Colorado - Part 14

A girl walks backwards in place on the moving walkway, and a man in the next lane has a mustache that shakes my faith in facial hair.

"Did you hit yourself?" I overhear a mother say, "Now you know how it feels. It hurts, doesn't it? ... I don't need your slime on me!"

A woman lounges on the floor like a Roman chaise, waiting for grapes from nubile maidens. There's a reason the seats here have metal dividers, ma'am, and you have circumvented it.

On the plane, the girl in the window seat is drawing somebody. Probably not me... hopefully not, since I was eating a sandwich and haven't shaved in days. Or months, depending on your definition. But then again, air travel doesn't do wonders for anyone's appearance. I think I'd take it as a flattery—she seems skilled.

As the plane starts to taxi, she stops of necessity, but we seem to be delayed due to a mix of maintenance, weather, and personal politics. Flickering static and tumbling bass noise on the teevee screns, lights turning on and off, the cabin begins to remind me of Escobar, sans Scotch, sans soda, sans dancing.

Nevermind, she was drawing some sort of airplane wing-inspired nautilis curve study. A hype piece on the teevee screens placates the crowd in the wake of a high-profile plane crash and kills time on the ground during our delay.

Airport security isn't scare tactics after all, though I had firmly believed it was. 'Pro' travelers look back at poor schmucks getting stopped at the scanner, thinking, "Why can't they simply follow the regulations and breeze through as I do?" A culture in which compliance is valued and, dare I say, rewarded. This—not plastic water bottles and toenail clippers—is the real danger.

The drawing is abstract but taking form. Lines fill in even as the bumpy ground travel hints at an eventual liftoff. She mutters to herself, unsure whether to look out or shut the window. Praying, perhaps, and it is a choppy takeoff.

In ORD, my Gonzo twin dashes off to Frontera: a highly rated, tiny, packed restaurant, to try the signature Goose Island Marisol. It's expensive as it is delicious, but I have to grab a table as I seem to be in everyone's way.

I admire the light orange, the trace of unobtrusive mango, and the less-sour pineapple of the brew as I glance up at what are apparently decorative HVAC sculptures, a mural, and a teevee evidently showing teh mastermind chef blending fennel into a casserole. This place needs a delivery door. Four PM should be off-hours for a restaurant, but airports know no such thing. Description says "Latin-style White Ale," but it's godlen in body and wheat (grains of paradise?) is not overbearing, though there's a cling-ering sweetness that could be a wheat presence.

'Copperplate' (the typeface) is EVERYWHERE.

Colorado - Part 13

It strikes me that there's a disturbing trend in payola memberships to skip airport security lines, which doesn't serve the interest of security at all, but definitely makes some cash and provides the 'haves' another opportunity to buy out of interacting with the 'nots,' short of flying into Aspen's own airfield, playground of private jets.

In security, my film is hand-checked at my request by a bearded agent who remarks, "How could I say no to someone with such an epic beard?"

The golf carts ferrying the morbidly obese/mobility impaired around the terminal evidently lack the horns so common at other airports, so the drivers whistle to alert travelers to their presence. Deciphering the tone and tune, I determine, is better left to ornithology.

Each announcement on the train between terminals is accompanied by a particular musical riff. How whimsically mnemonic.

Water emits from the fountain in a limp dribble into my leaky bottle, filling it only 20% full. Meanwhile, I am 100% certain that recent regulations are in fact a racket to sell bottles of water to air travelers.

Colorado - Part 12

At DEN, the young man behind me looks like he has pink eye, but it is Colorado, after all. An old man in front of me smells of bergamot, but that doesn't make him an earl. Or even named Earl.

The giant woman from Hawai'i who has talked so long with the car rental agent gets a patdown because evidently it is unclear just what she may have concealed under that mu'umu'u.

Lefty's Mile High Bar & Grill is not what you think, being at an airport, even though it is Denver, after all. The cart next door labeled "Climax Jerky" seems unabashedly dubious though. Decent product, no sodium nitrate, and it's only double retail price. There are free samples, so now I'm eating dog treats from a metal tin with plastic tweezers at a mile-high meringue pie airport (if you've seen the architecture, you will know what I mean.)

I hit the john and find myself in 'line' behind one guy for at least four open urinals. I figure he's there to watch, but he finally picks one, cutting me off in my own path.

Colorado - Part 11

This sauna isn't quite warm enough and smells of piss—not as bad-smelling as Denver proper, but I'm eager to be off homeward. A nasal man, a screaming child, and a medicated mother—all mercifully outside the unfortunately thin-walled sauna, insulated as poorly acoustically as thermally. I'd have waited until later but I've already been up for 17 hours at least. A woman strolls by who looks like she could displace most of the hot tub. Clearly not in Boulder anymore.

Denver smells like the middle ground between fried food and fried dogshit. Dinner at Yard House was far too large, with some kinda oatmeal stout, the name of which I neglect to record, but the quality of which I designate "good," a Green Flash Hop Odyssey: Citra Edition (enough to confirm my distaste for Citra), and a taster of New Belgium Paardebloem which is just okay enough for me to forget I didn't like it and buy a bottle when I got home, to surprise (and disappoint) myself again. Tasting my companion's Alaskan Amber makes me wish I'd gotten a large.

One man's appetizer appears to be deep-fried boneless piglets, arranged like Lincoln Logs.

Colorado - Part 10

The pay-for water bottles in the hotel room say 'Aspen Pure,' bringing to mind two things: I did not see this brand in Aspen, and Denver tap water tastes nicer than Aspen's anyway (as does Boulder's). It's a non-smoking hotel, and despite an overdue update to the decor, much appreciated, it still maintains a bit of bourgie 90's charm.

One elevator smells like garbage, and one stairwell smells like cannabis. These unpleasantries are immaterial to me, as the hotel also sports the first sauna of my voyage, though regrettably the last. "When will the US get on board with other civilized nations?" I think, but perhaps ubiquitous air conditioning is a fair trade-off. Cool fluorescent lights, winter imagery, frosted glass, and brushed metal (plus the aforementioned climate control) make the hotel feel slick and ice-cool, or pallid and dim, depending.

Colorado - Part 9

We leave the beers to melt in the car, as we walk around downtown Boulder. There are too many Greenpeacers, and one of them gets my death-glare in the face—I maintain that this was by accident,  but my subconscious machinations answer and explain themselves to no one.

I'm still tired from waking up before 4am and hiking one of the tougher slogs I've ever slogged. Slugged? I find a tea house and sample a staff favorite from an eccentric man with a mustache more impressive than my own before paying for a cup of my usual. I rejoin my party and we make our way to The Kitchen; I order a Firestone Walker Solace, which I desperately need in the figurative sense. A slug for a slog.

It comes in a giant snifter which appeased and amused me. Tart at first, but then wheaty as it should be. Something else is here as well. Maybe oak, or maybe not. Maybe also grains of paradise. Maybe I'm slipping. My portobello sandwich arrives and it's great but too salty after all the parmesean.

We depart.

Colorado - Part 8

I lay awake in bed, anxious and barely able to sleep between the excitement of Avery and the threat of an exorbitantly early rise. I dance the long dance between drunk and hung over to the tune of a lonely ghost playing a single castanet.

I wake myself up and ready myself for a balloon voyage destined never to happen. Such travel must be dangerous, I think, or the purveyors could never stay in business at the cancellation rate we seem to experience (an 'unexplained gust,' I am told, is the cause for alarm amid otherwise perfect weather). The lights in the hotel courtyard (the sun not yet being up) are the giant high-pressure sodium vapor globes that make light pollution activists cry a single tear.

In consolation, we hike up a mountain at dawn. Suffice it to say, I have more than the elevation to surmount. On the way back from breakfast, I notice a sign reading, "The Joint: A Chiropractic Place." I begin to suspect that Colorado is full of such ham-fisted puns.