help when you guys turned on me..." "Get help," the first interrupts. With that, he and the officers depart, and the guy who was getting help is by himself. he asks the manager behind the desk, "Do you know who that guy was? That was my ex-wife's attorney." He calls him an asshole.
My girlfriend tells me on the phone that she has arrived. It's an hour until check in time, so we grab a bite to eat before returning. Then my own ordeal begins. She parks and takes a nap while I go to check in. I want to pay with cash, but this requires an extra $100 cash deposit. I don't have that much cash and don't want to put this bill on my card. I ask if I can put the deposit on the card. It's either everything in cash or on the card. The card it is. I get the card keys first for one room which don't work. Then I get a second pair of key cards for the same room which don't work. Then I get a third pair for a second room which don't work. Lastly, I get a fourth pair for a third room which don't work. I'm glad my girlfriend is getting some much needed sleep in the car. I just which she had a bed...in a room. As I am makin my way back and forth between the front desk and various motel rooms, there is a guy with a grey beard who sounds as if he has been up for 48 hours. He's trying to check in, but is complaining that what the manager is telling him contradicts what he was told by Expedia. So he decides to call Expedia. But his phone is dead. 'Can he charge his phone?' he wants to know. He just needs ten minutes of charge. They can't let him do that. Well, he tells them, perhaps he can charge it at a gas station because he needs some gas in his car. he tells them he needs to go home anyway. 'Can they give him directions home?' he wants to know. The third time I return with a pair of non-working key cards, they have printed him a map from here to his house. When I get the fifth pair of key cards, the manager tells me that she will come with me to unlock the room. In the lobby is a guy who tells her, "You didn't do that for me last night." This is a guy who I just saw outside, crawling between a couple of bars on a metal fence. The manager and I begin to walk toward another end of the motel when I ask her where we are going. This motel is actually two separate motels, with two identical sets of room numbers for each motel. Once again, I have checked us into a script for a television program. When I point out the 40 minutes which I have spent trying to check in, she tells me that it's not "our fault..."
My bike and the bags I go to and from work with, myself and the girlfriend all enter a room which is now unlocked. It's not long before we are both undressed, and not long after that before she falls asleep. She's an amazing woman. She's my age, a certified nurses assistant, and a single mother of two teenagers at home. She works a full shift at a nursing home on top of individual home care for other patients throughout the metro area. She rarely gets enough sleep, staying up 48 hours over her weekend. I let her sleep. I read naked. I watch some TV naked. She wakes up and has a small bite to eat before going back to sleep. I watch an episode of Ken Burns' The Vietnam War and part of another before she wakes up again and we make love. I decide to hit the hay. It's wonderful having her next to me. Before she knocks off she is texting with her daughter, trying to tell her that she needs to let her know where she is. Her daughter sends her phone footage of a New Year's celebration called Decadence. She tells me that it cost $300 to attend. We drift off and I wake up at 2:30 AM before going back to sleep. I wake up again to the sound of the TV next door. It sounds like some kind of stand up comedian. I nod of again and we both wake up at 6 AM. She tells me some kind of crazy story that her mom has become sick and that she must move to Mexico for ten years because it is her country. I'm not sure what this all means. At 7 she is off to see a patient at their home.
Before we get up she asks me what I have been doing all these months she hasn't seen me. It's been since June of 2016. That's what, 19 months? I was riding the bike trails to and from work, wondering what she was doing those evenings. I think that what we are both doing is trying to pursue whatever happiness we can fit into our busy lives, hers far more busier than mine. Perhaps this is why we both get along, why we fit so well together, why we understand each other. She is the one who asked me to get my first phone so that we can text. This is the only way she can communicate most of the time.
Tuesday. The bus home is late. When it arrives, a young guy with a goatee sticks his head out of the door to let me know that there is a drunk on the bus. It's the first warning I've had in all my years using the transit system. The young guy is not the driver, but a passenger. When I get onboard, he whispers to me, "It's not me, I promise." Really? You're awfully friendly for a passenger, dude. This must be why it's late. The guy also claims that a supervisor will be at the transfer station to assist in removing the drunk. In a short while, I will hear the driver tell a supervisor the story of this drunk, stumbling badly enough outside to cause alarm that he way fall under the bus. Earlier, according to the driver, the drunk was asking something about rehab and his halfway house before insulting all the passengers with racist slurs and also attempting to fight them. I don't learn this until we reach the stop with the supervisor. Until then, the drunk is quiet as a mouse. In fact, he's trying not to pass out. The transfer station comes and goes without any sign of a supervisor. At one stop past the station, the drunk gets out. At the next stop is where the supervisor is waiting, and the driver tells the full tale.
The following morning, I board a connecting bus to work. I notice that the bus bike rack is down and locked into position. This is how it is supposed to be when it's being used, i.e. at least one bike is on it. This one is empty. If yours is the last bike of the rack, you are supposed to secure it in the upright position. If you don't, the driver will honk at you. I mention to the driver that someone forgot to put the rack back up. She replies that she didn't notice. I pull my bus pass out of my wallet to show the driver when a piece of paper falls out. It has by bank balance on it. In a front seat is a folksy-looking derelict guy. When I pick up the paper, he says to me, "Might need it." A good distance toward the end of the line, this guy gets up and walks with uncertain steps to exit the bus. he turns to a guy who I realize then is with and asks, "This the place?" They step out into the morning together. On the trip back over this route after work, a kid gets on and tells the driver something like he needs to ride without paying any fare because "it's freezing outside." It isn't. The single digit temperatures were a week or two ago. The driver tells him that, if he refuses to get out, he will have to report him. He half heartedly asks the few of us if we "have a bus pass" he can have. If he means a coupon good for one fare, he has no takers. He sits down and looks at his phone before he tells the driver that he is looking for a certain address. The driver tells him that this isn't his problem. The kid gets out after a short few stops. The following evening, I am on the same bus but headed in the opposite direction after work, just a few stops from where I get on this bus in the morning. This evening, we pick up a passenger who points out someone outside to the driver. I think he's getting on because I hear him tell the driver that person "was harassing me."
The men...he told us, were "mujahedin," 'holy warriors.' Gavin looked at me. We hadn't heard that word in Afghanistan before. ...the Afghan army was...allowed to play an important role in [Soviet] operations. Some...tanks...were Afghan...and only the Afghan army patrolled the city in daylight. Pashtun tribesmen...were shooting nightly at Afghan troops in the countryside outside Jalalabad. ...bombs had twice destroyed the electrical grid and transformers... Jalalabad...had no electricity for five days.
All my life, in the Middle East, people have asked me to trust them. And almost always...they were worthy of that trust. Even in the worst blizzards...Ali's ancient bus made it... The Afghan army had been told to stop journalists covering the country in cars... ...past the big Soviet guns that ringed Kabul and a European face beneath a Cossack-style hat waved us, unsmiling, through the last Russian checkpoint. The old city...looked like a medieval painting...set against the snow-smothered peaks of the Sufid Kuh Mountains... The Afghan army, notionally loyal to its new president and his Soviet allies, theoretically controlled the countryside. [In Ghanzi] some form of ceasefire existed [with] the Pashtun tribesmen. Almost a thousand years ago, Mahmud of Ghazni imposed...an Islamic empire that consolidated Sunni Muslim power over thousands of square miles. Ghazni became one of the great cities... But the city was now a mockery of its glorious past... ...Soviet construction workers and their wives had decided to visit...Masjid Jami mosque in Heart - a place of worship since the time of Zoroaster - only to be seized...and knifed to death. Several...were skinned alive... "Leave here now. ...they will think you are Russians and kill you. They will find out who you are afterwards." A succession of pro-Soviet dictators had ruled Afghanistan...through tribal alliances. ..the...communist governments had been trying to...force upon these rural societies...girls...would go to school...young women did not have to wear the veil...science and literature...taught alongside Islam. Inevitably, Karmal [the current Afghan communist ruler] tried to appease the mujahedin... ...we heard reports that only 60 percent of the...Afghan army [were] now following orders... He announced that he would change the Afghan flag to reintroduce...Islam...
"Goodbye - and give my love to Linda McCartney." This was incredible. No Western journalist had been able to talk to the Soviet troops invading Afghanistan, and here I was, sitting next to an armed Russian soldier...allowed to watch this vast military deployment from a Soviet army vehicle. With near disbelief, I realized... While he was wrestling with the wheel of his lorry on the ice, I was being asked to watch...for [Afghan "rebel"] gunmen. {He gave the author an orange.] The orange was my pay... [Out of that Soviet army vehicle and into another, this one with a Soviet army Major.] Could he, he asked, borrow my map? ...this long convoy did not carry with it a single map of Afghanistan. ...I was gently handed a Kalashnikov rifle... ...I was riding shotgun for the Soviet army...
All American journalists were expelled from the country. An Afghan politburo statement denounced British and other European reporters... ...but I had a plan. - Fisk
Sunday. I'm downtown for lunch and a movie, on the nation's longest street. I purchase my ticket and now must find a diner. I happen upon a place called Pete's kitchen. It's across the street from another diner called Illegal Pete's. I've heard of both, and I go inside the legal one. Like some remaining places in this town, especially on this avenue, it's like something out of another decade. There is a short line, in front of which is a pair of men, one of whom tells the hostess that they "were here first." I've got some time. I take a seat at the lunch counter. I'm told that I can't sit at an empty stool at the end. I'm not told why, but I notice that a calculator sits on the counter. I may however sit directly in front of the spinning thing which holds the order tickets. When my lunch arrives, the plate is set down between a stack of dishes and an appliance. On the other side of the dishes are plates of food waiting to be served. I hear a waitress speaking Spanish to the cooks across the counter. She bumps into me and apologizes in English. I tell her 'no problem' in Spanish. The customer nest to me gets up to leave. A waitress asks me if I want to move over. Why get up now? My helmet is already tucked under a cabinet. I watch the big flat grill full of hashbrowns and eggs and a lone omelet. A cook takes a small can of corned beef and bangs it out onto the grill. I come out of my movie. At the bike rack is a grey-haired guy just standing there. He tells me that he left his house with "the wrong keys," (?) and i assume he is unable to lock his bike to the rack. He says his brother is on his way with the right keys. He complains about the bike rack. I see nothing wrong with it. After I get home I have dinner a couple street away. On the way back, I see the gas station across the street from where I live completely cordoned off with police tape. Someone was shot and killed. I suppose that I won't be getting any after dinner hot wings from there this evening. On the same side of the street, over there, I had breakfast this morning. Last night, I had dinner across the street from there, as well as had my haircut this morning.
Monday. . The flakes are floating down this morning. Streets are icy. I ride across the street to make my bus on time. It's a miracle I don't go down on my ass. I feel my back tire slide on the pavement. I get on the wrong bus, which only goes to the train station. It's the driver who lets me know. I thank her and tell her that I am too dumb to be a passenger. At the train station, I get out into the blowing snow. This is a station where many buses cross paths, headed up, down, and crosstown. The passengers here are clearly cold and impatient for the same bus I am waiting for, the Route 31 northbound. They are cursing each bus which goes past. A bus with a route I've never heard of, the 33A, pulls to a stop. A passenger approaches the driver to ask where his bus goes. He ain't goin' north. The passenger tells another that this bus is "fucked up." This blog is no stranger to the consternation of many a passenger with the transit system. It's a transit system which does some good things...and keeps them a secret. The 31 is not far behind. Our bus arrives, and when asked, its driver says that the transit system is not on a holiday schedule regardless of this being Martin Luther King Day. I jump out at my stop and run into a gas station for a hot chocolate. The cashier takes it upon herself to let me know, after inquiring if I am riding the bus, that the transit system is operating today on its holiday schedule. I decide not to argue with her. The following afternoon, I'm at work. A customer comes in with grey coiffed hair. he's in a track suit. He's behind another customer which he knows. He's talking to her about how all the others where he works come into his office because he has a "full panoramic view" of the mountains. He tells her that he's looking into purchasing his own private jet, "Something that will get me out to the east coast." After work, I am back on my corner, at the Chinese place. Inside is a patron. He is young and a very rare Caucasian. He's in a hat with a brim and sunglasses on it.
"I've seen my entire community desecrated and family separated by market forces...in collusion with the white power structures in Denver - aka urban planning." ...an economy that has created massive inequalities due to structurally racist policies. ...of...access to more jobs...the housing crisis that would be created from skyrocketing rents would displace the same people. ...it is theoretically impossible to stop growth under capitalism. Denver is already seeing the deeply negative effects of development. ...the median income doubled...the neighborhood didn't qualify as at risk for gentrification. ...these...statistics...are thanks to "a mass exodus of the poor" where "residents are pushed out...to new pockets of poverty developing elsewhere." Is it possible to separate development from its neoliberal framework...? Developers have moved into neighborhoods, fragmenting communities and destroying culture... - Outfront, 1/3/2018
By Mayor Michael B. Hancock
...we're pulling every lever we can to build and preserve affordable housing across the city... ...when the people of Denver look back at these projects...they see the communities they enhanced, the careers they launched and the futures they secured. - Capitol Hill Life, 1/2018
Next month. the Denver City Council may...bring some of the most intense development of River North up to...neighboring communities. ...buildings rising up to 16 floors... It would become one of the densest clusters to develop outside of downtown Denver. "Are we a city that has...density [around] multiple nodes in the city?" "We think it could be a really incredible welcome mat for the visitors that are coming to the city." - Denver Herald, 1/18/2018
"The construction workers would arrive 6:00a.m.-6;30a.m. and the "suits" (business people) were next. Retail and restaurant workers would take any remaining spots. My husband would leave at 8;15a.m. to take our kids to school and, by the time he returned at 8:30a.m., there was no parking left." - the profile, 1/2018
I have been told...that we should all take a deep breath and keep some perspective. To that comment, made by a very smart person, I say, "bullshit." I have heard..."If a city isn't gentrifying, it's dying." Gentrification is not the same as renewal. Renewal...should be, improving what exists for the current neighbors; not kicking them out. I knew gentrification was winning when a sushi restaurant moved into the hood... - Capitol Hill Life, 1/2018
The monarchy, so long as it existed, provided a mosaic of unity that held the country more or less together. When the monarchy disappeared, the only common denominator was religion, it was identified with nationalism... Although...the mujahedin was a reactionary force - opposing the emancipation...of women and secular education - it focused...on the realities of politics in a way that had never happened before. ...a new Islamic force emerges from within the resistance rather than the clergy. ...a luxury bus...was packed, not with...villagers and Pakistani businessmen...but with Afghan government students. Some of the Afghan boys were taking off their [Afghan communist] party badges.. ....the students stepping off their bus onto the road. Some...white with fear, were told to form a line... Three of them were tied up and blindfolded and taken, stumbling and falling...until they...had disappeared. ...a Pakistani...cloth merchant from Peshawar...clucked his tongue and shook his head. "Poor chaps," he said. Here were...the "remnants" as the Soviet general blandly dismissed them. But they didn't look like "remnants" to me. Their Kalashnikovs were the new AK5 74s that the Soviets had just brought into Afghanistan, and they were wearing new ammunition belts.
[Iranian] Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadr ; one of Khomeini's closest advisors...simply had no idea what was going on in the courts [in Iran after the fall of the Shah in 1979], and I'm sure he preferred not to find out. The white-bearded Ayatollah sat cross-legged on rich ornamental carpets. I still have the tapes of the old man's excuses... There would be no counter-coups in this revolution...no CIA man...within the U.S. embassy. Indeed, very soon there would be no U.S. embassy. ...the "Ministry of Islamic Guidance," asked us to take a look at the Niavaran Palace in north Tehran. In the Shah's personal office, the guards could scarce restrain us from dialing a line on the [solid] golden telephones. ...I played an execrable version of Bach's "Air on a G String" on a harpsichord presented...by King...and Queen...of the Belgians. ...toys that once belonged to...the Shah's eight-year-old daughter. A blackboard carried [her] first efforts at writing in chalk the European version of Arabic numerals. - Fisk
Thursday. On a mid-morning bus up the street to work. It's almost standing room only on this one. We pick up passengers at one bust intersection. This driver is late and anxious to get going. As he does, a passenger outside comes running up and bangs a fist against a back window in an attempt to alert the driver of his presence. When he comes aboard, I see he is a tall Caucasian in his early thirties, with straight, shoulder length blonde hair and a beard. He looks out of place in this ethnic working class population. He mentions something to the driver about 'waiting 28 seconds at his stop.' I don't know what this character is talking about, but I notice that he mentions nothing about the bus being late. And where has he been if he wants this bus? When he gets out at the train station, he says, "Thanks, sorry about your window!" If the driver doesn't like you banging on the window, trust me 70s dude, the driver will let you know. Some eleven hours later, I am just off the crosstown bus and rolling toward the stop for my last bus home. As I approach the stop, from shouting distance a little guy is asking me for money. He's perhaps 15 years my junior. He's in a brown hoodie, baggy Dickies and white sneakers. He's dressed like a 14-year-old. He tells me he just got out of jail in the county I work in, a long way away from here. He only has 75 cents he tells me. I tell him I don't carry money. He looks familiar. The driver lets him on when the bus comes. Some twenty blocks later, a grey-haired guy gets on who appears to know this guy. The older guy tells him, "Let's go in the back." It's then I see that the younger guy has a pizza and perhaps a beverage in a plastic bag. Just out of jail, with gear from the boys section and a pizza? Score!
The following morning I'm headed past a new apartment building on the other side of the street from my place. A couple of twenty-something Caucasian dudes are on the covered walk to the entrance. One asks the other if he is going skiing. The other is carrying inside skis, poles, and boots. "Yeah, I'm goin' today," he replies. This has to be the first ski equipment I've seen in my eleven years in this neighborhood, carried by a resident of the building with the only Caucasians I ever see living here. Across the boulevard, residents of color fill up their gas tanks. On the boulevard, Hispanics street race through another morning past the neighborhood with the youngest demographic in the metro area. Saturday morning. I wake up on my own exactly an hour before the 5:22 AM bus up my boulevard. I don't usually catch the bus this early. At the stop across the street are a handful of bundled up guys. It's not bad this morning. A time/temperature sign reads 48 degrees F. One guy comes along, recognizes another, and greets him in Spanish. They begin discussing food. The bus arrives, and at twenty after 5 AM on a Saturday, every seat has someone in it. This route begins a short distance to the south and hasn't yet gone very far. I don't see any Caucasians with skis. Fifty plus blocks later and I am out at a busy corner. I have what I think is a half hour layover for the crosstown bus. I run into a Sinclair station for a soda. During the week, the clerk in here after sunup is a woman in her sixties, who can never figure out how to work the register. This morning, before sunrise, it's a woman who is not yet thirty. Her long dark hair is collected on top of her head. She's got that north Denver charm. "Busy day?" she asks. She tells me on the way that she wants to see me smile. I'm out at the stop and the crosstown bus appears to be fifteen minutes early. Or I read the schedule incorrectly. We make our way west to a transfer hub, where a tall, lanky guy sticks his head in the door and asks, "Where you goin'?!" He decides to come aboard. He's got a white beard and white pants, sky blue golf socks, and black and green stripes sneakers which have seen better days. He pulls a red roll away suitcase. He nods off while we sit at the station. He has a Kleenex in his left hand. After we get going, we pass another time/temperature sign. This one reads 27.
At the gym my ass is dragging. All day at work I have no appetite and I feel like I have no energy. After work I am off the crosstown bus and on the 4:50 pm one home. A familiar guy is onboard this afternoon. He's listening to a guy in a yellow vest, who is telling him how to find work shoveling snow. We're supposed to get dumped on tomorrow. The other guy tells him all he has to do is wait for a text telling him where and when to arrive and start working. "Well, we'll see what happens." He says this to the other guy a couple of times. I think he isn't sure if he will be sober when the text arrives. He sounds like a burnout. "Is there a guy I talk to?" The other guy replies, "David Wonder." He responds, "David Wonder. What the hell kind of a name is David Wonder?" The other guy says, "It's the only name he's got. He's a good guy. I like him." Well...we'll see what happens. Right? The bus passes a small white car wrapped around a tree in the median. He says, "Poor tree." The following day the snow is here. With the appearance of some beginning of the year expenses, I opt for my old deathburger for lunch. I'm rarely here anymore. I take the bus up the street and get out at the corner with a guy who appears homeless. He carries a shovel and says to me, "Hoo! This (snow) is a good one isn't it? I got a couple of (shoveling) jobs down there." His two front teeth are missing. At the deathburger, a stolen shopping cart is outside next to the window. At a booth right next to it is a couple. I assume that it's in their possession. Inside the cart, among some blankets, is a can of paint and some electrical cables. A tall guy comes through the first of two sets of doors. He pauses in front of the second set to talk to the doors before he comes inside. He has a Sprint tote bag big piece of silver duct tape over his right eye. He has a seat before he gets up to order. A second guy comes inside. He has a seat and also begins quietly talking to himself Monday. The sun is out and the sidewalks are not completely clear. When I leave work I have limited time to make it to the bus stop and not the conditions to make it by sidewalk. So I'm on the parkway. Just make it to the bus I do.
...Khomeini...had a harsh voice, like gravel on marble. ..he was staring at a point on the floor... ...he had clearly decided what to say to us long in advance of the interview. ...Khomeini simply came back again and again to the same argument. Rather like the U.S. television networks, he seemed to be obsessed by...retribution. ...our driver held the Imam's right hand and kissed it...tears streamed down his cheek. ...the Imam...built his palaces of people...the adoration of dozens of men who pushed and shoved and squeezed and kicked their way into the small audience room... ...there was a cry of...hysteria from the crowd as he entered. He talked in the language of ordinary people., without complexity, not in...religious exegesis... An embassy assessment of Iranian society in 1978 reads... 'The inability of Iranian society to accommodate...social changes stems in large part from [the fact that] Shia Islam is...an all encompassing religious economic, legal, social, and intellectual system that controls all aspects of life, and the sect's leaders unlike...in Sunni Islam are believed to be completing God's revelations on earth. ...there has been no real experience with democratic forms... In Najaf [,Iraq, where Khomeini was first exiled,] all I could see was a monochrome of streets and shuttered houses, the fragile negative of a city dedicated to the linked identities of worship and death. Ayatollah Khomeini must have loved it here. "One night a young girl...was brought straight from the courtroom to our cell." ...a cell containing 120 women... "She had been sentenced to death, and was confused... She didn't seem to know why she was there. ...at intervals she woke up with a start...asking if it were true that she really would be executed. ...at about 4 a.m. ...she was taken away to be executed. She was sixteen years old." Executions took place in all the major cities of Iran. [The women] were told [to write] their names on their [bodies] to identify them..."finishing shots" to the head would make their faces unrecognizable. Khomeini raged against the leftists and communists... Why did people oppose the death penalty, he asked. "...those who had rebelled against...the Islamic Republic...make you cry for humanity!" - Fisk
Tuesday. Melting has cleared more of my path fro work to the bus stop. On my bus is a guy who is telling the driver that he 'forgot all his shit' where the driver picked him up. "You don't remember where you picked me up, do you?" he asks the driver. The driver will shortly tell a transit system supervisor, who comes aboard when he stops, that this guy flagged him down downtown. He picked him up somewhere other than a bus stop. It would take until the following morning to occur to me that this guy flags down a bus downtown and rides here to the end of the line without ever getting off, and then claims he needs to stay on to go all the way back again. It now sounds like some kind of elaborate ruse to stay on a bus. The guy keeps going on about "How could I forget all my shit." He claims to be mostly worried about his psych medicine. The guy does ask the supervisor if she can arrange for someone to search the place where he was picked up for his "shit", which is not something the transit system makes any effort to do. Which is why it's odd a supervisor would come onboard to listen to this guy. Perhaps she just wanted to have a look at him. He is wearing a cap which otherwise looks like a U.S. Army cap, but instead reads, "God's Army." I never hear him mention god. And what he has to say during my ride about the Army is...questionable. He tells the supervisor, "I just need to breathe, smell the candles." The supervisor, spotting the unlit cigarette between his fingers, suggests he may want to refrain from smoking. He replies, "I'm 47. This (pointing to the cigarette) isn't going to make any difference (at this point in his life.)" I suspect any doctor would beg to differ. It's an ironic reply, considering that both driver and supervisor suggest that he go to a hospital to get more medicine. I wonder if they would like him to stay there? The driver asks him if he was in the Army. He says he was enlisted from 1959-1964, or from age 0 to age 5 according to his current stated age. He said he was stationed in Poland during the Solidarity movement. In...the Soviet Army? Surely the anti-God's Army. The driver asks him if he had to do pushups in the army. He replies that he "pushed Georgia." (?) He makes reference to his lament for the loss of said shit. He tells the driver, "Some days, it doesn't pay to be a dumbass." I'm off to catch a connecting bus. When I am walking home from the stop, there is a guy in the dark across the street who wants to know if I need a bus transfer. I suspect he is selling them at an upcharge from what the transit system asks. I think he means ride coupons. Hustle and jive...
Mid-morning on Thursday, I have a rare opportunity to sit down at a deathburger next to work, before I begin my shift. I am with mostly middle-aged and senior working class men. Flannel shirts and nylon zippered fleece, work boots and heavy soled shoes. A few hours later and I am back for lunch. Caucasian kids come in from a nearby high school. At a table of five or six of them, one guy with a shaggy afro asks a girl, "Is she your bitch?" They all laugh. The girl does an imitation, "You're my bitch." To these kids, such vernacular appears to be a world away. They look like the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics. I imagine that their school will never be surrounded by a line of police tape, such as recently happened to the high school down the street from where I live. The following morning I am on my way by train, crosstown to the opposite end of town, for a doctor's appointment. I always get here early because I expect that it will take me longer than it ever does. I head to a breakfast place for an order to go, as I am fasting until any possible bloodwork is done. I arrive at the restaurant just before a rush. I overhear a friendly waiter say to a manager just arriving that they are short two employees, and another has just quit. I sit down with a bag on a long cushioned seat which runs the length of the wall. Its for patrons waiting for a table. In the next ten or fifteen minutes, the long seat fills up and empties again a couple of times as patrons are quickly shown to tables. A pair of guys arrives, and one pulls out his earbuds to ask if they can sit down. He asks me to move my bag.
My blood pressure looks great, a tech tells me, and my doctor has renewed a prescription. I am off with a late breakfast, which I attempt to eat out of a container inside a bag. I am holding a fork in one hand and the handlebar of my bike in the other. The bag hangs from the other handlebar and the train accelerates and turns and decelerates along. Just about eight hours later I am at a stop for my connecting bus home, with my hot chocolate from the Muslim doughnut place in hand. When I arrived, a guy was here with a bike. He left as soon as I showed up. Another guy comes around the corner of the Muslim doughnut shop. "You got a cigarette brother?" I got life, mother. I got life, sister. I got freedom, brother. I got good times, man. I got crazy ways, daughter. I got million dollar charm, cousin. I got headaches and toothaches and bad times too like you... Saturday. Six-thirty AM. The bus up my street has almost every seat filled at this hour on the weekend. After the next stop, the bike rack is already full and at the stop after, a passenger brings a third inside.
...a weekend-night and day-drinking mainstay of young professionals who were big fans of its anchor bar, which doles out geeky beer and easy-drinking cocktails... ...warehouse-chic ambiance... ...a killer back patio... ...the road crews, maudlin-drunk insurance salesmen and local armchair quarterbacks... Pair drinks with indulgent gastropub-y bar snacks, like Gruyere-stuffed gougeres and one hell of a dry-aged burger. ...from hipsters to street folks. ...waits for a seat - there's no standing at the bar... - Westword, 1/25-31/2018
He had cried, he said, when the authorities delayed his journey to the battle front. Cried? I asked. A child cries when he cannot die yet? ..incredible and genuine and terrifying... I could not imagine this speech with any other army. ..the Iranian boy soldiers were all...priests, all preachers, al believers... "Our first duty is to kill...so that God's order will be everywhere. [To kill] as many...enemies as possible before [martyrdom] we must remain alive." ...the European renaissance had done away with religion [he said] concentrating only upon materialism. There was no staunching this monologue, no opportunity to transfuse this belief with...humanity or love. We looked into their eyes...children who were...already dead. They had started on their journey. [The Itanian Republican Guard troops] shouted at me when I took their pictures. "War until victory." These men...were going to their deaths in Iraq...with an insouciance, a light-headedness...
By early 1982, the Iranians were threatening to move across te border. If by entering Iraq the war could be ended... Khomeini...would surely want an Iraqi regime...loyal to him, a vassal state of Iran, or so the Arabs began to fear. The largest community in Lebanon...was Shia. Syria was...ruled by...a Shia sect... If Iraq was to fall to its own majority Shiites, there could be a Shia state from the Mediterranean to...Afghanistan... With both Iranian and Iraqi oil, Khomeini could undercut OPEC and control world oil prices... This, at least, was the nightmare of the Arabs and the Americans, one that Saddam was happy to promote. Now the Arab leaders who had expressed such confidence in Saddam were fearful that he might lose the war they had so cheerfully supported. "...Donald Rumsfeld was in Baghdad to meet Saddam and...treated like a king...all the people connected to the Americans." Around May 1985, a U.S. military delegation traveled to Baghdad..."the embassy wouldn't talk about it. ...they came on a special Pan Am plane. But the U.S. would not want Iraq to be a post-war regional power. - Fisk
Sunday. At the bus stop outside my place, it's been a while since I've seen the JW dudes peddling the Watchtower. I head out to breakfast before grocery shopping. After breakfast, I decide to get a hot chocolate. At the deathburger, a guy behind the counter in a Wallgreens cap (I am not at Wallgreens) tells me that they are out of hot chocolate. I get a hot chocolate from a nearby gas station instead. After shopping, I come out of the supermarket and I see an old guy slowly, slowly walk his bicycle and lean it against a table where employees take their breaks. He has a seat and his bike falls over. He does not even turn to look. I get the groceries home and am then off to another library used book sale. I bike to the train which takes me to a stop, where I haven't been since I can't remember anymore. I used to come this way on occasion when I worked for the previous owner of the company purchased by my current owner, and then closed. I remember standing at lonely stops along fields of weeds, early on a winter morning or late at night, by myself. The solitary life of a floater. I am alone again when a bus from the train station drops me on a corner where I look for lunch. I find it neither at a gas station or a Sonic, which appears only for customers with cars. I forgo lunch for the book sale. I am never disappointed at the interesting stuff I find at these hidden away libraries. The next morning, the JW dudes are at the bus stop across the street from where I live. I jump on an early bus to get a workout in before work. In the locker room at the gym, I listen to a couple of middle aged guys talking about the first porn movies each saw. It sounds as if these were in the 1970s. Then one of them hits the shower, while he listens to an audio recording of the Bible on speaker. The morning after, I am at a deathburger next to work, before my shift. In comes a woman in a grey perm. She asks for a manager, and tells her that she spoke with another manager fifteen minutes ago, to tell her that she was here for her "orientation." She claims that this other manager told her that they did not yet have her paperwork. "It's so hard when you are without work," she laments. "I have a medical clinic who wants to hire me." This manager tells her that she must do what is best for her, but that she does have her paperwork. Though they do orientations only once a week, she can get her orientation started. The woman isn't sure, because she repeats that the other manager told her that her paperwork was not yet complete. Jesus. Does she want a job or not? Ten years ago, people began losing their homes and their jobs. I head off to work. I'm am back three hours later for lunch. The woman is just now leaving. The next morning, the crosstown rolls past single detached family homes. Upon one big concrete covered porch, I see a single woman staring out at the morning traffic. She takes a long drag on a cigarette. She is in a sweatshirt with the name of the city football team and a backwards baseball cap. Her shoulder length hair has strands of grey. I feel as though I am watching a true northwest Denver scene.
