September 2019, "Blah ba blah ba Blah Ba BLAH! Asshole."

     I looked into a couple of vape lounges, but unfortunately, those didn't stay in business.  I...discovered the Coffee Joint, which is currently the only place in Denver to smoke legal cannabis.  Lit on Lit started was started when the Suspect Press team paired up with Colorado Cannabis Tours and Puff, Pass & Paint.  It got attention from..."Men's Journal", "Yahoo Finance", "High Times" and "Thrillist"...  [Certain marijuana] strains age generally the most preferred for creativity.  They help expand the imagination, enabling access to new thoughts, concepts and ideas.  Lit on Lit tends to draw a lot of journalists and other professional and technical writers - writers write...rarely for themselves.  - Westword, 9/5-11/2019

     ...I live through the moment.  ...in a boxing ring...with the next adversary who's come to knock me dead.  ...I get up and go out in the bloody mess again...  God, I get tired.  ...trying to find safe zones [to] relinquish my fear of people.  ...another hidden agenda masquerading as safe.  ...I keep breathing in the days...  - V. Bryant, vendor, Denver Voice, 9/2019

     Late last month, I was on my way to work.  Mid-morning.  I was just across some light rail tracks.  Next to the side of a building, in front of an industrial yard and across the street from a residential downtown neighborhood, lay a woman asleep.  She may have been homeless.  But her entire back and lower back were exposed.  And she is beautiful.  Sunday is the 1st.  I notice the sun just beginning to set a few minutes earlier.  School is back in session last week.  The sister and I make our annual pilgrimage to Boulder.  This year, the natural cold spring pool at El Dorado, along the way, is closed for renovation.  Yesterday, I worked my Saturday off until we closed early for the holiday.  I attempted to navigate my way on foot, past downtown's annual Labor Day festival event, to track down a free pedestrian mall shuttle.  I ride to one end of the mall to catch the last day of a contemporary art exhibition, after which I make my way back on a similar shuttle with middle-aged tourists making stupid jokes.  The festival downtown is called the Taste of Colorado, which one guy onboard refers to as "Taste."  It's a short hike back to work where I pick up my bike, and make it back home in time to grab dinner at a favorite place before grocery shopping.  In Boulder, we hit a favorite place on Boulder's Pearl Street mall before going to see an exhibition by the same artist at a Boulder gallery.  The young woman behind the desk is wearing the first US Army field jacket I've seen since a Tracy Ulman sketch decades ago.  Underneath she has on a Standing Rock T-shirt.  Boulder is home to the architecturally modern-looking University of Colorado, and the town has young women among the families which haunt the coffee shops and ice cream parlor.  They stroll among a classic car show and a small outdoor festival in a park across the street from the gallery.  We walk behind one which begins to dance to some music on a festival speaker.  For the first time since I can remember, I wonder what it would be like to be twenty years old again today.  One of the cars is a hot rod police car.  A driver fires up the engine.  The noise of the motor together with the sirens comes across as ridiculous.  A real police officer stands watch over the car.
     Labor Day.  I make my way, on a hot day, to the waterpark.  I can't believe it's the last day of the season to swim.  On the way out, a bridge goes across a creek and follows a long open grass space on one side, and trees on the other.  The waterpark is next to a kids' little farm.  It has some small animals and a children's locomotive train which runs the length of the grassy space.  The conductor waves at me as I pass him along the bike trail, on the way to swim.  On the way out, I pass the train again, and he waves at me a second time.  I must appear trustworthy.  On a second bridge, someone is flying a small kite in a breeze.  From there I pedal back to the train, which whips me downtown.  I grab dinner before heading off to the festival I navigated two days, and technically a month, prior.  I stop at the downtown deathburger homeless central.  My chain slips off the gears on the back rim, referred in cycling jargon as the "cassette."  This bike is perhaps a year old.  It's at the lowest end of the quality scale as it's from a department store.  It's beginning to feel as if it's coming apart.  In slipping it back on, my fingers become black with dirt, grease, and perhaps ground graphite.  I enter the eatery and ask to use the men's room to wash my hands.  The first answer is that I must make a purchase first.  I explain that I want to follow traditional norms and customs by fucking washing my hands.  Not in so many words.  Not that such language in this particular loony bin would so much as make an eye begin to think of blinking.  I'm told to find the custodian.  My search turns up no one.  I return to the counter, where I am told the custodian has just returned to the custodial closet.  Not is so many words.  I find the custodian, who does not appear to speak English, and tells me in Spanish that I must show a receipt to get to wash my hands.  I respond in Spanish with my desire to follow traditional norms and customs.  Not in English words.  She unlocks the door, with something like the button you push to unlock every door to your car.  A guy follows me in, and confides to me that he just wants "to get some water."  I don't tell him that I don't work there, and he isn't required to report to me.  This particular deathburger is, as always, full of the usual rotating roster of graduates of the street.  A woman in her sixties is quickly making her way around the circumference of the place, as I did a minute earlier searching for the gatekeeper to the soap and water.  She's in a sequined disco blouse and throwing out statements as she traverses the square footage.  In one sentence, she's telling no one in particular to fuck off.  In the flowing sentence, she claims that she's "ten years off of drugs.  That's everything."  I know that some who have particular mental health afflictions often self-medicate.  I can't tell if she is a casualty of narcotics or if she needs to return to them.  At least she's getting exercise.  My old deathburger, from the first half of this decade, I used to see the indie of at 5 AM.  The homeless were few, and they were regulars.  And they were QUIET.

     For more than a decade, sensitivity has...supposed to [distinguish] an educated, middle-class male from...blue-collar...men...trapped in the "traditional" male role, "where interpersonal and emotional skills are relatively undeveloped."  No one, of course, has measured sensitivity and plotted it as a function of social class.  [In fact,] it is blue-collar men who express less "traditional" or "macho" values…  ...the androgynous drift of the consumer culture.  It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic...  ...our collective values are shifting away from the liberal, unisex ideals of the seventies toward something more belligerent.  ...the post détente militarism of the eighties...  - Ehrenreich

     Tuesday.  Back to work.  I stop at a gas station near work.  It has its own roster of wandering derelicts.  A guy in a yellow construction vest stands as he's entering the place.  He's giving a lecture about the amount of work he does to a woman who has asked him for money.  Her response to him is, "Blah ba blah ba Blah Ba BLAH!  Asshole."  The following morning.  I'm out of the house as soon as I wake up.  The previous day, much work was left behind.  Along the way to work, I stop at the downtown supermarket.  When I come out, I pass through a covered open space under a building.  It's a popular shelter for homeless.  This morning, it's host to a young guy bending over a shopping cart.  The guy has what appear to be some kind of Pacific island tattoos on his ace.  The cart is filled with stuff, including a skateboard.  he appears to be working on a panhandling sign.  From around the corner comes a woman perhaps in her sixties.  She has long stringy hair, and she's using a collapsible shopping cart as a walker.  The cart is empty except for a sing lining the bottom.  It appears to be some kind of promotional sign which reads, "Elvis Presley."
     Sunday.  I trim down my list of potential activities on this, my one day off this weekend.  I skip the biannual metaphysical fair, an audio tech convention, and an art festival.  My single choice, a library used book sale across town, it turns out took me all day.  That I had a good sleep the night before  means I get a late start.  I head out under clear blue sky, grab a late breakfast, swing by the pharmacy inside my neighborhood supermarket.  It's almost never open when I do grocery shopping.  Then I make the slog across the bridge over the interstate to the train station.  The train whips me to the stop where, during this past summer, I would disembark for the water park.  In fact, I pedal past it, now closed until next season.  From late 2015, until just over two years ago, I used to make this trip to work six days a week.  It's noticeably colder today than the past couple of months of close to 100 degree days.  Typical Colorado.  As soon as September arrives, the temperature makes a turn down.  Down the trail, I arrive at my old shopping center.  I stop into a grocery for something to drink.  I used to come in here all the time over a couple of years.  I unsuspectedly grab some tea with active probiotic alcohol.  I make the purchase, take it back, am taken around the place to find cold non-active-probiotic-alcoholic tea...which we never find.  I have a quick salad and warm normal tea for lunch.  The sky is now filled with a growing thunderstorm.  This stretch of crosstown road leads to a dead end, requiring me to turn off onto a series of gravel trails which twist and turn between neighborhoods.  I come out into one of them as I am passed by a young female runner.  I ask her how close I am to my destination and she ignores me.  Shortly thereafter, a middle-aged guy points me the right way.
     After a slog up another long hill, at the top is the library.  It's next to an assisted living complex.  On the front steps, a folksy volunteer is handing out bags for books.  He's reminding each and every patron who arrives, "It's bag day.  Know what that is?"  One bag of books: seven dollars.  I score three books and I head out under overcast and darkening skies.  I roll toward the train home.  I stop at a gas station for more hydration.  I watch an Indian guy with a long beard lock the door and go to the men's room.  Some seven customers assemble before his return.  One of them shows me her phone, with directions to the train.  I get there before the rain begins in earnest.  The train makes it's way north to my stop.  The conductor comes over the intercom and mentions that we will be going only about half the way.  I can't hear him that well.  I think he mentions something about a football game.  I disembark and discover that the elevator from the train below to the ground above is "out of order."  As I carry my bike with books on the rack, I hear a passenger who is learning of the interruption in service.  he is yelling across the station, "Are...you...shitting me?!"  I stop into another supermarket for an item I can't get at my own neighborhood's supermarket, and I go next door to an IHOP.  I lock up my bike under an overhanging piece of roof and I'm inside when the sky opens up.  It's a deluge of rain.  The manager invites me to bring my bike inside.  He tells me that his kitchen workers had their own bicycles stolen from behind the place.  He says that it was some homeless.
     It's Thursday of the following week.  In the morning, I'm on my way to work.  I stop at a 7-Eleven which is a kind of crossroads for the lower classes and the transients.  It's a kind of snapshot, perhaps of the current economic dynamic.  The last guy I saw here had a bike, and was wearing nothing but underwear.  Powerful testimony.  This morning, there is a homeless couple who appear to be approaching their sixties.  They are both tall and lanky.  The guy is missing his bottom front teeth.  He's dressed as an eighties rocker, and holds a card with a magnetic stripe in his hand.  They both have a single bicycle and a bike trailer between them.  The guy waits for the woman to come out of the store.  A flatbed tow truck pulls into a parking space.  The driver steps down from the cab and slowly makes his way inside.  He's a young guy with a long dark perm.  He's in Capri-length denim shorts with a patch over each back pocket.  I don't think I've seen patches on denim back pockets since I was in grade school.  As I said, powerful testimony.  Down from the passenger seat steps a young woman with sky blue hair.  She follows him inside.  he comes out again and climbs in the cab.  he starts up the truck and slowly backs out to move over to the gas pumps.  The blue-haired lady comes running out and yells his name, barreling over to his door.  I stop back here after work.  At sundown, I'm sitting on a stone ledge outside, eating a couple slices of pizza.  A middle-aged guy in a worn black leather sport coat comes over from the sidewalk.  He tells me a story about his bike being stolen from here.  He then runs through traffic across the street.  The following evening, I'm on my way home after work.  When I get out on time, such as this evening, twilight seems to follow right on the heels of sundown.  It's dark by the time I'm climbing the hills through the neighborhood between the trail and my home.  I'm rolling a residential crosstown street, past a small apartment complex with Mexican residents, children playing in the yard.  An adult lays on his back inside the covered cab over the bed of his truck.  Kids yell to each other.  Adults yell to the kids.  Adults are on their phones.  It's a familiar cultural dynamic.  Opposite the apartment complex is a perpendicular street which stretches uphill.  Down the hill comes slowly strolling a Caucasian couple, late twenties or early thirties.  They are almost statuesque, even in the dark.  The lady has long brunette hair.  The gentleman has a trimmed dark beard.  He hold the leash of a dog.  A late model Corvette rolls up to an intersection behind them.  After is crawls across the street, it jackrabbits.  The couple turns their heads.  Powerful testimony.
     The beginning of the following week.  I'm climbing the last long hill home after work.  In the dark is a Caucasian woman walking her dog.  She's in a shirt which reads on the back, "Denver Dog Walker.com."  Friday morning.  I sneak in next week's grocery shopping before work.  I'm then on my way to work late in one of the month's waning mild mornings.  I'm passing the park in the neighborhood between my own and the bike trail.  Running in front of me is a young Caucasian mom pushing a three-wheeled stroller with a pair of children inside.  It's at least the second Caucasian parent running along this park with a three-wheeled stroller inside of a minute.  I notice that the color of her tank top matches my shirt.  I slow down alongside her to mention that, "We have the same shirt on."  She pulls out her earbuds to hear me.  He response is, "Yup."  Disinterest or contempt?  Nice to meet you too...neighbor.  Saturday.  I had hoped to get a haircut after arriving home from work.  However, for the second Saturday in a row, I stay three hours after close.  Sunday morning I do laundry and dishes.  Now, I am ready for a day in the mountains with the sister.  When I return home, I then pay a visit to the gorgeous Mrs. Thuy (pronounced "Twee"), the most beautiful Vietnamese woman in her 50s who you will ever meet.  And also my barber.  My late mom referred to her as Mrs. "Tweety."  I mention to her that the parking lot of the garage on my corner was first torn up.  Then, late this past week, the garage itself was demolished.  I ask her if she think that new condos will arise in its place.  She happens to know that a Vietnamese grocery, currently leasing space down the street, has purchased the land.  A new Vietnamese grocery will be going up, right next to where I live.

     ...all the changes in the area, including encroaching gentrification, make members [of the downtown Japanese community] uneasy...  "Where things were set in stone, they're now back to square one.  It's the only home we have in Denver."  ...the prospect of [downtown Denver's] Sakura Square's identity being subsumed by the city around it is 'heartbreaking."  Keeping the neighborhood together, making sure that "existing businesses are not to be displaced"...  Forced into a tiny pocket of the city, they made a community.  A temple, a grocery store, a block in the center of a city's identity crisis.  - Westword, 9/12-18/2019

Heavy snow falls.  It's wet ice.  Everyone
looks dismal in this down town.  I stand, dark
and dismal...
watching another high rise of homes being
built.  The BANG
BANG BANG on large hollow iron pipes like
empty bells without a song.
The snowfall feels like...
wet snowballs from the arctic that
don't miss slapping me in my face.  I can
no longer feel my fingers, toes or nose.
I start to walk for warmth.  And then I
remember: at least today I have a
warm, warm room.
- M. R. Dixon, Denver Voice, 9/2019

     Monday.  The arrival of Autumn brings the perfect temperatures.  An illusion which hides the cooler weather just beyond.  I come to find out, from my boss at work, that the owner came in Sunday to do some work.  The manager himself showed up at his usual hour of 4 AM on Monday.  Each of them saw our tiny parking lot behind our business with around fifty homeless sitting on the asphalt, some sleeping, some cooking.  All having a fine time.  The manager describes them as something of a "caravan"-like group.  The owner of the restaurant next door cleaned up their refuse, including half of an umbrella frame.  One of his employees tells me that, after sundown out back, she has seen homeless who have acquired some of the bicycles which the city charges a fee to ride.  You can pick them up at stands where they are parked across the metro area.  She has seen them stripping these bikes for tires and other parts.  She called the city to notify them, but after being put on hold for fifteen minutes, gave up.  After a couple of hours at work, I take my lunch and walk a block to a gas station for lunch, only to discover that there is nothing there to eat for lunch, which sometimes happens mid-afternoon.  As I am walking back to work, I spy a brand new food court.  I go inside for a chicken Cesar salad to go.  Salad in hand, I'm out the door.  Around the corner is a parking lot.  On the ground sits a guy who asks me if he can have my "leftovers."  Back at work, a couple of vendors of the local homeless newspaper come inside to sell me a copy.  Capitalism, crime, and some kind of caravan.  Thursday.  I'm coming off the bike trail.  Crawling up a ramp, I'm behind a homeless couple pushing a shopping cart full of stuff.  They are going as fast as they can.  I'm going as slow as I can.  On Friday, I'm on my way home from work, just around the corner from this ramp.  I'm on a sidewalk next to a long building, with a covered entrance which is a favorite of the homeless.  I'm approaching some railroad tracks which I am prevented from crossing on a regular basis by a passing train.  The street is a busy thoroughfare which intersects with both a busy avenue and the on ramp for an interstate, which runs right next to the thoroughfare.  Coming across the middle of the street is a young homeless guy carrying an unrolled sleeping bag.  He says to me, "Hey it's about to rain and I got a big fat joint if you want to smoke it under the shelter."  By "shelter" I assume he means the covered entrance.  I decline his offer, telling him I don't smoke.  Not even big fat joints.  He replies, "That's cool..." and then repeats exactly what he said.
     Sunday.  I'm coming back from a movie, and going across town to pick up a low carb product at a store full of low carb products and low car advice.  Their door reads "Sunday 1 - 5."  I arrive smack at 3 PM.  Crickets.  On my way back home, I top a hill at an intersection of two busy residential streets, Virginia and Tejon.  From here, I have a view of downtown from the southwest, spread out before me.  I stop and take a look.  Sunset isn't far away and the sun shines directly on the scene.  I can make out at least two red construction cranes rising over building sites.  The following evening, after an eleven-hour day at work, I'm home around 11 AM.  Across the street, at the renovated apartments full of Mormons and other assorted Caucasian college-types, a lone woman sits on the steps.  She's in fur and sparkly pants.  She's looking at her phone, and I hear her sobbing.  Strange Autumn portents.
   

August 2019

     ...down any road in America...you can...find a story.  We did that when we were on tour.  ...a lot of that has vanished.  I think timelessness is what makes good writing.  Even if you aren't familiar with the time or the place.  - Out Front Magazine, 7/3/2019

     I'm home from work last night, headed across the street to the Chinese place.  Out front is another panhandler, a guy I haven't seen before.  He's tall, lanky, and young.  He appears as if he should otherwise be downtown in a shirt and tie.  But he's here.  His hair has that matted appearance and his skin is covered in dirt. He mumbles to himself until I pass him, when he instantly becomes lucid and asks me clearly for a dollar.  Thursday the 1st, August proper.  I'm at work when a customer comes in.  She's in denim cutoff hot pants and has her blouse tied in front.  Topped off with a mesh Fedora.  It appears as if she forgot to put her sexuality away.  She makes a joke and touches my hand.  This is no Daisy Duke.  She has this trippy, stoner way she moves.  She drops off some alterations, one of which is an old Army jacket with a smiley face patch.  On the patch, the eyes are marijuana leaves.  When she emphasizes a point, she opens her eyes wide, as if she's terrified.  Her voice slithers like movement underneath a bedsheet.
     Friday is my birthday.  I do some dishes, water the flowers.  I'm rolling down an alley behind my old bus stop.  In the shade of a big tree, hung over a vine covered chain link fence, is an old television antenna.  Out of the alley and around the corner.  I'm rolling past the park, where a tall and golden-haired female Caucasian is in a long white sleeveless blouse.  She's angel-like as she walks her dog.  These are hot mid-summer days.  I turn onto the trail just before going under the bridge.  Yesterday morning, there was a sandwich sign here on the side of the trail.  It warns cyclists about the blind spot in each direction and to watch for other cyclists.  This morning, the sign is gone.  Has the problem been solved?  I'm under the bridge without colliding with anyone else, and off the trail.  I'm on the bridge I just passed under, headed across the river.  Immediately after is the bridge over the interstate.  To proceed from one to the other, I must cross the off ramp from the interstate to the avenue.  Traffic predominantly looks left toward oncoming traffic, not to the right to see me.  This morning, there is a cyclist coming from the direction of the street traffic.  She's a curvy female in a bright green tank top.  She catches the attention of the male driver waiting to turn in front of me.  He stops for her, allowing me to cross as well headed the opposite way.  I work a full day before having a nice little dinner with the sister on the way home.  We decide to close down our late mom's checking account.  For me, there is something especially final about this single act.
     Saturday.  That was possibly the fastest birthday I've ever had.  And with my birthday gone, I feel like we are headed toward the end of the summer.  I must ensure that I get the last swims in at the water park.  But not so fast.  I don't have time to get to all the festivals going on today, and I get a late start.  I suspect that the two are related.  I check yesterday's mail.  I have my next door neighbor's tax refund.  I ring my neighbor's bell and the wife answers.  She's been waiting for this check.  All well that ends well...from the IRS.  I head out to grocery shop, hit my usual diner along the way, tell them yesterday was my birthday.  I haven't finished reading a weekly newspaper at work and must skip ahead to the events section to see what's up for the weekend.  There's an Ethiopian Festival.  It's almost all the way to the airport.  They offer me a free piece of pie.  I take a rain check as the day is already getting away from me.  I'm back from shopping and look at my festival options, including swimming.  I pass on the Ethiopian Fest.  Though it's only going on today, it appears to be very small, and may take all afternoon to get to.  And back again.  I was in this same movie a week or two ago.  I elect instead to return to the pool at my rec center and elect to check out an "International Festival" in the park downtown.  Along the way, I grab a late lunch at a darkly lit diner I've been to a while ago.  It's just outside of the city center.  It's a kind of sports bar with nineteenth century wallpaper behind the bar.  Decades old punk rock plays from the sound system.  I'm listening to The Descendants for the first time in thirty years.  The hostess is in a low cut dress with spaghetti straps, revealing the tattoo right between her breasts.  It is quite a hot day.  This has been a sexy kind of birthday weekend.  She has black combat boots, to match the music I guess.  After lunch, I'm off to grab a doughnut at the doughnut place.
     Then I'm off to the pool, where half the families are Caucasian.  It's new apparently middle-class Caucasians with the long time residents.  Sitting and waiting for the three o' clock break to be over, I have a brief conversation with a woman I a wheelchair.  She knows the lady behind the desk at the gym.  "She knows a lot about computers.  Have you heard the blonde joke about computers?  A blonde's computer is the one with white out all over the screen." she tells me.  From there, I head over to the fest in the park.  I pick up a free pinwheel at a belly dance booth, to replace the one which I would put outside each summer, and finally fell apart.  I watch some beautiful Persian dancing in the amphitheater.  Some kind of security guy hangs out at the top of some stairs.  I can't decode the acronym on the back of his shirt.  On the way home, I'm coming down one of the streets along the interstate, it's old immigrant homes being replaced by hipsters and others with a lighter skin tone.  At one corner, the street is blocked off.  The neighbors are having a block party.  I navigate the blockage by going up onto the sidewalk.  The only neighbors I notice are Caucasian.  If they weren't, every day would be like a block party.  With an open street.  Along the way, I realize that, I left downtown just about the time I would have if I had worked this Saturday.  And I'm taking the same route home.  I'm looking for a men's room.  I know of a 7-Eleven along the way.  When I go inside, the clerk tells me that a customer broke the key off in the lock and it's closed and locked.  When I arrive back home, I'm watering my flowers in the courtyard when one of my neighbors comes outside.  I mention that an unknown neighbor has been spraying the weeds for me, and it's appreciated.  I also take the time to tell her that my mom is no longer with us.

     ...computerized polling...eliminated...canvassing...  ...the televised campaign commercial...eliminated the issues and, hence, the arguments.  Throughout the eighties [Democratic] party leaders kept the voters at bay with the catchwords "growth," "strength" and "family"...  [The Democratic] party chairman announced a meditative retreat in search of "new ideas," which optimists interpreted as a code for "white male voters."  ...no voters a all were being sought.  Loyal rank-and-file members...were asked to bur their voter registration cards and withdraw discreetly into private life.  ..."liberal" was not always...a loose way to cover everyone from sex educators to socialists.  hen the liberals went underground, it was left to...the feminists, peace activists, rainbow coalitionists, socialists, union militants...to defend social programs...  - Ehrenreich

     …"the city seems to be less interested in housing the people who live here and more interested in housing for people who have yet to move here.  ...they're less concerned about people...currently in the street than...preventing people...in housing...from going out to the street."  …"so the city has kind of doubled down on enforcement...moving people around...to make the visible homelessness go away."  - Westword, 8/8-14/2019

     ...an increasingly concrete Denver, maintaining green space...should be an urgent priority.  ...being a developer is "probably the most hated profession...people automatically don't like you if you're a developer, in Denver at least."  ...to go through...a "beautiful" area plan drafting process led by the city.  - Westword, 8/1-7/2019

     Skyscrapers are eating up the downtown view, devouring independent coffee shops, mom-and-pop Italian restaurants and small corner stores.  Which makes it more exciting than ever to support your own favorite new ventures, celebrating the independent spirit of living here.  - Elevation Outdoors, 8/2019

     ...Denver has started to grow...  The black community is...starting to move out of the neighborhood.  Denver's black community needs...black-owned businesses...to survive.  They become a refuge...  "We've kind of become the anchor.  You can develop this space and still include us."  ...the feeling in Denver right now is to scrape and start fresh...  "I feel like the belief is, in order to improve something, you gotta erase what's there.  You don't have to erase us.  We don't have to be carnage in that process.  It's kind of a nightmare that we're losing all these spaces"...where Denver activists meet.  ...the Whittier café hosted a fundraiser...for...a 17-year-old girl who was...killed by Denver Police.  ...after a different coffee shop refused...  Since then...activists consider the café to be a home base when talking about progressive candidates or violence in the community.  ...when minority-owned businesses start to close down.  Where will those people go to find members of their own communities?  - Life On Capitol Hill, 8/2019

     The most famous man in the state of Colorado looked like he had just finished playing 18 holes...  Hell, he may have.  Wearing khaki shorts and a colorful, fitted Polo...  From the TV guys to the writers, to the shock jocks on the radio, no one was going to turn down free food courtesy the organization that was just valued at $2.65 billion...  - Mile High Sports, 8/2019

     ...younger people now...don't have much hope.  It's impossible to move out.  It's impossible to buy a car.  It's impossible to pay insurance.  It's impossible to rent a place.  - Out Front Magazine, 7/3/2019

     ...there are...all of these amazing younger artists who are working here.  But it's harder for them to find...studio space throughout the city.  ...and it's harder for them to thrive.  It's just a more expensive city.  A recent body of work...was...looking at the border between a gentrified house or a new home and an old one and pulling out - calling out - the contrast, and calling out the rapidity with which things are changing in certain neighborhoods.  The one area that everyone...that's a part of the art world...in this city...recognizes could be strengthened is the opportunity for critical discussion.  I really see MCA [the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver] being able to occupy that role more fully, and there are many ways we can go about that.  But artists are hungry for it.  - Westword, 8/29 - 9/4/2019

     The following Wednesday morning, I'm on the way to work, headed through the underpass just onto the bike trail.  There is a homeless guy who spots another guy approaching us from the other way.  The homeless appears to recognize him and tells him so as a pigeon flies past my face, so close that I can feel the wind of its wings.  The other guy says hi, "but I don't have a cigarette."  The following evening, I'm on my way home form work.  I'm back in the neighborhood between my own and the bike trail.  I'm rolling past a house with several additions built onto it and repainted.  Standing in the driveway, next to a U-Haul trailer, is a group of perhaps ten twentysomethings.  One guy with a beer is in overalls, and appears to have a mop of white hair inside a headband.  I hear a young woman giggle.  I crawl up a steep hill and turn a couple of corners before I am down the way and at the park with the Caucasians with dogs.  This evening, a big inflatable movie screen sits in a corner.  A woman with a microphone is raffling prizes in Spanish to a crowd in lawn chairs, before The Incredibles 2 begins.  In the near distance, lightning flashes from a dark horizon.  Thunders quietly rumbles and rain spits.  Saturday is my turn to work.  Ahead of me will be a 9 1/2-hour day.  This morning I make the trek through the neighborhood between my own and the bike trail, the neighborhood with the rapidly changing demographics.  Past the park and down a hill, I'm rolling up on a young Caucasian woman in a workout top and hot pink shorts, walking her little dog.  Approaching her is a young bearded guy in a college T-shirt, walking his own dog.  Can this pair find love in a place of Mexicans racing pickup trucks and little cars with spoilers and damaged bodies?  On this same corner, another Caucasian goes past.  He's on his own bicycle with saddlebags and a radio playing music.  He himself is in black Lycra under his neon yellow vest.  Some ten hours later, I step out of the front door of work and lock it behind me.  It's 7:30 PM.  Just a few yards away, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, is a balding guy with what little hair he has tied back in a pencil thin pigtail.  Groovy.  He's organizing papers on the concrete.  As I climb past him uphill, he asks me, "Got a light?"  Is he going to burn some documents?  In the next block is a old guy in a green camouflaged long-sleeved shirt and pants.  He's hustling the restaurant patrons on the outdoor patio.  A half hour I'm climbing the steepest hill on my way home.  It's twilight, and I just passed a long white-haired and bearded guy.  He's going my way on an electric bike.  He's in a Dish TV T-shirt.  He passes me uphill with the electric motor.
     Sunday.  I'm once again at the downtown Chilis, after a swim at the waterpark.  At the Chilis across the boulevard from where I drop off film, the host and servers are on the ball and quick.  I never have to run them down.  But I'm not at that Chilis.  I'm downtown.  I come inside right before a couple, and the tree of us stand at the front.  The host comes out and welcomes me.  She waves an index finger around.  I assume she's asking if we are together.  "Just me," I reply.  "Dining room, bar, or patio?" she inquires.  I ask for the dining room.  It looks like rain.  She smiles and points to my bike helmet, and says nothing.  I mention that I said "dining room."  I'm seated at a wobbly table which I keep my foot on.

     ...give them a few hours and a sympathetic face...and they'll be telling you about the Bermuda Triangle, or a personal appearance by Jesus or a deceased relative, or what they were doing three hundred years ago...  When social life lacks a transcendent dimension, people start...hustling the occult.  ...the problem is not just the emptiness of the middle-class, American life...  ...to rise above the depoliticized culture...  ...the vocabulary for collective moral discourse.  ...that is, "socialism" - or more properly "'democratic' socialism."  ...it is the only word we have that attempts to bridge the gap between our private notions of...morality and the...political economy.  ...it is still the only vision we have - the only modernist vision...in which individual desire might be reconciled with collective need.  The alternative [to a] technocratic approach...is to rediscover socialism itself as an evangelical, visionary cause...  [Together, using conversation as art, the] sharing of personal experience, the weaving of the personal into the general and political, the adventure of...speculation unrestrained...  - Ehrenreich

     On Monday, I'm on my way to the bike trail through the neighborhood between there and my home.  I'm coming down the steepest hill before I make a turn.  I watch from around the corner come a tall young Caucasian guy on a skateboard.  He's in a black T-shirt and black pants, and his hair reaches to the middle of his back.  I'm home after work as twilight falls.  I'm on my way across the street to the Chinese place.  I pass the apartments across from where I live.  In the parking lot, sitting on the edge of the bed of a pickup, are a pair of young Caucasian women in these odd dresses.  The kind of dresses you might see on school children.  The way they are sitting, demure and waiting for someone to take them by the hand.  A couple of young Caucasian guys come out in shorts and T-shirts.  On the way home, I've been watching a gathering thunderstorm as the sun sets.  As I'm looking at the screen of my camera, lightning begins to flash at the base of this storm.  It begins to push the air ahead of its path as a wind arrives.  I collect my Chinese food and return to my own parking lot.  I watch a young Caucasian couple running together past me.
     Tuesday.  Out of the door a couple of hours earlier than usual.  On my corner is a Caucasian guy with a backpack.  He appears to be a student.  Perhaps a half hour later, I'm at the downtown supermarket.  Next to it is a kind of covered plaza space in place of where the first story of a building would otherwise be.  A grey haired police officer appears to be giving directions to a homeless guy who he has just woken up.  The officer is gesturing with his arms.  The homeless guy is wearing a T-shirt with "Class of 2022" on the front.  He'll be a returning sophomore this fall.  After the supermarket, I swing past a gas station where a younger homeless guy is seated with his own bicycle.  He asks, "Need any bike lights, brother?"  The following evening, I'm on my way home after work.  A downtown homeless guy, a little guy, is hidden behind a stone wall of a bridge over an underpass.  He appears to be one of these guys who have been disconnected from society and culture for some time.  He tells me, "I like your purple socks."  I'm wearing pink dress socks.  The bridges, one after the other over first the interstate and then the river, are my final passages out of downtown.  Then it's across the tracks and up what seems as nothing but hills.  My last turn onto my street is past the park down said street.  This evening, I see the neon green frisbee being used kind of as a football.  Then I hear English.  Then I notice the group of young men with the frisbee are Caucasian.
     Thursday evening.  I'm just off the bike trail and across some railroad tracks.  A Caucasian guy is out running with his dogs.  One begins barking at me when he immediately addresses the dog.  "Shut up!"  Twenty-three hours later, I'm headed crosstown through the same neighborhood.  In the setting sun, I can spot a Caucasian guy from a block away.  His long blonde hair is backlit in the last rays.  He's out...walking his dog.  I make one of my last turns up a long hill.  Approaching a parked minivan is a young mom holding her grade school aged boy.  "I want water," says the boy.  "You want water?" she replies.  I wonder if his dad is the young guy I see running from door to door.  He's in slacks and a Polo shirt, and he's holding what appears to be some kind of leather notebook.  The following day is my turn to have Saturday off.  I'm on the bus home from grocery shopping with a grey-haired drunk who is going on about someone he thinks is an asshole.  The passenger behind him says quietly to him, "I'm going to say this once.  I'm going to say this once.  Shut your fucking mouth."  Later on, on the way home, I have dinner at a deathburger on the boulevard which I used to live.  A homeless guy appears to be able to sit inside in exchange for wiping down tables.  He mentions something to the women behind the counter about not having his back teeth.  I had stopped on this corner to get a card from a metaphysical book store.  The entire strip mall is gone.  In its place is a brand new condo development.  The following morning, I have a late breakfast with the sister, celebrating this Monday's birthday of my late mom.  She's back from a trip to Taos, where she was outside of a store with the Mexican shop owner who spoke no English.  A truck with a couple of white guys drove past them, and one guy told the shop owner to go home.  In the early evening, I swing past the home of a former coworker.  I sit with her and her sister, also a former coworker.  Everyone there is Mexican but myself.  I attempt to explain in Spanish, and translation with the help of a daughter, the craziness of the final days our former company existed.  A third coworker drops by with her family.  I play with a two 1/2-year-old.
     Monday.  I stop at a gas station before work for breakfast, and some 12 hours later, I am back there after work for dinner.  A nut comes by on a bicycle.  He has shoulder-length dreadlocks and he's wearing underwear and shoes.  He's yelling at his bike to stand up.  He complains to no one that some random clerk has no respect for him.  Or his underwear, I suspect.  An extra disc brake dangles, attached from a backpack around his shoulders.  A female street person arrives on her ow bike.  I've never seen her before.  She tells me that she ran over her plastic cup from the gas station by mistake, that this morning she argued with the clerk inside over a free coffee.  The underwear guy tells her that clerks in general have no respect.  I'm reminded of a joke, which somehow no longer appears to be a joke, made by a comic I heard on the radio.  A homeless guy asks for money from a guy passing him on the street.  The guy passing by replies with the standard, "Get a job."  The comic then goes on, "I don't think it will be that easy for this guy to get a job.  He was wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants.  I predict trouble during the interview.  I think that even McDonalds has a policy of wearing your underwear on the inside."  Two days later, I'm at the gym in the morning, where a woman in a wheelchair threatened to run over me two mornings earlier.  I'm changing my shirt outside as a trio of high school-going-on-30 guys approach.  One is headed inside as he tells the others, "Catch me at lunch time.  Lunch is 11:35, right?  Oh, and Sayeed says tell everyone, 'What's up?'  He most likely gets out in September."  Six and a half hours later, I'm out of work early.  I decide to take a roll of film across town to the camera shop.
     I take a popular bike trail from downtown into my old neighborhood.  On a corner, a young woman on her phone asks me where to catch a bus.  She does not appear to understand English well, and does slightly better with Spanish.  I continue to attempt to motion her off the bike lanes and onto to the grass.  This is like a bicycle interstate highway and she will be hit.  I point across the boulevard where a bus is stopped.  She makes her way toward it, still having difficulty comprehending that bikes are always around the corner, waiting to flatten her.  I stop at the mall for dinner before heading over to the camera store.  My tall, photographic, hippie goddess is on a months-long trip around Cambodia, and she may not come back.  I was not informed that my club membership expired a couple of months ago and I renew it.  From there, I stop by where some old coworkers now work to leave a greeting, grab some ice cream from a popular shop, and I put on my poncho at the sound of thunder.  I ride toward home as hail begins.  Lightning and thunder is not far overhead.  I cross a park and join a soaked young female runner waiting at a light.  I mention to her that, "There's nothing like a milk shake in the hail."  I arrive at a train station and grab a bus.  On the short bus ride back home, I ride through heavy hail which beats the windows and loud thunder and lightning.  I eventually notice, as I drink my milk shake, melted ice cream runs down the front of my poncho.  Are you freaking kidding me?  I disembark in some of the heaviest rain and hail I remember being in.  Thunder and lightning follow me the last yards home.
     Two days later.  It's been a summer of waiting for my late mom's hospital bill, of an oral surgeon contradicting my regular dentist, of my primary care physician ordering tests for me, of my having to sit down with my doctor's referral person during a separate appointment to communicate a code number to my insurance company which it is able to recognize, of my doctor's faulty fax machine requiring me to physically walk the fax info to another medical office which it turns out is not in my insurance company's network in the first place, and so on.  I wonder if I should be surprised at this point that the summer is almost over?  After completing one of said tests, I stop into the downtown deathburger homeless central for a bite before work.  Inside are the usual street folk, the occasional downtown office employee, and a trio of folks who appear to be "in character" for some comic convention.  Rounding out the menagerie are a pair of outpatients, indeed on an outing with their minder.  The day after I have off.  One week later is my Saturday to work.  Past the park down the street, I see more Caucasians walking dogs than I ever have here before.  On the trail through the underpass, a young guy with no shirt and dreadlocks is stopped on his bike.  Out through, up and onto the street over the young guy with dreadlocks beneath, over the river, and onto the next bridge, which is over the interstate, a young street-dwelling couple, each on a bicycle, are stopped on the bridge arguing with each other.  At work, I stay an extra three full hours after close so that we have no work to walk into on the coming Monday.  Sunday I do a little grocery shopping, and then it's off to the waterpark.  This may be my final trip there this season.  Next week is Labor Day weekend, and I may not make it.  As for this early afternoon, I'm headed down my street for the train station.  I have a transit pass which is still good for another hour.  Down my street, a couple of Harley riders have to stop for a woman crossing the street with a walker.  Neither of them have helmets, but they never forget their leather vests.  I see more Harleys down the street and still no helmets.  I guess it wouldn't be a Harley with a helmet.  Live fast and die with your brains hanging out.  After my swim, I disembark from the train, grab lunch at a deathburger, and go on another wild goose chase for a non-existent outdoor market before swinging by a theater close by.  I check what's playing and when before I decide to head home.  I'm back on the bridge over the interstate when I end up behind a woman on a bicycle with bags hanging off every part of the frame.

     "[The centralized state structures of] Syria and Iraq will, in the final analysis, be undermined by regionalism."  ...a grimy rising plain...merged with the leaden clouds.  Kurdistan was more real than several score of the nation-states officially recognized by the world community.  "Leh, leh, leh-leh-leh" blared from the scratchy cassette.  This was the music of the Kurdish guerrillas, the Pesh Mergas - "Those that walk before death."  Before the 1980s.  There was nothing here but the usual mud and dust.  ...from the stone age to shopping malls without any intermediate steps...  The third world town of the future - a free zone of creative chaos where regionalism had replaced nation-statism.  - Kaplan

     Friday is the last day of the week before Labor Day weekend.  I have a dentist appointment before work.  It's one which has been waiting for more than one financial shoe to drop.  I now know what my late mom's hospital bill is.  Finally.  I have a good idea of my share for the cost of two tests my primary care physician wants me to have.  Finally.  And I've made a decision concerning oral surgery my dentist wanted me to have, reversing my original decision 180 degrees.  It's been something of a contrast, a long summer which has flown past.  It's my new life.  Before going to my appointment, I stop by the current place of employment for a couple of women I worked with for a decade.  The owner of their current place is thin, wears a back brace over his dress shirt and slacks, and appears nervous that I am around.  I then hit an organic grocer for a buffet breakfast before crossing the street to pick up some photos.  Around the corner is yet another woman I worked with, before I worked with the first pair.  This one is just about the age I was when we worked together.  She is still tall and thin with long blonde hair, and perhaps the most beautiful woman I know.  We discuss the homeless around her store.  I'm glad she and I are still friends.  Then it's off to the dentist, who now wants to see me every four months instead of six, for a more frequent cleaning of my teeth.  Hey, why not.  I will be coming here even more often now, even though the last three homes I lived in here have long since been "scraped."  I didn't realize until my last trip to the gym, the public pools probably shut down the middle of this month.  This weekend is the final one the waterpark will be open.  How did such a long month disappear?  Because I practically live at work now, we are so busy.  I will soon be staring down the end of the year as well.

CBS vs. The Star Trek Discovery Hate Boner, revised

     Here ye here ye here ye.  All rise.  The court of public opinion is now in session, the Honorable Judge YouTube presiding.

     It's hard to believe that it's been two full seasons since the launch of Star Trek Discovery, on CBS All Access streaming service.  To this day, I've never figured out how to get hooked up with CBS All Access.  Everything I've seen of the show is direct from the internet.  I believe that I first saw the Discovery in a post of a clip of its unveiling at a convention.  I agreed with fans that it appeared to be a terrible design.  I first noticed that they changed the engines this month, on my Star Trek Ships of the Line calendar.  Love the new engines.  I think that it was last year.  Someone posted the first episode of season one online.  I thought that the dialogue was terrible.  I didn't realize after watching it that the main character is Spock's half-sister, or that the character is transgendered.  I had trouble understanding what the plot was.  The ship which appears to be a variation of the old Enterprise NX-1 shows up to investigate a Klingon ship.  Why?  I don't know why a Klingon ship needs investigation.  Was it in Federation space?  I don't know.  Then there was a bright light.  The main character knocked out the captain, and when the captain came to, she put the main character into the brig.  This is all I knew of Star Trek Discovery until this year.
     Some months ago, I stumbled onto something called Midnight's Edge.  Generally speaking, it's a kind of online public disclosure channel about new science fiction television programming and film releases.  Lately, it's been a magnet for those accused of having what one critic of the channel refers to as a "hate boner for" the CBS All Access program Star Trek Discovery.  I found it when I was looking on a search engine for information about said program, which I have yet to see more than the tiniest bit of.  I was looking for alternatives to signing up for the CBS service., to watch the show  Midnight Edge goes into detail about Discovery.  It focuses pretty tightly on what it is able to discern from CBS decision making and from what it can surmise about ratings.  Midnight's Edge concludes that a relatively tiny audience has signed up for the service, a little over 100,000 subscribers, explaining that this is too little revenue to satisfy the financial deal made with the distributor, Netflix.  After season one failed to impress enough potential subscribers to satisfy Netflix, which paid for the entire production cost of this original season, Netflix has elected to drastically reduce what it is willing to pay for the second season.
     When I encountered these first criticisms, I wondered what difference they would make.  The show appeared to continue being produced.  I don't know what difference it makes to the actors, who are being paid for the work they do.  Midnight's Edge also reports that the program originally was never going to mention Mr. Spock, nor did it have plans to show the original USS Enterprise.  Trekkers felt as though the show didn't care what they thought, and other YouTube commentators claim that Trekkers have flocked to their YouTube postings for vindication of this.  Midnight's Edge reports that the program claims to have heard these Trekkers, and both Mr. Spock and the Enterprise have arrived for season 2, with Captain Christopher Pike in command.  The USS Enterprise design has been reinterpreted, both inside and out.  Midnight Express explains the legal reasoning for this.  I wondered if Trekkers would revolt at any redesign, but I have yet to hear of anything like this.  Spock has a full beard now.  I think this is fuckin' cool.  I like the ship redesign, and the bridge redesign.  All I have seen are some still shots from the program.  I have yet to see anything else beyond the first episode of season 1.
     Here toward the end of July, 2019, I've been watching various YouTube channels which discuss Star Trek Discovery.  They are very entertaining.  These are Trekkers, who know Star Trek "cannon" far better than I do, and they're excellent debaters.  One of the YouTube commentators mentioned something about an outtake from the program, the entire cast singing the word "nerd" together.  The commentator claims that this is the cast calling the Trekkers nerds.  I recall the cast from Star Trek he Next Generation during an interview, one cast member talking about the first couple of years of that program.  The cast would go to conventions, where they were met by an average of "30 people who hated us."  I understand that these were fans of the original Star Trek series who didn't like a new "Enterprise" cast and/or didn't think the first couple of seasons were up to par.  The consensus among fans and cast of STNG is that the show found its footing by the third season.  I wonder about the cast if Star Trek Discovery, and it's monosyllabic acapella performance of "nerd."  Is this in fact a message from the cast to Trekkers?  Is the cast drawing its own line with Trekkers?  Is this cast from the performing arts department of Donald Trump's university?  I eventually saw a clip of the cast singing what in fact was a parody of the musical Rent, swapping words from the original song with a narrative about nerds.  The parody appears to me to be an homage to all those nerds who watch the show, without the show could not survive.  One of the Discovery show cast members was a member of the original cast of Rent.  He refers to the cast also as nerds.  If this is indeed the case, the performance is being misinterpreted among some Trekkers on YouTube.
     I've seen a couple of YouTube channels, both very different, both not simply making banal complaints but brilliantly eviscerating the plot, and both amazingly entertaining and simplistically genius.  Jesus, these people are faster and smarter than I'll ever be.  One YouTube channel questions a plot point where one planet's cave-dwellers "learn how to fly starships.  In, what, two weeks?"  Another YouTube channel can't believe that both USS Discovery and USS Enterprise become "surrounded" by enemy ships, or "drones."  Surrounded in space...by a circle of the enemy.  The pair of Federation ships never attempt to make use of the third final dimension and fly out of danger.  The writers of Star Trek Discovery are accused of not paying attention in school or perhaps suffering from brain damage.  Well, I suppose we all can't be as smart as Vulcans.  I'm sure humans are being asked here to be smarter than the writers.  There is one particular YouTube channel featuring a young woman with long bright red hair.  She displays a message sent to her from Michael Kurtzman, an exec with some oversight over the show.  In the post, he mentions that he knows "some martial arts stuff," and he threatens to knock her teeth out.  He would later claim that his "drunk brother" gained access to his computer without his knowledge.  I'm trying to remember if I have ever heard of either TV or streaming programming production, with critics who have driven one of the head guys to lose his fucking mind.  Yeah, I happen to know some psychological kind of things and stuff.  Just ask my drunk brother.  Or has there been a program where the actor playing the main character is in a position where he or she must respond to a question by promising that "we'll fix the timeline.  We will.  I promise."  The actor went on to address the critical Trekkers; "They're intellectual."  I suppose supporters of Discovery, and there is a following, are whatever the opposite of intellectual is.  The actor finished by saying that the show "wants younger viewers, because that's how you keep the franchise going."  Okay.  Intellectual vs. young.  I wonder if intellectual means old.  Are you listening, Mr. Spock?  You know some intellectual stuff.  Just ask the new young viewers.
     Okay computer club members.  Here's my own take on Star Trek Discovery.  I don't remember such a clash of world views between a production and such a distinct part of an audience.  But I feel that this production has put its cast and crew and writers in an impossible box, from which they are begging us to be patient with them.  I suspect that all they want to do is have a nice Star Trek, please God.  And after two seasons, the clash is gaining momentum.  One of the posts I watched online just this month is a recap of season two.  Nothing I saw on there made any sense to me.  The ships doctor disappeared and reappeared as some kind of monster who wasn't recognized right away.  A thinking planet swallows a couple of crew members for a while.  The season ends with the USS Discovery travelling through a wormhole 930 years into the future.  I'm not angry, I'm just lost in this space.  They tell me it's called Star Trek.  If they say so.  They must know some stuff about writing...

July 2019, Four o July, The HUH (Homogenized Urban Hipsters), West Denver Cleanupalooza, and My Tall Photographic Hippe Goddess

     This month begins on the corner yards from my front door.  I'm on the way to work this morning, waiting at a red light next to a truck driven by a Caucasian guy in a fishing hat.  Through the open window, he asks me, "Is, uh.  Is this a good bike route?"  I tell him that it's okay.  I'm down the hill, through the underpass, and parallel the interstate before I get to the bank.  Then I'm at the gym before I head off to work.  The entire block around where I work is cordoned off by yellow police tape and police cruisers.  At 7:11 AM this morning, a guy shot a gun through the window of an empty parked vehicle.  He appears walking past the front of our store on our camera before he is shot and killed by police.  A police sergeant escorts me to the back door of my place of employment.  Last week, and month, the alley was blocked off by muralists.  This morning, it's a deceased guy who liked to shoot car windows.  I get a call from one customer who wants to know when she can cross the police tape.  The street outside our front door is blocked off from traffic, both vehicle and pedestrian.  Another customer is escorted inside by an officer who is on her phone to a relative.  "I don't know when I get out of here," the officer says.  "This is going to be an all day (crime) scene."  A police officer delivers a stack of newspapers to the door of our neighboring business, which never had a chance to open this morning.  Yet another customer is escorted inside.  He drops off and says he will pick up later.  I don't want to keep this guy (the police officer) waiting.  I'll come back when there's not a crime scene."

     The new apartment stock coming into Denver is largely for luxury renters...  ...about 5,600 homeless people [live] in the Front Range.  Some housing is...not close to stores or bus routes.  "A lot of people get housing, but lose it.  In Denver, people can't really afford to live where they work."
     [Candi CdeBaca is] the first democratic socialist to serve on Denver's City Council.  "We've never had representation from Globeville or Swansea on City Council."  ...long...home to some of Denver's most vulnerable populations of people.  The district saw more displacement during early development in the city than any other area in Denver.  - Life On Capitol Hill, 7/2019

     ...we soon learned that social media post does not warrant votes...except (I think) one highly publicized race.  Congratulations to Candi CdeBaca.  ...we have had our challenges.  ...we have lost major advertisers [to online sources.]  ...I refer to...the Dubious Seven (D7).  Talking Black and walking white does not sit well with me.  [Of seven publicly visible local African-Americans campaigning against incumbent African-American Mayor Hancock,] this [is a] form of "Black on Black Crime"...  I hope the D7 (and the others who were quietly outspoken) revisit their values...and ancestral heritage...  There is no way today, in this Black America, we should we witnessing this form of castration of a Black Man from Black men.  - Denver Urban Spectrum, 7/2019

     In October 2018, my partner and I quit our jobs in Denver, ended the lease we'd held...  We'd been in the city for a while...we'd developed...friend groups, professional networking groups...social justice causes.  I'd been struggling with Denver's rapid growth...  Like most metropolitan areas that become popular, tech in Denver is on the rise, neighborhoods [gentrify and are] renamed, and folks are either losing the housing battle and falling into homelessness, moving to the...outskirts, or leaving the city...  ...most new Denverites are too green to...care...  - Elevation Outdoors, 7/2019

     ...under the weight of higher property taxes.  "I'm concerned that something like this could eviscerate the entire district in a year.  It's how you kill cities.  ...like seeing gentrification in print."  A letter of protest to Mayor Michael Hancock, Denver City Council and other city officials was drafted with the help of [the head of] both the neighborhood Business Improvement District and the resident Community Development Corporation...  .."we have a vested interest in...attracting small business, building new jobs...  ...we see longtime people leaving...  It's...systematic."  ...the city hasn't been proactive in supporting small businesses in the corridor...  ...Denver...eliminated its business support offices four years ago in favor of creating BIDs...  "But BIDs are hard to establish, and don't...replace support offices in what they do."  [Denver county has six arts districts left.]  All report rapidly rising assessments and little useful advice from the city on how to deal with them.  "It's damaging the character of the city...  ...there's no champion for us at the city..."  "Maybe we need to shut down Santa Fe Drive in  protest during rush hour.."  - Westword, 7/11-17/2019

     ...Raven Canon...launched the "Echo" [homeless newspaper in Colorado Springs] in January 2017...acting as head editor and lead writer...was also homeless, was found dead on the streets on a cold morning in March 2017.  "I got tired of being hunted like an animal at night."  - Denver Voice, 7/2019

    Tuesday.  Less than 48 hours after a guy was shot and killed some yards from where I work, I am taking out the trash to the alley.  It's the alley which was blocked off last week because artists are painting a mural of the building opposite the one in which I work. Yesterday, the alley was closed due to a dead guy, which also resulted in the artists taking the day off.  They are back today.  I hear one ask the others what they want for lunch.  I awoke with a splitting headache, and I never get headaches, and not enough sleep.  The following day, the headache is gone but I'm still without enough sleep.  Okay, so Caucasians are not the only ones who walk their dogs.  I've see three Hispanics walk dogs, one couple this morning.  But Caucasians are still the only Latter Day Saints who I have seen directing an SUV out of a parking space.  On my way to work, I pass cross a bridge over the river.  It rolls along lately from afternoon rains.  This morning, it sparkles in the sunlight.  After a couple of turns, I'm on a street of old and disappearing homes.  I read about this street from an author who grew up here, and who has seen people she knew sent along their way.  On this same street I keep passing young Caucasian couples who strike me as new residents.  I passed one along this street yesterday evening, loading an SUV.  I pass them again on my way back to work this morning.  They are still loading an SUV.  Up the street, another Caucasian young couple carry bags and boxes to their car.  They come out of a little home with a brand new front door.  I remember the suggestion of a new front door as a way to increase the value of your home.  If you are a homeowner.  They live next to another old home being demolished.  A couple of Caucasian cyclists roll past.  A guy comes into work.  He's homeless and, as many homeless, wears an orange reflective vest.  I've seen him come in here once before.  He spoke to the manager.  He stands with his bottom lip protruding.  I ask him if he is looking for the manager.  He turns and walks a few steps away before he returns and gestures with one figure, asking another employee to come up to the front counter.  The other employee tells him that the manager is not here.  He shakes the other employee's hand.  After he exits, he tries to shake a passing a stranger's hand before he rolls away his lawn mower.  We have no grass to mow.
"Four o July"
     A restaurant across the street from where I leave has a sign posted on their door, notifying patrons that it will not be open during "Four o July".  My own Four o July begins with breakfast at a diner on the way to the waterpark.  This is the diner with orange plastic upholstery and waitresses in white uniforms.  On the other side of the window over my booth is a young woman, at an outside table.  She's in a summer dress and has tattoos and false eyelashes.  She's filling out an application to work here.  This is my first assumption.  These days, the clientele here include a purportedly "healthy" dose of young Caucasian hipsters.  Semi-urban, but urban enough that they can be recognized as homogenized urban.  I make my second assumption, that these homogenized urban hipsters, or HUH (I like that.  HUH.  My first acronym.) reside not much farther than a block from here, in any one of a myriad of new condominium complexes which now occupy the space where once a mighty rubber plant once stood.  The employees of which this diner, still open 24 hours, was built to serve.  I'm sitting next to a foursome of Indian nationals.  Next to them is a young couple, and the guy has some kind of permanent grin.  Behind me is the register, where the owner sits in a shirt the same color as the upholstery.  Customers are lined up to pay.  "You from Chicago?" he asks one.  "You like to fly fish?" he asks another.  One guy paying his bill is in a U.S. flag shirt, a bandana around his head, and tights.
     The Indians and the couple with the smiley guy clear out.  Another hipster trio arrives.  A young red-haired woman with freckles is in a tie-dyed T-shirt.  I've seen the shirt for sale at more than one summer outdoor festival.  The vendor calls himself the Tie Dye Guy.  My waitress takes their order and mentions to them that she will be heading up to a local speedway today.  The trio tells her that they are headed up to Boulder to hang out.  I hear a customer tell the owner, "We've had a big Fourth of July party since '98.  We buy everything.  (?)  The problem is the kids.  They're not kids anymore.  They maw through the house like locusts."  After breakfast, I'm bummed because it's overcast and not exactly warm.  Not the most encouraging swimming day.  The trailhead for the bike trail to the water park is on the other side of the river.  I must traverse a sidewalk on a bridge, with a low cement wall on one side and the railing with the river below on the other.  Approaching from the other direction is a homeless guy on his own bike.  He stops along the way to let me pass.  When I do, he says, "You're welcome."  The trail is full of July o Four riders, some with their own flag gear.  At the waterpark is an employee in flag socks.  And the clouds have burned off and the sun is out.  And I am encountering both wisdom and parental outrage.
     I hear a father tell his child while in the pool that "Water is water."  Hmm.  Very Eastern.  NOT.  I watch a young, lanky guy with a blonde mop of hair come down the steps toward the pool.  His T-shirt reads "FRICK".  But I spend my hour at the pool between the pool and the drop slide into the deep end.  And it's during one exit from the pool to the slide when I look up and see her.  I call her Golden Mom.  Her tan is perfect, her hair is blonde, and she is curvy and idyllically beautiful in her bikini.  One would think that she would be satisfied with this.  She is in fact gesturing animatedly as she berates her fifth-grader for not going down the drop slide.  Apparently, her daughter has already been down one of the much longer and higher slides across the park.  Golden Mom is at a painfully visible loss as to her daughter's reluctance to go down such a relatively short slide.  She tells her daughter that she will be on the other side of the pool to "video" her daughter going down this slide.  The child is behind me.  I say to her, "Your mom sure wants you to go down this slide."  She responds that, she tried to last year, and the lifeguard told her she was taking too much time.  I go ahead of her.  She climbs the steps and sits at the end of the tube.  She comes back down.  Golden Mom is beside herself.  She goes up with her daughter, the daughter stays, and she comes back down.  The daughter is still too scared and descends the steps crying.  The pair calls it a day.  Golden Mom would, rather continue to try her hand at parenting, be of more use to her daughter if she were stuffed and mounted.
     After an hour at the pool, I decide to head out to find Four o July lunch.  Down the trail to a connecting trail along the river, I run back into the cyclist traffic and more U.S. flag gear.  The bike trail must be the place to be seen in your flag shirt.  Along one stretch of trail are people carrying tubes with which to ride the river.  Just over a hill, along a wooded bank, is a homeless couple.  the lady is decked out in clothes and colorful scarves.  She tells the guy, "Okay, I'm going to wash up."  The trail has the bike traffic and the river has the tube traffic.  I am making better time on the trail than the tubers moving with the current.  I don't know why I am surprised when, as usual, it rains and hails in the evening.  I step outside to watch fireworks together with lightning.

     [Of] fourteen Afghan [local police] officers.  Six...were not qualified to have weapons.  Of the other eight, only three said they had been to the main police training center.  The Afghans mimicked the Americans raising their weapons.  "They could have shot everyone."  The police officers without weapons aimed their fingers and laughed hysterically.  Another police officer stuck his rifle butt between his knees, pointed the weapon at his head...  On a walk through the village, an Afghan police officer waved his gun at a baby.  ...a video of the Afghan army trying to do jumping jacks...resembled...an incurable disease.  "...we asked them, 'Do you ever arrest anybody?'  'No.'  'What do you do?'  They're like, 'Eating, sleeping, nothing.'"
     ...Karzai wanted to make a deal with the Taliban...  ...Karzai finished his speech...  He called me "ma'am," pushed his way toward the door, and...a loudspeaker burst into flames...  I...watched Karzai run toward one of the helicopters...to fly the lonely three and a half mile back to the presidential palace.  The journalists were...hungry, new to Afghanistan...  ...like I had once been.  I...didn't want to scrub any more people off the bottom of my shoes.  I soon finished packing.  In the corner, I left a gray plastic trunk...with things I needed only in Afghanistan.  ...gathering dust almost as soon as I shut the lid, in a house filled with similar boxes in different rooms...  - Barker

     I am a proud American, and I like to think of myself as a good American.  But I can be better...  I vote...  At games, I stand and applaud when...the military are honored, but I need to say "thank you"...in more personal ways.  I appreciate the freedoms we enjoy, but probably not as much or as regularly as I should.  I'm not proud of that…  - Mile High Sports, 7/2019

     Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of "traditional values" installed.  In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on...the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes.  In spiritual matters, we emulated...the Shi'ite fundamentalists.  ...our "traditional values" have always been bigotry, greed...buttressed by wanton appeals to a God of love.  Thanks to..the upwardly mobile, pita bread and salad bars have sedimented down to Burger King...  ...occupations that pay well - corporate law, international banking, cocaine retailing - involve almost zero energy...  ...exercise is to eating as contraception was to sex in the sixties...  ...uncoupled gluttony from obesity...  Does your date still think sushi is stylish?  Then he probably has been passed over for a promotion and squeezed out when his apartment went co-op...  If...he goes...for the baby bass en route, he may have a Harvard MBA and a flair for currency speculation...  - The Worst Years of Our Lives, B. Ehrenreich, 1990

     Saturday I am working what would otherwise be my Saturday off.  I run into the downtown supermarket before work.  When I come out I see a homeless guy with his stolen shopping cart...pushing back tot he supermarket.  The day after, I return to a pool across town, where I lived for fifteen years over the previous couple of decades.  Along the way I grab lunch and yogurt at the mall where I used to live.  The mall I stop into more than when I lived up the street from here.  The woman at the yogurt counter sounds French.  She tells me she's from Turkey.  I pedal out to the pool, on the same bike path I rode to work, two years shy of 20 years ago.  In the pool, I listen to a mom and the young woman who is her daughter.  I ask the daughter if they are Russian.  They are Bosnian.  Tuesday of the following week.  Somehow, June was nonexistent.  It must have been the chilly mornings.  Now, the 4th of this month has blown past.  And we are standing in the middle of the summer, just like that.  And in the middle of the year.  On my way to work, I've just turned onto the bike trail.  Approaching me is a middle-aged homeless woman.  Her hair is dyed pink, her skin is burnt umber, and she pushes some kind of wide red cart.  She is a reddish summer specter.  I'm at work in the afternoon when a young woman comes in off the street.  She's in a black summer dress and she's holding a laminated flyer for something known as the Arise festival.  It's a hippie music and truth, goodness, and beauty kind of happening up in the mountains.  She walks as if she may be stoned.  All she wants is a lollipop.  Later in the day, another young woman comes through the door.  She is from Ukraine, she says.  She is a missionary, she says.  Nice to meet me, she says.  She opens a hinged box of trinkets for sale, or in exchange for a donation.
     Wednesday.  A guy comes into work.  He's in a T-shirt and he wants his measurements taken for a suit.  He doesn't say he needs a suit.  What he says is he needs the measurements for an application he's filling out.  Later on, I'm taking out the trash.  A wiry little young guy with big glasses approaches me from the alley.  He wants to know if I can go inside and charge his phone for him wherever I work.  When I get home after work, it's a bit early, around 7:30 PM.  I see a guy poking around the small front lawn before he strolls slowly toward the back parking lot.  I hear him mumbling to himself.  He carries what appears to be a short length of television cable wire in his hand, and a folded outdoor patio umbrella over his shoulder.  Either he works for our property management company, or he's homeless.  Some 24 hours later, I am on the way home from work.  I've just come out from the underpass on my short ride on the bike trail.  Approaching me very slowly is a homeless guy with grey hair.  He's standing on a skateboard attached to the back of a stolen shopping cart, the size of one from Whole Foods.  It's packed full of stuff.  He creeps along toward an incline.

     "Mubarak can only move slowly toward privatization...  He...concluded that Gorbachev fell...because he moved too fast."  ...Americans had taken on the character of the Russians during the Nasser era...too big and too isolated...  ...the new United States embassy in downtown Cairo, built in the 1980s...relocating the official residence inside the walls.  ...the architecture suggested how much [the U.S.] feared the Egyptians.  The diplomats...eating American food in the embassy cafeteria.  When I mentioned this to the diplomat, he was annoyed.  "The fundamentalists say we are propping up Mubarak from inside this building.  But Mubarak is seeking to champion an apolitical Islam.  Is that so bad?"  "We are an occupied people.  Look at Bosnia, look at Kashmir, look at Palestine.  They are killing Moslems everywhere and the West supports the dictatorships."  ...can the...U.S. embassy accept moderate Islam?  Of course, the Near East has long since ceased to be an exotic backdrop for literary-minded Westerners.  An urbanized peasantry...has withdrawn into religion...  Central power can deteriorate only so far before another gravitational force emerges.  …"the state will either fragment or it will become more authoritarian"...  - Kaplan

Hungry vs Future Hacker
     Friday.  It's early in the evening.  The sun casts its long shadows across pavement.  I'm out of work a half hour early and rolling alongside a huge abandoned building next to the interstate.  I came past this same building this morning, headed the opposite way, when I saw a homeless guy in a kind of alcove.  As I roll past the same alcove, he sits with his hands behind his head.  The sun's last rays shine on his face and shirtless torso.  Over the wide sidewalk, a black plastic grocery bag floats on a breeze.  Out of downtown, over the interstate, and onto the trail along the river.  At one trailhead sits an old woman.  She's flying a sign which reads, "HUNGRY."  Another old woman who appears as if she could be her sister is at the edge of the road.  She is attempting to stop vehicles to panhandle.  I don't remember ever giving anything at all to anyone who is homeless.  I got some cash back at a grocery on the way home, to purchase the local homeless newspaper.  I give my change to the seated woman.  I've never see anyone so desperate as to stop passing vehicles for money.  I'm across the tracks and am finishing the climb of a steep hill.  At the top is a Mexican family huddled around a sedan.  Among them is a middle-school kid in a black T-shirt which reads, "FUTURE HACKER."  Just a jog and halfway down the street are a couple of Mormons who appear very familiar, one with a red buzz cut.  I think it was last month when I incorrectly referred to both of them as Jehovah's Witnesses.  They are listening to a woman speak to them in Spanish as she leans on a wrought iron fence.  I creep past them.  I never hear the Mormons respond, in Spanish or English.  Behind the trio is a two-story apartment building.  On a second-story balcony hangs a big beautiful bright red quinceanera dress.
     Saturday.  I wake up way too early.  Unable to go back to sleep, I decide to do my grocery shopping this morning.  I'm already out of the supermarket and waiting for the 7:21 AM bus.  Coming down the sidewalk are a trio of slow-moving guys.  One of them takes a seat in the bus shelter.  He's young, younger than me.  He has trouble walking.  He asks me for money.  He wants to know if I have any food.  Yeah, I just went grocery shopping.  It's then he asks me for a light for his cigarette.  I wonder about a guy this young walking with two older slow-moving guys, one with a cane?  I wonder why he has trouble walking, why he has no money or food?  Both of us step aboard the bus up the street.  The driver lets him on with no money.  Soon, we are past where he told the driver he wanted to disembark.  He gets up from his seat to stand at the front.  I step out at my corner, drop off the groceries, and get on the bike to work another Saturday.  I'm scheduled to finally have the following Saturday off.  Along the way I stop at another supermarket for some beverages to take to work.  When I come out of this one, a different street person awaits me.  He totes a suitcase on wheels, with a milk crate and his coffee balanced on top.  He gives me a rambling story about a bike shop somewhere.  My ride home from work is during a heavy rainstorm, with lightning streaking over my head.
     The following day is a busy one because I have it crammed with plans.  And it's why I did laundry and grocery shopped during the week instead of today.  I awake late (for me: 7:40 AM.  Insanely late.)  I begin with a trip to the diner on the way to the waterpark.  The hostess is in a T-shirt with "HEY" on the front.  I tell her I like it.  After a late breakfast, no sooner am I out on the bike trail to the water park do I stop to take a photo of the sunlight sparkling on the river.  I know what will happen next, and it does.  The trail is full of grey-haired cyclists.  A senior female whizzes past and, seeing that I am stopped, asks me, "Everything okay?"  She is neon-colored and spandex-clad, with pockets in back of her blouse for her phone.  It's some kind of unwritten rule: ask anyone stopped for any reason if they need help.  These cyclists are never here, nor is any cyclist, in the winter months.  Nor were they when I did need help before sunup when I worked the morning shift.  But this issue is like the river: it's water under the bridge.  In jig time, and some exertion on the bike, I am at the water park.  I'm standing in line at the concession stand when a woman introduces herself as a promo person for the place.  The employees recognize me as a frequent guest.  I reply that I am flattered.  She tells me it's the bike helmet which gives me away.  She feels bad that I am here so often and gives me info on a season pass.  Though I had a season pass a couple of summers ago, I'm still impressed.  She mentions the rec center where I may purchase a pass, and I tell her I used to work out there a few years ago.  I'm there for an hour before everyone must get out of the swimming pool.  (The rest of the park pools can still be used.)  I decide I have a big day ahead and take off.
     From the municipality of Englewood to Littleton, I follow the trail past where I worked a couple of years ago, and I keep going off the trail, down residential streets I began riding when I worked this far south almost fifteen years and a long story ago.  I arrive at the Southglenn Library for its annual used book sale.  It's outside in front, and I'm not there for long before an elderly woman approaches me with a book by a familiar conservative author, on the subject of President Trump.  She tells me it's a great book and asks me if I've read it.  "I don't know if you're conservative," she says, and the tells me that I can bring a list of book titles into any branch library, "And they will bring the books out.  Even if they're new."  At first, I thought I was pegged as a conservative.  Now, I think she may be insane in the membrane.  I find more books than I thought I would before I grab a late lunch at a grill across the street.  I'm not far from the big drycleaning plant where I worked for a few months shy of a decade.  Every Saturday I spent there, and most other days.  I make the trip, detouring through a new and growing condo complex across the street, the beginning of which the original owner for whom I worked had been waiting.  It began just as he sold the business.  I grab a bite at the old gas station in front, where I purchased many a snack between 2005 and the end of 2014.  I knew a middle-aged Iranian couple who owned it for some years.  I was the very last person to clock out of the old plant before the new owner shut it down, and after laying off the plant's employees after lying to them about restarting another plant for them to work in.  After my snack, I venture the last few yards around the corner.  It's open on a Sunday.  It's now some kind of place where you can make a project yourself, using their wood and tools.  The wood is some kind of prefabricated log slices with the bark still around the edges.  I never would have guessed.  I greet a man and woman behind a counter made of one of the slices.  They strike me as married.  The heard something of the saga of the sale of this place, and the rest of the business.
     From there, I make my way up the avenue and turn down one of the roads I rode years ago.  After I turn onto the street to the train station, I pass a graveyard.  On the other side comes the sound of live music.  A band is playing a song by the Eagles.  At the train station is an old snack and gift shop with an owner I used to know.  The train whisks me downtown, where I ride a city block to the Black Arts Festival.  After the fest, I head along a busy avenue to a intersection downtown.  I catch a bus headed for my own boulevard.  A middle-aged woman is turned away for lack of fare.  We head out and make our way to the stop for a downtown community college campus.  A loud drunk woman gets out.  She appears as if she may be Native American.  She's yelling at the world, flipping everyone off, telling them they are "all immigrants."  As the song says, you may lose or you may win, but you'll never be here again.  The bus pulls into the station where I cross the street to catch my last bus home.  It's a notorious stop across the street from the football stadium.  Somehow, shortly after I get there, the middle-aged woman turned away from the bus comes shuffling up.  I notice a cloth bandage completely covering her left arm, complete with butterfly clip.  Next to both of us and the bus stop sign are a couple of guys asking passersby if they "want any weed?"  One of them asks me.  An elderly guy come shuffling through the crosswalk on a red light.  Street racers must slow down until he makes it all the way across.  When he gets to our bus stop, he appears to know the woman with the bandage.  The stop is in front of a liquor store parking lot.  They discuss prices for liquor at this store.
     On the evening of the following Tuesday, I'm on my way home past the huge abandoned building.  I roll past a couple of homeless guys standing on the sidewalk.  One is telling the other, "Say something, like 'Have a good day,' or 'How's your day going?'"  The following morning, I'm at the doughnut shop on the way to work.  I'm behind a customer with a grey buzz cut and boots, who is behind a gabby airhead.  I listen to him tell her how he used CPR to save the life of a guy having a heart attack.  "I'm giving the guy mouth to mouth, and suddenly I've got gum in my mouth."  She tells him that's "awesome."  I wonder if he asked the guy how his day was going.  She tells him that she would like to take a CPR class but can't fit it into her schedule.  Behind me is a customer in a dress shirt and slacks.  I watch him animatedly jerk from window to display window, picking out individual doughnuts.  When Saturday rolls around, once again I have two days of the weekend instead of one in which to cram a ridiculous number of events.  After breakfast and grocery shopping, the sunscreen goes on and I'm off to the train for a quicker trip to the waterpark, after a quick lunch at the retro diner.  I spy more than one thunderhead the direction of the mountains.  At the pool, I'm in line behind two beautiful women in bikinis who appear as if they may be a decade younger than myself.  One is shorter with short dark wavy hair and slightly darker skin.  She's one fantastic-looking mom.  I wonder if they are sisters.  They aren't doing anything but simply waiting in line, shooting the breeze.  She isn't flaunting anything.  Can she know how good she looks?  I can't linger, either on this question or at my favorite swimming hole.  I must be back to the train into downtown.
     Raindrops spatter the train before I disembark and grab a snack at the deathburger homeless central.  It's unusually empty in here today.  This does not discourage the usual mayhem.  A kid is rolling something to smoke as he wanders around the place loudly conversing with his pal.  A middle-aged guy in line and a younger guy are threatening each other.  I step into the men's room, where one guy is using a urinal like a sink.  The toilet stall in closed for repairs.  He leaves, and as I am using the urinal, another guy comes in behind me and thinks I am the first guy.  He begins complaining that I'm taking too long.  I come out and he comes out after me.  He's passing around a couple of DVDs to see if anyone wants to purchase them.  While I am eating, lightning, thunder, and pouring rain and hail appear.  An assortment of the usual characters, along with myself, wait for it to stop.  One is a woman with a couple of other guys.  She never stops stepping moving, dancing, singing.  One guy walks around in a shirt with "SECURITY" on the back.  He steps out to check on a handful of derelicts waiting in the foyer.  It lets up and I ride down to the stop for the bus to the Denver County Fair.  I wait with four more derelicts.  I arrive at the fair and stand in the ticket line behind a couple of thirtysomething Caucasian guys rattling off precise technical details of football offense and defense.  It's a smaller fair this year.  I chat with one woman from Missouri who occupies a booth for window replacement.  After the fair, I have a short wait at the stop for the bus back downtown.  A trio of middle-aged street goofballs are there.  One is telling me how terrific the design of my bike is.  After I've told him I got it at Walmart.  "It's not a $1,000  bike?"  On the bus ride home, more thunder, lightning, and rain.
     Sunday is the usual race against (what appears to be budding thunderheads, with) rain to get in a swim.  I hope to include a postponed art fest, a food fest, and a global bazaar.  First I have film to drop off.  I leave the house without breakfast.  Such are my summer weekends.  A few blocks away is a stop for one crosstown bus to the camera shop.  It's next to a church, which has been on this corner since I moved here in 2007.  The church, surrounded by the usual ominous chain link fence, has been "scraped" (as they say in real estate parlance.)  Its remains reside inside the walls of its exposed basement.  Parked stoically in the parking lot, looking like nothing so much as a great dinosaur skeleton, is a steam shovel.  I wonder if my neighborhood's stretch of this boulevard proper will have the first condominium?  Only time, money, and the speculation of what the late Hunter S. Thompson referred to as the "wizards" can tell.  The bus arrives, and soon it has as one of its passengers someone telling another passenger, "...well then act like it."  I couldn't hear the beginning of his sentence.  I wonder if he's related to the guy behind me in the men's room yesterday, who was yelling at me to piss faster?  He than asks the other one if he has a job.  Or was that a question uttered by the derelict goofball I rode the bus back toward downtown with yesterday.  I feel as the aforementioned Dr. Thompson, having awakened with his reel-to-reel tape recorder around his neck, going forward and back again, in an attempt to reconstruct the past several days.  I've sat next to twelve years worth of these guys and distinctions between them are coming loose.  The bus driver curses the drivers in the traffic all the way across town.
     I disembark upon my boulevard of old, some eighteen minutes after stepping aboard, and soon I'm at the camera shop.  Helping a woman at a computer monitor is the young woman who enjoys winding my film camera.  Her tall and willowy frame is bedecked in flowing clothing.  She sees me approach with camera in hand, and she mentions to another employee that I am "the only one who lets me rewind his film, because he know that I like how it feels."  The place is enjoined with laughter.  Has she just public revealed her feelings about me?  My tall photographic hippie goddess?  And didn't I yesterday only just finish fantasizing about a middle-aged beauty in her bikini?  Of course.  But I saw this one long before the woman at the water park.  And I have this one's business card.  Apparently, heterosexual male fantasy comes with rules.  Having said that, rewind my film she does.  Yeah, baby.  But this time, she says I must load my own film.  No worries, baby doll.  She's telling the customer whom she is assisting about a previous customer, who had 176 apps open on her phone.  "And she didn't even know what an app is."  I drop my film at the counter, with a terse-looking employee.  He's in a Polo shirt with the store name embroidered on the breast, and has glasses and a little beard.  She had better not be dating him, though they are most likely almost the same age, which is far from my own.  I pick up another roll of film and bid her farewell.  "Mark, right?" she asks.  She may call me anything she likes...
     I grab breakfast/lunch across the street, ride to the pool for a nice swim.  I then proceed to waste another bus trip up the street and a ride to this "art festival".  It's actually five tents, a few square yards, and hip hop music from a sound system.  I don't even get off my bike.  This stretch of the infamous Colfax Avenue appears to be home to an array of shady-looking hotels, full of residents who appear as if perhaps they can't afford apartments.  Which is no crime here in the Mile High City.  This doesn't stop the print media from quoting that tired line from Playboy, about Colfax Avenue being "the wickedest street in America."  America must have been more attractive itself when it was younger.  Since then, every college junior and her grandmother have written books about going "undercover" as part time strippers.  On the way here, pedaling through the established middle-class homes down the street from old apartments, I imagine this neighborhood surrounded.  Ahead of me, to the east, is the train and new "development."  To the north, past neigborhoods like this, I wonder how close development is.  To the south, better neighborhoods.  And behind me, to the west, developing downtown.  I grab a bus back that way.  I can't complain about the air conditioned ride in exchange for a long ride in 90 degree F heat.  It strikes me that, if not the businesses, then at least the undemolished small brick storefront architecture never changes along the Avenue, all the back to the Capitol.  Perhaps Colfax Avenue is the last original street in the entire metro area.  I end up back at the downtown deathburger homeless central.  Again, it's relatively empty compared with other days.  Inside, the piss-complainer/DVD hustler is in a seat.  He's making grunting noises as if he's in pain.  He gets up to wander around with his sweatpants falling down.  I've seen people in the July heat, wearing sweatpants and hoodies, flannel shirts.  This afternoon, he's hustling a single can of Axe body spray.  He's letting it go for $5.  When he gets around to my own table, I tell him that I already have one on my bathroom shelf.  "One of these?" he asks.  "Yeah."  He spots my salad.  "What's that?  Chicken?" he inquires.  "Yeah."  "Not from here?" he asks.  "Yeah."
     From the Deathburger Bizarre, I decide to make the Global Bazaar my final stop today.  I don't want more food from a food festival, and I suddenly remember that I need new shoes.  In fact, there are handmade shoes from Peru at this little gathering off the pedestrian mall.  I try some on.  Alas, just a size too small.  Yes, even here in what I've recently heard described as "the world's greatest economy," my own small feet continue to leave too great a footprint.  I'm off to s shoe outlet, where I find a pair which fit.  With all due respect to the great nation of Peru.  In the checkout line, I am in front of a young woman speaking with friends in a language I can't place.  (And I am behind an impatient hipster.)  I ask her, "That isn't French you're speaking.  What is it?"  It's Turkish.  They are exchange students from Turkey.  She also mentions a language called Ottoman, from the old empire.  They are here for the summer doing "Work and Travel."  She works at the baseball stadium.  I don't ask, but I'm sure she now knows the English words, "hot dog," "men's room," and "vomit."  They decide where they want to travel in the United States, and apparently this includes Las Vegas and California.  If you ask me, they are already as American as the rest of us.  She tells me that Americans have already asked her if the Turkish speak Arabic or Farsi (as in Iran), and if the Turkish women wear the hijab.  I ask her if they've been to the mountains.  She doesn't like the altitude.  And she doesn't like thunderstorms.

     ...Kickales [in Turkey is a] holiday camp for the working class on...package tours.  'We are...peasants trying on our own to figure out what tourism is.  The government is nowhere."  Trashy...hotels were in various stages of completion, separated by murky, garbage-strewn paths...  The hotel where I checked in...was...filled with pink-faced German factory-workers...  They shouted, banged the Formica tables...  In winter the population...was three thousand.  But from May through October it was tens of thousands.  The visitors [didn't] care - where they were.  Redbrick high-rises rose behind...Roman remains dated from the first centuries...  Refuse floated in the water.  [One local resident, a] man [who lived] between cultures [with his] tight pants...  He apes the West, is frustrated by it, and often winds up hating it.  [Such men] became foot soldiers for the fundamentalist risings in Iran and Algeria.  They are the product of the new Mediterranean and Near Eastern landscape: package-tour hotels, late-night discos, and the weird fields of neon signs.  - Kaplan

     ...the music-video ad from the real estate pros at Team Denver Homes, who up until last week were Kentwood Real Estate's number-one-selling agents.  Just weeks after a vitriolic mayoral race largely divided by the city's housing crisis, these realtors posted [a] video in which they treat rapidly gentrifying Denver like their playground...  ...a spokeswoman...saying that Kentwood Real Estate had cut ties with Team Denver Homes.  - Westword, 7/25-31/2019

     Tuesday morning.  I'm out of the door in the morning, off to work.  On my corner, right next door to my condo complex, is a small mechanic garage.  It appears as if a steam shovel is tearing it down.  On my way home, it appears as if the parking lot is being carefully removed.  By Thursday evening, the entire lot has been raised.  The small garage itself is still standing.  Thursday morning, I am out the door and rolling past my old bus stop across the street.  A young guy stands outside the shelter, holding his crotch.  Next to him is a little white-haired guy in a long-sleeved camouflaged shirt.  The young guy asks me, "Got a shigarette?"  I'm around the corner and all the way down a street when I spot a turtle in a gutter.  This is the first turtle I remember seeing here in the state.  It's the exact color of the road, and makes it's way across.  It's indistinguishable except for the shadow between it and the street.  Some eleven hours later, I'm on my way home through this same neighborhood, a handful of streets north of here.  It's twilight as I'm rolling down my last long crosstown stretch of residential street.  Walking my direction are four young guys.  Two are Mormons in black slacks and white shirts.  And plastic name tags.  The pair are strolling in the street.  Next to them are a couple of young guys in long sleeved T-shirts.  The four walk along in a horizontal line.  One Mormon is recounting a tale about death to the other pair.  As I cruise past, the other Mormon raises his hand in a wave and gives me a nervous smile.  He has big, round, horn-rimmed glasses.

     It's the things you "don't" see around Denver Public Schools [on my boulevard, and] Colfax Avenue...  ...Keep Denver Beautiful (KDB)...volunteers to eliminate litter, junk, and graffiti...  ...residents...clean up that areas that they see as important...resident's [possess] knowledge of where litter is actually located...  ...West Denver Cleanupalooza.  - Colorado Parent, 8/2019

     On Thursday at work, I watch out the front window the busy avenue leading the remaining few blocks into the center of downtown.  A trio of middle-aged guys shuffle past.  One has a walker.  They all appear to be homeless and bald with a lot of stylized facial hair.  They're like homeless bikers.  They give me the sense that they each look out for each other.  They are followed by the obligatory office types.  Twenty-four hours later, I'm at work the following afternoon.  A guy comes in with a laminated sign.  It informs me that he is deaf, and would like a "5, 10, or 20 dollar donation."  It also suggests the donation of a "gift card."  We don't have gift cards.  I don't have any of my own.  When I decline these suggestions, he asks if I can take him next door to the restaurant after we close to get something to eat.  "I want chicken," he mentions.  I can't believe this is happening, and yet I am thoroughly unsurprised.  I have to tell him twice that, when we close, I'm headed home.  The next day is my Saturday to work.  I wake up earlier than usual with enough time to grocery shop before work.  Groceries in hand, I'm at the stop in front of the supermarket.  The Jehovah's Witnesses silently pull up in a black SUV.  A middle-aged woman in a dress sits with a young woman in the bus shelter.  The elder one has what appears to be an I-Pad.  Minutes later, she and the SUV have evaporated.   Sunday is a blazingly hot mid-summer day.  This has been very unlike the freakish sixty degree F days which plagued last summer, ruining my outdoor swimming.  I'm out the door for a late breakfast at a diner along the way.  On the table I unfold the bike map I finally remember to bring along.  I think I find a trail to an art fest.  What appears to be trending at the fest are renderings of wild animals.  And warm soda.  And heat.  After the heat fest I roll up to the downtown deathburger homeless central.  I swing past the state capitol where a couple of state troopers are poking around among the homeless under the shade of the trees.  I cross the avenue past the terminal for local buses.  A couple of police are rousting a woman outside.  "This is bullshit!" she yells.  At the deathburger, a couple of officers are inside the front door.  One is collecting personal information from a guy sitting at a table.  In line if a guy with a tiny white string of whiskers under his chin.  On this hot day, he's decked out in black leather: hat, boots, and chaps.  He says a single word to someone sitting in the booth next to where he stands.  "Broken," he utters.  The guy in the booth tells him, "I don't care," and instructs him to look away.  Another guy is running around the place, in a hat with a brim, a tie-died T-shirt and leather Grateful Dead vest.  I escape this fast food cosplay and roll the short distance to a Native American comic con, after which I finally try out the pool at my rec center.  Late in the afternoon, I go looking for a Peruvian festival which does not appear to be where it's advertised.
     Monday.  I'm at the gym.  A rec center employee is working out.  He's telling another regular that he was bitten by a scorpion.  Also, he was working out when he was stung by a bee.  He isn't having the best luck.  He says his daughter had some "marijuana hand cream."  As the week progresses, I notice that not only has the auto mechanic garage on my corner been stripped if its parking lot.  The surrounding fence has disappeared, as have the mounds of tires contained within the fence.  All that remains is the tiny building itself.  Of what portent this omen be, I know not.  Another unexpected sign.  One evening after work, I head over to the Chinese place for dinner.  I notice my old bus stop across the street.  Two Buddhist monks in bright orange robes are sitting with the usual riff raff.  Missionaries have been known to move among the unwashed yet inevitably digitized masses.  And there are Buddhist temples in the neighborhood.  As well as Jesuit monks complete with rope belts, Jehovah's Witnesses complete with SUVs and office attire, and Latter Day Saints sometimes on bikes and with helmets.  And let's not forget the Protestant Evangelical masses who take over this corner a couple of times a year, with a bullhorn and one weird long white-haired motherfucker who does his own thing.  Can any of these godly devotees tell me where my summer is disappearing to?  The good news, I've enjoyed it so far.  My mom told me that she used to love the summer, but came to hate it.  Summer is still my season.  It's been a long month.  I hope July gets some rest until next year.