(Actually I think my elevation is something like 13 feet, but I don’t really know how to check.)

I made it back from my short trip to Denver yesterday afternoon.  We had a great time with no major hassles, other than Denver’s horribly mismanaged airport security line, and a couple of pouty four-pawed felines who get upset when we leave them with a petsitter.  The only real issue is the trip seemed way short, and we barely saw any of the city, aside from Coors Field.

My perception of Denver is weird, because when I lived there, I thought it was a pretty small place.  But when I think about all of the places we didn’t see at all during this trip, I realize it’s pretty damn huge.  And I also realize now that in my year there, I barely scratched the surface; there are so many things I never did there, I could probably line up a years’ worth of weekend voyages and daytrips and visits and expeditions.  And part of that is that during my year there, we spent almost every weekend going to the movie theater at Stapleton, and then going to the Target there.  There’s a lot of good food in town, but I ended up at Bar Louie’s or Breckenridge Brewery eating nachos and wings and trying to watch a game on mute.  I feel like if I had the time, I would be able to do a lot more there.

Example: we went to the Denver Art Museum.  Never went when I lived there, and I was slightly reluctant only because the King Tut thing is there now, which means there’s this mad rush of confusion with the herds heading in to see the mummies. But for ten bucks, we spent a couple of hours looking through the exhibits, and even the outside of the buildings is pretty awesome looking.  I mean, I am always conflicted about fine art, because there are pieces I really like, and not just photorealistic painting, but modern art that elicits some kind of response from me.  But there are other things that don’t, maybe because I’m an idiot or never studied art, or don’t see how a fire hydrant painted blue is supposed to signify the coming of a second ice age due to botched foreign policy.  But the DAM had some interesting stuff, and it’s just another example of something I completely missed while I lived there.

Anyway, I’m slowly getting the pictures on flickr, and I’ll write up the baseball games eventually…

Hello from Denver, my former home and now a great vacation spot for me to get my baseball fix once a year.  We got into town Thursday night, saw the Rockies beat the Brewers last night, and will go tonight and sit right behind home plate for game two of the series.  We also took the stadium tour and I got some great pictures from the field.  We will be flying back tomorrow, which thankfully means we get to miss the last game.  Sunday is “faith day”, sponsored by the jesus freaks at Chick-Fil-A.  “Faith day” is code for conservative christian day, when all of the lovely folks from Colorado Springs take a break from their megachurch and come up to see a baseball game with the heathens and sinners. I’m very tempted to go rent a press-on-beard and turban and see if “faith day” really means all faiths.  I’m sure nobody would get the joke.

There are a lot of things I love and miss about Denver, but that’s sure not one of them.  Like yesterday, I was sitting down in the club level to eat my pizza, and overheard some windbags losing their shit about the TERROR MOSQUE, repeating ad nauseam whatever Fox and Friends told them to believe about the mosque going in “at” ground zero in New York.  I honestly don’t give a shit either way, and I really don’t like to burn cycles on politics, but as a person who was in lower Manhattan in the fall nine years ago, I really don’t like it when tea party types circle-jerk in the name of all things 9/11.

Anyway, Denver is weird in that way.  I mean, it can be a very left-leaning place - there are a lot of hipster types with way too many tattoos that smoke way too much pot and spend a lot of time eating lean and mountain biking and a bunch of other stuff that’s pretty much incompatible with the belief system proclaimed by all of the christian conservative types that stomp around here.  It’s weird that a city with as many damn pot dispensaries can also have so many megachurches.  (In our old neighborhood - LoDo - pretty much every former Pilates or Yoga studio in the area has converted into a legal pot store, with a cheeky name like “Rocky Mountain High”.  I think some law must have changed right after we left, or people just wised up that selling medical weed is way more profitable than running a doggie day care.)

It’s weird to be back in general.  It’s not as oddly nostalgic as it was the last few times I returned, but it is still weird to vacation in a place I used to live.  I mean, we parked last night in the lot that I used to look at all day when I was in my office writing.  And it looks like that apartment’s vacant, so if I really wanted to come back in exactly the same fashion, there you go.  But it’s funny - we were talking the other day about “wasn’t that apartment really great”?  And then we started thinking - “yeah, but when the sun rose in the morning, the bedroom turned into a sauna”, and “there were no screens on the windows, and these giant Jurassic Park bugs would fly in”, and “every time the garage door opened, two floors below, you heard this ‘beep beep beep’ sound”.  I still did like the layout of the place though.  One of our main criteria when we shopped for our new place was “some place like Denver, but to own instead of rent”.  And the neighborhood is hurting, tenant-wise.  It looks like the place is only at a third occupancy, and they’ve built several super-huge modern apartment buildings, which all sit vacant.

Not much else.  My nephew turns 13 today, which is weird.  I vividly remember my 13th, if only because my parents were getting divorced then.  I can’t even imagine my parents married now, so it’s weird to think of their split.  I just remember being overly concerned about getting a home computer, because I spent my hours writing BASIC code on sheets of paper, trying to invent a new Zork-type game to streamline my D&D playing experience.  So you know where my priorities were those days.

Okay, I should get off of this shared computer in the business center and go find a quiet place to write on my netbook for a bit before we start the day.  Full report when I get back to sea level and have my real mac and the ability to upload a few thousand photos.

I’m eating a frozen pizza, drinking a Sprite Zero, and thinking of time machines.

I’m not talking about H.G. Wells, or teleporting man-machine hybrids that look like a leaner version of the current California governor back to save the leader of the future resistance army.  I’ve probably mentioned this to others, but it always seems to come up in conversations with Michael, usually about writing.  Time machines are my shorthand for any stimulus that instantly beams me back to a previous era more than just simple nostalgia would.  It’s a touchstone of some kind that will automatically change my brain chemistry in a magical way and show me a brief view of a different world in my past.  It initiates a rush of memories about some forgotten time, some former lover or old job or just a series of events or common pattern that happened long enough ago that it takes that piece of machinery to take me back there.

This frozen pizza - it’s the Lean Cuisine Margherita pizza, a little personal pan thing you microwave for a two minutes thirty while it sits on its own box, turned inside out to reveal a little high tech silver cardboard browning thing that probably can’t be recycled and clogs up landfills.  Six weight watchers points.  In the summer of 2008, when Sarah was out of town and I needed to fend for myself for dinner, this was a common go-to.  In fact, I have a tally of everything I ate that summer (and it worked, so don’t knock it), and I ate one of these pizzas eleven times.  And almost every time, it was when I sat at my computer, listening to a Rockies game.  These things have a distinctive flavor, the artificial preservatives and synthetic garbage that keep the tomato sauce stable for a thousand years, the low-fat cheese, probably made with some soy crap to keep the calories and fat down.

It sounds horrible, but every time I eat one, I think of that summer, of obsessively watching everything I ate, writing down every food, shopping for the newest reduced-fat this and hundred-calorie-pack that.  It reminds me of the long walks I took in the ever-sunny Playa Del Rey tropics, the jogs on the sands of the Pacific, the breaks from working at home to go to the local Subway and get the same exact thing every day, because I had the points so dialed in.  Even though I was broke and panicked over money and applying for every god damned job on dice.com that popped up in the middle of a huge economic downturn, I really miss some parts of that summer.  And when I sit down with one of those pizzas, it’s a time machine that brings me back to July 1, 2008, when I had a pizza and a diet root beer and listened to Aaron Cook and the Rockies beat the Padres at home 4-0.

Here’s another:  I bought some new shampoo this weekend, a drug store off-brand that’s supposed to be like Axe, called Blade or Storm or Pyro, or Battle Mace or something.  (It was on sale, I needed shampoo.)  So I crack this stuff open on Monday morning, during my usual hurried 5

must-shower-fast-so-I-can-write shower.  And it smells really familiar, and I don’t know why, and then I realize it: it smells exactly like Obsession cologne, or as exact as those impostor fragrances get, anyway.  And this is a huge, huge time machine for a couple of reasons.  First, smells are absolutely the most precise way this phenomenon happens.  And second, I went through this doofus phase in 1992 where I was convinced that any deficiency in looks, physique, personality, lineage, education, or financial standing could be resolved with a pheromone-like effect from the right cologne.  And that spring, a friend of mine got me started on that particular Calvin Klein fragrance.  And I don’t remember if I talked about this in Summer Rain or not, but it was part of my standard uniform I’d wear on all of these failed first dates I went on that year, at least until I switched to Eternity, and then to Drakkar.  And now the smell of that stuff, or a facsimile shampoo, transports me back to 1992, when I drove up to Forest Hall in my beaten and rusted diesel VW Rabbit for my first date with Patty.   The rest of the story - well, go buy the book - but I fell for her, it was a month or six weeks of magic, then she left for Pittsburgh and broke my heart and did not give me a pen.

Speaking of time machines, I am supposed to be packing for a trip to Denver.  Wish me (and the Rockies) luck, and I’ll try to get the netbook rolling while I’m a mile up.

I did some minor facelift work to the home page - check out https://www.rumored.com/ if you get a chance.  Nothing too exciting, but I wanted to mess with JQuery a little bit, and I’m now using it for rounded corners and hover effects.  The old circa-2007 DHTML stuff I was using for panel swapping was fun, but I’m convinced that the method of having the panel text embedded within the JavaScript was causing crawler issues.  I’m slightly worried that the new caffeine engine of Google’s is bombing out on page errors, and I think the old embedded HTML in JavaScript crap was looking like one big error.

The new page is not as exciting, and I am convinced I need to do something better, but I don’t have time to sink into some gigantic mess of flash and photoshop wizardry.  I really just want to work on narrowing down and focusing what I have on the site, which is why a lot of stuff is now gone.  But I like what I have.  Or at least I like what I have as seen in Safari 5 on a Mac.  I’m always worried that a copy of IE 2 for Solaris will turn the whole thing into an unholy terror due to some rendering problem.

I was thinking about this, and this is maybe my fourth iteration of the root page on Rumored, and I think there were at least a couple of iterations on speakeasy from 1995-1998, a brief home on plan9.spry.com in 95, and then a couple of iterations on bronze from 1993-1995.  I also had a hyplan (what we used to call homepages) back on cs.indiana.edu in 1992-1993, but it consisted of two .au files, one of Cannibal Corpse, and one of Bill Perry yelling “will you shut the fuck up?”  That’s 18 years of homepages.  EIGHTEEN YEARS.

The www as we know it is only 7000 days old.  I’ve been here for about 6500 of them.  Christ.

I had the most vivid dream a bit ago.  I was back in Bloomington, in present-day, working some job that involved me commuting either to or from Indianapolis every day.  I went for breakfast at the Phoenix Dumpling, which had been (re-?)opened as this sort of foody sit-down service restaurant, but still had the same cooks and the same food and kitchen setup.  I ordered The General and wolfed it down while overhearing a conversation at another table, with some woman who was a geology PhD from Arkansas or something, although she looked Filipino, who bought and reopened the place, trying to make it as accurate as possible.

I think the Phoenix was the first place I’ve ever eaten Chinese food.  I mean, I know I never ate it as a kid, because the most ethnic food we ever ate was maybe Pizza Hut.  The Dump was sort of an institution amongst the compsci people and other hackers that used to hang out at Lindley Hall.  You didn’t have to know the difference between a struct and a pointer to a struct to eat there, but at least half of the people there at any given time probably could.  (Or maybe not - it was a pretty scheme-heavy institution, scheme being this lisp-like programming language, not a synonym for plan or strategy.)

The Dump sat in this building with two storefronts, and a bunch of apartments above it.  At one time, Frankov had one of the studios above it, which must have been torture, smelling the food below on a daily basis. The storefront next to it was temporarily the location of Jerry’s Liquors, when their other location burned down in 1991.  Phoenix Dumpling consisted of a small dining area with a few tables in the front, with a sort of assembly line of food prep in the back.  A row of giant cauldrons sat on gas burners, a line of ancient Chinese women hunched over each one, stirring gallons of food with giant boat oars.  You pointed at the kettle of food you wanted, and they would pile it into a styrofoam box, along with a bunch of premade rice, and you’d order a coke, and they’d fill up a styrofoam cup, no cans or coke-logoed paper cups.  You could get in and out of there for five bucks easy, and get a pound of the best worst Chinese food you could find in town.  I mean, there were plenty of places to get Chinese food, and there were several places with better food, but this was one of those pound-for-pound comparisons, where you got five bucks of food for five bucks.

I’ve been thinking about Bloomington a bit lately, digging through some old stories I want to clean up eventually.  I have not been back since 2002, and even that was for a quick afternoon.  I wish I could go back, but any time I’m in the midwest, it’s up north and during the winter, so I can’t invest the ten hours of driving on crap roads to walk around a cold and vacant campus.  I don’t know though - it might be incredibly depressing to see everything changed, and the place populated with kids who are literally young enough to be my kids.

Okay, gotta get to work.