reflections on Boulder (14 years later)

[it's been a while since i tried this, but here goes...]

Last weekend, my yin and I travelled to Boulder, with sidecar and yin-in-law in tow. My love with the mountain west began upon first site, following a furtive escape from the east in 2000 with the noise of so many things crashing down so loud that I couldn't hear anything at all until years later and then it all sounded like a Clash song recorded the year I was born.

But this is beside the point...

The point is that this trip to Boulder triggered in me a sense of nostalgia for my first visit there, when the bar mitzvah boy we were there to celebrate didn't exist yet, nor sidecar, and my yin and I were in the first week of our honeymoon, which consisted of: 1) escaping Florida as efficiently as possible; and 2) driving around the west for a month, meeting Bullwinkle, visiting Mardou, avoiding hookers, and returning to the older mountains where I was born. At the time, I remember thinking of this magical month as an incredibly important because it would - in all likelihood - be the longest time without work or responsibilities for decades to come, and thus far that has certainly proven to be the case.

But this is also beside the point.

The point is that during this visit, I stumbled on a profound and mildly problematic mathematical theorem:

Boulder = hippie ethos + yuppie checkbook

This realization dawned on me as we were sitting at a coffee shop on Pearl Street, listening to the conversation as sidecar and her cousins dined on cookies, and I indulged in hibiscus tea. While true during my previous visit, I was not yet mature enough to see it, or perhaps too steeped in my post-grad school, pre-professional, quasi-bohemian identity, over-hyphenated identity. I thought about the podcast I had been listening to before our trip, which did provided a fascinating  history of Starbucks that managed to be simultaneously definitive, revisionist, and counterfactual.

(recycled semiotic poesy goes here)

paradigm, syntagm and value

This was the first time

it felt like a poem:

Fourth floor

mythologies

on a Monday

night parking

deck, a table

full of apples,

middle school

prophecies; all

teetering on

the brink of

structuralism.

I’ll be the signifier,

you can be –

(why)

Who holds the pen?

Six days ago, 14+ years after my first visit to Boulder, I reread the ingredients on the label

and went back to my notebook and revised my theorem:

Boulder = hippie ethos < yuppie checkbook