A Google Maps Kvetching Tour of Denver

July 16, 2007 



Lochbuie:
Y'all, America is one depressing fucking place, and I am aghast at the continual flow of evidence to support this claim. Recently I was taking the young'uns somewhere and they both fell asleep in the car, and I knew they both really needed naps, so I decided I would drive around and waste some gas and check out the Denver hinterlands while they slept. This is something I used to do pert' near daily when I was a single man (and when gas wasn't quite so expensive and war-inducing). Thus I can confidently say that probably 84% of it is utterly depressing, dreary, bleak, and in some cases, makes you want to slit your wrists in a fit of locational anomie. Lochbuie is a fine example. Almost every home in Lochbuie is a modified mobile home, only instead of building them in trailer parks, they're built along an ordinary street grid. Which, I suppose, is preferable to a trailer park, aesthetically speaking, but it's still a big eyesore. Lots of dirt and weeds. The focal point of the whole town, like many such towns, is the convenience store by the highway. Apparently no other commerce occurs in Lochbuie.

Evergreen: My man Scout lived up here for a couple years. The town proper is kind of a cool place, all crammed into a tight canyon with houses built on rock outcroppings and so forth. Much of the surrounding area (Evergreen has its own suburbs) is McMansion territory filled with people who don't mind commuting 45 minutes up and down Interstate 70 every day.

Ward: Ward is an indescribably weird place. It's a self-governing little town that sits at about 9500 feet, and is filled with hippies and outcasts who live in school buses and tipis and lean-tos. It's almost impossible to drive through, as most of the roads are A) dirt, and B) so ridden with potholes and washed-out portions that only the most foolish driver would attempt, hence the impressive array of broke-down and abandoned Subarus along most of the streets. It reminds me of what an Appalachian backwater town must be like, with all of the insular weirdness that such isolation might entail. The last time I was there, I saw a man in full-on Davy Crockett attire walking down the road carrying a shotgun.

Here's a few photos from Wikipedia:





Kittredge: mostly mountain-dwelling suburbanites, but Kittredge is notable for the fact that former senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart lives here.

Commerce City: The name says it all. They recently tried to float a petition to get the town's name changed so as to invite more development. It failed easily.

Rollinsvile: Not really much of a town, but I have some fond memories of doing some extensive four-wheel drive action up near there with the above-mentioned Scout. To my knowledge, Rollinsville is not named for Henry Rollins.

Glendale: A little island-city surrounded by Denver, Glendale is notable for having a high concentration of strip clubs, presumably because they're exempt from whatever municipal code prohibits such things in Denver proper. I think they also have a professional cricket team or something like that.

North Suburbs: This is the area I like to refer to as Trashcanistan. It's the sort of area where you imagine a lot of meth labs to be located. Shitty, tinderbox apartment complexes along six-lane speedways in an area so utterly devoid of character that you find yourself craving a meth fix yourself, just to stave off the oppressive hatefulness of the place.

Rich People Zone: This is where Denver's elite celebrities live. The thing I can't figure out is what's so rootin' tootin' special about the area. It's pretty much just an old orchard that now has a bunch of gated communities with garishly huge houses built on it. Not somewhere I'd ever want to live if I had money to burn.

Truck Stop Corridor: This strip of I-70 has a most impressive array of megalithic truck stops. Just thought I'd mention that.

JesusLand: This is the area of metro Denver that most typifies suburban sprawl as we now know it. It's also home to the district that hands Congressman Tom Tancredo an easy victory every time he runs, even though he promised to term-limit himself several elections ago. And this is where you move if you want to live among the other hyper-materialist, right-wing, Bush-supporting, fag-hating, Excursion-driving, Jesus-hoarding suburbanites.



COMMENTS


Jesusland sounds terrifying. My step-mom has a nephew who is almost 40 and is serving in Iraq for the sole purpose of trying to convince the locals to forsake Allah for Jesus. Apparently, he is one of many Evangelical soldiers over there on the same mission. How long will it be before all the fundamentalists (Christian, Muslim, Jewish) blow the rest of us to bits fighting over whose religion is true?

I have a MySpace blog: www.myspace.com/bigmoneygrips, where you can read about exhilarating topics such as discussing nocturnal emissions with my cousin's 11-year-old son, rediscovering the joys of marihuana consumption, and life in a neighborhood surrounded by police barricades. It's marked private because I don't want the nosy mofos I work with to be able to read it unless I truly like them, but by all means "friend me" (sorry) and join the party!

- Schmidlet July 16, 2007 08:48

Your description of your cuz perfectly fits this Ted Rall comic that has the righties all disquieted:

http://www.gocomics.com/rallcom/2007/07/14/

Yo, I really want to read your spiel, but am too unhip to know what "friend me" means. Does it mean I have to get a MySpace account?

- Stargling July 16, 2007 14:25

ola Yale.
I have you on my RSS feed thing and I check it frequently and there have been no updates since "It Got Heavy".
But I come to the page and see a couple of new things...
RSS not working properly - or do you have to update it manually when you add new stories and just haven't gotten around to it?

much love,
B

- Bruce July 18, 2007 07:43

Yale, you left one area uncategorized! What about Aurora?

- Amerigo Vespucci July 19, 2007 07:32

Ah, thanks for pointing that out.

Aurora is a huge place; it spans four(!) counties, if you can believe such a thing. Most of it can be accurately described as a failed experiment in extremely low-density development. And owing to its flat treeless expanse, it is often referred to by locals as "Saudi Aurora" or "Guadalaurora," both of which are apt descriptions. It's also where they push all the poor people when the older neighborhoods in Denver get redeveloped for yuppies.

It seems pert' near every big American city has its own version (or versions) of Aurora, a first-tier (i.e. sharing a border with its mother city) white flight suburb that at one time was probably a pretty prestigious place to live, but has settled in to its planned-obsolescence phase as the el cheapo late-60s-era houses fall out of favor with the middle class, who in turn move farther away from the core city. Seattle->Tacoma springs immediately to mind. L.A. -> Hawthorne (among others)? NYC-> New Jersey...

- Yargoyle July 19, 2007 09:25

RSS not working properly

Yeah, I switched web hosts and the new one has no shell access blah blah blah and keep forgetting to retool the RSS generator.

BTW- The Minutemen/Black Flag tribute photos you have on your site are mind-blowing! The D. Boon & Mike Watt impersonaters especially.

I couldn't quite figure out the Black Flag part though; is it a rotating cast of vocalists, just like the real Black Flag?

Anyway... wow.

- Yargoyle July 19, 2007 09:32

Here da link:

http://www.brucesiart.com/061213/

- Yargoyle July 19, 2007 09:33

Yeah those Minutemen dudes are pretty awesome.
The D & Mike guys are brothers... Pete & Sean.
Sean already had a beard & when he puts on a flannel and his bro shaves his head... well... you can see it's pretty stunning. Their "real" band is called "Pillow Man"

Yes the Black Flag band had a couple of different singers for the set - and the bassist wore a dress to be "Kira".

-B

- Bruce July 19, 2007 13:39

"Saudi Aurora" or "Guadalaurora"

HI-LARIOUS! I hadn't heard this...alas, I'm still new to the area.

I'm in Capitol Hill...it's a little seedy, but sort of amazing too.

The other day I saw a homeless fellow walking down the street with a shopping cart full of pillows.

- Becky July 20, 2007 08:51

Re: the "friend me" bit. Yes, you get a myspace account and then go to my page, and click "add friend." It's really pretty easy.

- Schmidlet July 20, 2007 10:01

Kira is believed to have the 10½

- Dave Felch July 20, 2007 11:55

Yale, I want you to know that your helpful blogging came up at a family dinner this weekend. My step brother-in-law's older sister was part of the gathering. She is mentally disabled and functions essentially as a 10-year-old. She can (sort of) carry on a conversation, but she can't work or live on her own. (Plus she's really weird and followed me around for the duration of the party.)

So we were having the ongoing "Where should Sarah move?" conversation and someone suggested Denver. I said, "Well, my friend Yale lives there and from his descriptions, it sounds like there are far too many SUV-driving, Bible-thumping superconsumer evangelists for my tastes." And the sister says, "Oh, I would love it there! I'm an evangelist." Which broke my mind! Are they recruiting the mentally handicapped too? Says a lot for your religion if it's preferred by people with limited rational-thinking capabilities.

- Schmidlet July 23, 2007 09:32

There but for the grace of logic go I.

- Bruce July 24, 2007 17:06

HIDE