In March, 1999...

DIARY

I was a second year living in 529D, the creepiest room in Mathews House. It was a haunted year overall, and by this point many catastrophes had passed and many others were on their way.

There was a break in all this, however...

My friend Armand had received an extra ticket from Vanguard, the airline he took from Chicago home to Denver, and he offered it to me. Instead of Michigan, I'd went to Colorado for Spring break.

It's been so long since this happened that my sequentiality has to be a little bit messed up, but I remember that it was freezingi n Chicago when he walked up Ellis to the 55 Street bus. Our flight left at 10:30 and we'd made the busstop around 8:30... We were a little edgy and nervous. I'd packed my suitcase too tightly, and it was a struggle to carry it the full distance. Moreover, there weren't any Express buses on Garfield at the time, meaning the crosstown ride to Midway might take fifty minutes or an hour. We made our flight alright, however, and it may have even been delayed. I read half of the flight and slept the other half.

Denver airport was oddly over-the-top. While complete with it's own internal subway system that seemed imported from the future, or at least Disney world, and all the polish and poise you'd hope for in an airport, it also had a strange extended dome that meant to suggest the mountains and instead came off as a furtive imitation. Armand's father picked us up and we drove to his home in Aurora. The airport was some distance from the city, and Denver is situated on the eastern bank of the Rockies, so the approach was actually quite level. I was able to see the whole metropolitan area sprawling off to my right and left. After a ten or twenty minute ride, we arrived at his house in Aurora, a looming corporation half the size of Denver itself. Aurora has it's own history and interesting parts, though some of it has blossomed out with houses and not-much-else, much like the area outside Detroit.

I believe it was the very next morning that I woke up before Armand and went for a walk to the Aurora mall and back. The scene was half-familiar and half-exotic. The rows of brick suburban houses could have been from outside Chicago, or Detroit, or Flint, but I'd never seen anything like the Prairie Dogs the scurried in and out of hundreds of holes in any unnocupied land.

Later that same day, I think, we went to a famous bookstore, and there I bought On the Road by Jack Karouac, more because I associated the story with Denver than anything else. It turned out I could just as well associate it with New York City, with Chicago, with San Francisco and with Mexico City.

We went to a radio play with Armand's parents.
We went out with a number of Armand's friends on several occasions; Jose who related his yule adventures in TJ and Julia who, when I said 'hello' gathered from my accent that I must be from Michigan or Minnesota. Mark (?) who drank 40s with us and tried to come up with the most offensive rap lyrics we could remember. And Marcell. There were a few others that I do not remember. One night, maybe halfway through our trip, we went out to a frat. I drank too much and the frat brothers asked us to leave. Armand wasn't too happy about that. Another day, we met with Judd and his roleplaying friends and went to see 8mm, which I defended as "pretty good," a memory I'd disown now, if I could.

On the morning of the third day, I believe, I went out for a long walk, weaving through Aurora in vicinity to I-70, past the Aurora mall and Del-Ray park, up to Colfax (the Dort Highway of Denver). I followed Colfax into the city past lots of goregous fifties motels, flattened and pastel, and the immaculate East High School, which I have to rope into Urbantasm somehow. I remember I entered and asked if I could take photos; they said no. I countinued through downtown and waited at a diner on Federal. I'd walked some twelve or fourteen miles. Armand picked me up, and we went to meet his father at a Vietnamiese dive with some of the best coffee I've ever had.

On the subject:

A subplot to this whole story was my staying up for most of the night each night. I'd recently switched my concentration from... who knows, G.S. Hum?... to Physics. But I was already behind by nearly two years, and I was determined to make if work, if possible. I'd entrolled in Calc 153 with Martin Pergler, who I knew from 151-152 my prior year. Each night I played catchup, covering as many pages of the Calculus as I could. I should have guessed the way the wind was blowing in the sheer difficulty I had grasping at derivatives and integrals my friends were solving in my sleep. But this would be part of the drama to play out Spring quarter. For now, it was nice. Each night, Armand's mom prepared me a pot of coffee and I sat at the kitchen table and looked out into that bleak Colorado-ness, and tried to solve the problems. I usually went to bed around four or five.

We left Denver three times on the latter half of the trip.

The first day, out with Armand's friends again, we drove up to Boulder with its pedestrian walkways. It was sparkling and hippiesh and I was asked for a loan from the most attractive bunny panhandlers I'd ever imagined; it was ephemeral, like anime. We looked at the red rocks, a favored place for suicide, and the observatories perched on the banks of the mountains.

Later, Armand's father took us through Denver, through Golden, and into the mountains themselves. Denver had been one of the most high-tech and pristine cities I'd ever seen but the mountains felt rustic and rusted and ancient in a way the Appalachians do not. We wound our way past massive casinos owned by the indians and arrived at a cemetery where some of Armand's family had been buried, in the 1800s, during the Gold Rush era. Then, we climbed further, and not far below the timber line there was a huge, mirrored lake with picnic tables, marshy at the margin, but clear and smooth as glass. One the drive back, we stopped at a Coney Island (the second Armand has sited outside of Michigan)... a strange little hot dog stand in a tiny building shaped like a hot dog and bun, up in the middle of the mountains. We drove past the McMansions that strung their way up into the mountains like sinous roots. On the final leg, we passed Columbine high school in Littleton ten minutes from Denver. In just a couple weeks, that school would make news.

Our third trip, and probably the last, involved an expedition we took with Jose south to Colorado Springs where we toured the Garden of the Gods, giant, vertical plinths of smooth red stone. Since a road-trip to Albuquerque was unfeasible, on the way back we drove out into the planes which rolled out in front of us like a massive carpet. The sun had sunk behind the mountains, and all that was visible to either side were little lights on distant farming apparatus, and very occasionally, a homestead. We drove out to Limon and caught dinner at a family restaurant. Then we made the long drive, some eighty miles back to the city.

I'd visited southern California in 7th grade, but for some reason this trip more concretely gave me a notion of the West and being in the West. The huge reservoirs and modest waterways that moved throughthe city, the looming presence of the mountains and knowing that the mountains rolled on in some form or other, for the last third of the continent, and above all the fifties car culture and ninteenth century saloon culture that didn't seem to have quite eroded all made a distinct and forceful impression. I've only been to Denver that once, but the memories of that trip are disproportionately striking.

Where were you in March, 1999?

END OF POST.