Sunshine, My Ass!
A number of people have asked me why I decided to move to Colorado for a month. Here is a short answer: the sunshine.
New York is depressing in so many ways. One NEVER has enough money, square footage, or viable prospects for matrimony. Half of the population is always currently suffering either from a hangover or a coke-over, making them chronically crabby, selfish and unhospitable. It's impossible to keep a pet of the fuzzy variety -- which is proven to improve one's quality of life -- unless it's a tarantula, or one lives with an aforementioned viable prospect for matrimony (which I don't) to help shoulder the burden of walking the thing and picking up its poop. And to top it off, the weather is awful approximately 327 days a year. If you're not dealing with mugginess that makes you feel as though you're being gagged with a sweatsock, you're busy trying to dump slush out of your shoe as a pile of snow alights on, and then melts upon, your newly (and expensively) blown-out hair.
One day back in early June, I think it was, I woke up in Brooklyn. The birds were singing outside my window, the sun was shining in on my face, and I thought, "I could deal with waking up like this EVERY day. Where better but to do that than Colorado, land of 300 days of sunshine a year."
Well, folks, you know my luck with travel, which apparently extends to lengthier living arrangements as well. Because it's hardly stopped raining since I got here. Record deluges soaked the middle part of the state all weekend, causing rockslides and flooding and general unhappiness among wet campers, myself included.
The plan was to head up to a stupid-sounding place named Poudre (pronounced POOT-er) Canyon and climb at a place called Grey Rock. Poudre Canyon, despite its ridiculous moniker, is a gorgeous canyon near Fort Collins, through which runs a pastoral-lookin' river. It's surrounded by big rock cliffs and fir trees. Saturday me and some friends of friends got tickets to a dirty-hippie concert (photographic evidence to come, as usual) at a place called the Mishawaka, which is a music venue outside a tumble-down old log cabin, where the stage is nestled five feet from the roaring rapids and dirty hippies come to eat mushrooms and twirl aimlessly like the parentally-funded autism victims they are.
The trip did not start auspiciously. It was pouring in Denver but I hoped that the weather pattern would miraculously shift once we drove farther up into the mountains. It was not to be, but the Mishawaka was a nice place to hang out -- at least during the opening bluegrass band. Then the headliners -- Little Feat -- took the stage, and my misery multiplied tenfold.
Little Feat lost their lead singer something like 57 years ago. He was replaced by some woman whose name I will never bother to research who had a very unironic mullet, was carrying about 80 additional pounds and had a singing voice like that of a tone-deaf hyena. The band started out with a song wherein one of the graying, balding backup singers informed us that he had a "Rocket in My Pocket," which I found supremely hard to believe and set the air of bemused annoyance for the rest of the night.
Not so luckily the sound system there is great, which meant that my ears were close to bleeding by the end of the night to the point that I was literally getting nauseous. The screeching and noodling grew to epic heights throughout the night as the members of Little Feat cranked away endlessly on such instruments as accordians and bongos. To make matters EVEN WORSE, I was responsible for driving everyone back to the campsite in my van (the only thing that made me "pass" as a hippie for the night -- see picture!) and so I had to remain relatively sober throughout the entire ordeal.
However, it would all be worth it for the climbing the next day. Of course, since I apparently bring bad weather and bad luck with me wherever I go, the rain never stopped and thus we were unable to climb.
Of course, today is Monday and now that I'm back in a basement working on editing stories about the sex lives of the arctic albatross and whatnot, the sun is shining gloriously -- mocking me, I'm sure. And yet, the camping was fun, and I finally got to drink some beer when the Show of Pain was over Saturday night, and all is well.
New York is depressing in so many ways. One NEVER has enough money, square footage, or viable prospects for matrimony. Half of the population is always currently suffering either from a hangover or a coke-over, making them chronically crabby, selfish and unhospitable. It's impossible to keep a pet of the fuzzy variety -- which is proven to improve one's quality of life -- unless it's a tarantula, or one lives with an aforementioned viable prospect for matrimony (which I don't) to help shoulder the burden of walking the thing and picking up its poop. And to top it off, the weather is awful approximately 327 days a year. If you're not dealing with mugginess that makes you feel as though you're being gagged with a sweatsock, you're busy trying to dump slush out of your shoe as a pile of snow alights on, and then melts upon, your newly (and expensively) blown-out hair.
One day back in early June, I think it was, I woke up in Brooklyn. The birds were singing outside my window, the sun was shining in on my face, and I thought, "I could deal with waking up like this EVERY day. Where better but to do that than Colorado, land of 300 days of sunshine a year."
Well, folks, you know my luck with travel, which apparently extends to lengthier living arrangements as well. Because it's hardly stopped raining since I got here. Record deluges soaked the middle part of the state all weekend, causing rockslides and flooding and general unhappiness among wet campers, myself included.
The plan was to head up to a stupid-sounding place named Poudre (pronounced POOT-er) Canyon and climb at a place called Grey Rock. Poudre Canyon, despite its ridiculous moniker, is a gorgeous canyon near Fort Collins, through which runs a pastoral-lookin' river. It's surrounded by big rock cliffs and fir trees. Saturday me and some friends of friends got tickets to a dirty-hippie concert (photographic evidence to come, as usual) at a place called the Mishawaka, which is a music venue outside a tumble-down old log cabin, where the stage is nestled five feet from the roaring rapids and dirty hippies come to eat mushrooms and twirl aimlessly like the parentally-funded autism victims they are.
The trip did not start auspiciously. It was pouring in Denver but I hoped that the weather pattern would miraculously shift once we drove farther up into the mountains. It was not to be, but the Mishawaka was a nice place to hang out -- at least during the opening bluegrass band. Then the headliners -- Little Feat -- took the stage, and my misery multiplied tenfold.
Little Feat lost their lead singer something like 57 years ago. He was replaced by some woman whose name I will never bother to research who had a very unironic mullet, was carrying about 80 additional pounds and had a singing voice like that of a tone-deaf hyena. The band started out with a song wherein one of the graying, balding backup singers informed us that he had a "Rocket in My Pocket," which I found supremely hard to believe and set the air of bemused annoyance for the rest of the night.
Not so luckily the sound system there is great, which meant that my ears were close to bleeding by the end of the night to the point that I was literally getting nauseous. The screeching and noodling grew to epic heights throughout the night as the members of Little Feat cranked away endlessly on such instruments as accordians and bongos. To make matters EVEN WORSE, I was responsible for driving everyone back to the campsite in my van (the only thing that made me "pass" as a hippie for the night -- see picture!) and so I had to remain relatively sober throughout the entire ordeal.
However, it would all be worth it for the climbing the next day. Of course, since I apparently bring bad weather and bad luck with me wherever I go, the rain never stopped and thus we were unable to climb.
Of course, today is Monday and now that I'm back in a basement working on editing stories about the sex lives of the arctic albatross and whatnot, the sun is shining gloriously -- mocking me, I'm sure. And yet, the camping was fun, and I finally got to drink some beer when the Show of Pain was over Saturday night, and all is well.
posted by Had To Move at 4:08 PM
2 Comments:
Jesus. I can smell the patchouli from here.
after albatrosses mate do they feel like an albatross has been lifted from around their necks?
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