Usually when I plan a trip, things go smoothly. Reservations aren’t lost. Flights aren’t missed. Everything works. When I got to Denver to pick up my rental car for this Mount Rushmore Labor Day Road Trip Extravaganza, things took a very wrong turn.
Since I don’t have a credit card, apparently you have to drop off the car back at the place you picked it up from if you use a debit card. No matter what I did, it wouldn’t have worked from Cheapo Car Rental, so I just took a Lyft to my hotel and assessed things. I figured if I booked a flight out of Denver, I could make it work with Enterprise. I did. The only catch was they didn’t have anything available until today. So I wound up with an extra day in Denver.
I bought a ticket to the Rockies game and figured I would have to kill time there. Because it was over 90 (but unlike Los Angeles there was no humidity so it was bearable,) I decided to go to the Denver Art Museum. While the architecture was neat:
I was disappointed with the offerings. They had two great exhibits though. The first was “Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013.” He took pictures from refugee camps around the world during this time with a majority focus on women.
Fazal Sheikh, Alima Hassan Abdullai and her brother Mahmoud, Somali refugee camp, Mandera, Kenya, 1993, from the series A Camel for the Son.
Walking through this exhibit I was on the verge of tears the whole time. The images of the mothers particularly at the Mandrea feeding center in Kenya during the Rwandan civil war in the 90s really grabbed me. Their faces betrayed no emotion as they were trying to get their malnourished babies fed. These women were just doing what they had to to keep their babies alive. Also haunting was the fact the a lot of the babies were being tended to by their sisters. Where had the mothers gone? Were they killed during the violence?
It was all just so haunting.
The other great exhibit was “Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Space.” One of the first things you notice when you get in is Ramiro Gomez’s mixed-media on cardboard piece about Lupita:
Ramiro Gomez Lupita Series.
And here is something very pretty from Gabriel Dawe:
Gabriel Dawe, Plexus no. 36.
Perhaps the best thing about the museum was that since it was the first Saturday, it was free!
And also right outside was the Taste of Colorado festival on the Capitol Grounds which was pretty terrific.
Then heading to Lodo to get close to Coors Field:
And my good seats at Coors Field:
The Rockies ended up losing to the D-Backs 4-2, but it was still a pretty fun day for me.
I went back to my hotel after that and prepared for my next day:
By the way, I did get my rental car and did make it to Mount Rushmore. More on that later.
The only reason I really look forward to my birthday is that I get time off from work and that I usually rent an Airbnb out in the middle of the desert in the Joshua Tree vicinity with a pool, hot tub, and no one around for 5 acres. So here I am in Landers (or a bit away from it really) whose claim to fame was that it was the epicenter of a 7.3 earthquake in 1992 just hours before a separate 6.5 earthquake centered in Big Bear hit on a Sunday morning. Wild stuff.
I arrived here yesterday, and on the way had to stop to get gas. Since this stupid fucking illegal war with Iran has driven gas prices sky high again, I’ve mostly been back on public transit again because, fuck that. There I was at the Arco station jaw agape as the $30 went to $40 and on up until it landed at $72 for 13 gallons of gas. Yes, the “cheap” gas.
I’m going to be spending most of the time in or around the pool trying to finish Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz. I’m at around page 604, so I have about 400 more pages to go. I’ll be honest — I have no fucking clue what’s going on in the book. It’s a slow, slow read and demands your attention but not in a painstaking way. It’s a very enjoyable read, but I honestly don’t know how we get from one part to the next. Instead of trying to make sense of it, I’m just riding the wave, going where it’s taking me and try to make sense of it later.
I’ve started working on a couple of things with myself and hope to get better at as I begin my 48th year on this planet: I have started to journal more. It’s the most mundane scatterbrained thing. I hope it doesn’t cause someone’s head to explode when they go through my journals after I’m dead. (How cute. I think I have any importance that people will actually read what I write rather than just dispose it like they should.)
I need to curb my YouTube addiction. I don’t watch tv shows. I don’t watch sports all that much. I don’t use TikTok. I only doomscroll through Facebook at 3 am after I have woken up to take a piss. I am no longer perpetually online. But I will sit down and waste hours upon hours watching YouTube videos. I really need to get that in check.
That’s all I’ve got. Overall, I’m not happy, but I’m not completely depressed. Let’s just call it nonplussed. For someone who feels like a stranger in his own country, I guess that’s about as good as we can hope for.
Occasionally, after reading certain books, when his disgust for daily life became particularly marked, he longed for the lenitive hours immersed in a cloister…
There is just a clause in the above sentence in the first chapter for J.-K. Huysman’s The Damned (Là-Bas) that really stuck out to me: “when his disgust for daily life became particularly marked.”
I had to go back to work today after two weeks off. The first week I did a road trip that culminated in being in a cabin for two days in Choteau, Montana that had a hot tub. It was nice to sit in the hot jets while it was 18F (-8C) outside. Then I meandered my way home before just doing nothing for the second week. Just sitting with my cats, sleep, and tell myself I was going to mop my floors before doing none of that.
After these weeks of doing a whole bunch of nothing, to my horror it was time to go back to work. The dread of walking into my office which I liken to a monkey cage at the zoo, plugging in my laptop and opening Outlook. Emails filled with complaints. That was the dread that was inside of me.
So I get it when Huysman’s protagonist Durtal has a “disgust for daily life.” It’s certainly reassuring that not a lot has changed over the last 130 or so years.
I was disappointed with the offerings. They had two great exhibits though. The first was “Common Ground: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh, 1989-2013.” He took pictures from refugee camps around the world during this time with a majority focus on women.
Then heading to Lodo to get close to Coors Field:
And my good seats at Coors Field:
The Rockies ended up losing to the D-Backs 4-2, but it was still a pretty fun day for me.
I went back to my hotel after that and prepared for my next day:
By the way, I did get my rental car and did make it to Mount Rushmore. More on that later.
