WhimsyLand

Well, Alejandro is back in Spain and Junie is back in Wisconsin, and I've caught up with work and washed the laundry and slopped the hogs.  So, I guess I'm back.

Junie and I took Alejandro on a whirlwind tour of Denver, including a wander through Morrison and Red Rocks, culminating with a meal at The Fort.  It's a rebuilt replica of the "oldest adobe structure in the US" and was originally a trading post in the mid-1800's.  Now, it's a restaurant with the usual frontier-motif menu (elk, buffalo, quail, rattlesnake), all citified up with blueberry coulis and herb-sprinkled plates.  They claimed that all the meat was absent of hormones and the critters were all free-range (even the rattlers, which are acquired during a yearly roundup, if you can believe that).  Reminds me of a friend who used to say that the beef at Whole Foods was "lovingly chain-sawed". 

This rather creepy scene of miners in heaven (or something) is a mural on the ceiling of an archway in Lower Downtown Denver (or LoDo to Denverites).  I'd never been to LoDo (or in particular, Larimer Square) and I guess I expected it to be larger.  It seems to be about the size of Greater Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, just spread out a bit more and with a few more good restaurants.  It's really pretty incredible that I've been to Europe more times than I've been to Denver, but it's not that unusual for Boulderites to pass on the 30-mile drive to Our State Capital.  After LoDo, Junie, Alejandro and I visited the Museum of Natural History, which was pretty nice, if perhaps showing its age a bit.  I wasn't expecting the Musée d'Orsay, but many of the paleontological exhibits still had that breathless enthusiasm of the '60s (and THEN the trilobites exploded into every evolutionary niche!).  There was a side-show exhibit with mummy stuff (grave artifacts, coffins, a couple of real mummies) which I always get a kick out of, particularly the long spoon they used to scoop out the dear deceased's brains through his/her nose prior to The Big Journey.  Apparently, although the other main organs were either separately mummified or corked into canopic jars, the brain was thought to be something you can do without in the afterlife.  Kinda reminds you of the current administration.

I was happy to receive my buddy Frank's latest chapbook.  It's called There Is Nothing to Love about Los Angeles and available from Pudding House Publications.  Very good stuff.  My favorite recent poem of his leads off the collection:

A Governor for Your Flippancy

Say heart, say heart on your sleeve, say you become
    a better person every time you leave this room.

Say you once fell asleep in this chair. Say you dreamt
    the one you loved tried to reach out, and say you spent

half your life trying to call back. Admit you hated
    the work: start with yourself, start in this space, start

by pulling the curtains back and say heart, say palate,
    say purpose, say pith. Say you never cried. Admit you came

pretty damn close. Tell it to the moon, swear to God
    you are telling the truth. Say there are hundreds like you

who ache. Say crutch, say cane, say you cannot make it
    go away, admit you never had the strength. Feel the weight

on your sleeve. Say heart, say chamber, say one of four parts. Look at it
    under any light. Say match, say candle, say forty watts.

To tell you the truth, this poem gives me the shivers.  Go get the chap and see what the rest are like.

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Tomorrow:  The new Barrow Street and PHC Pretty Good Joke Book.