Eerie Colorado

We slept in this morning but after getting breakfast and preparing for the day, The Wife and I found ourselves with several hours to pass before the first wedding event of the weekend we will attend. So we drove around trying to find a place for The Wife to get a manicure and pedicure, up and down Wadsworth Avenue in Lakewood.

We both agreed that there is something eerie about this little corner of the world. It’s hard to describe precisely.

Part of it might be that we’re a little underwhelmed with the hotel. It’s adequate to our needs but not quite up to the standards we had been expecting from this brand of mid-range hotel. The business center doesn’t work, so I’m sitting behind the front desk using the hotel clerk’s computer to write this post, which is also odd. (The clerks are so young!)

Part of it seems to be the lack of zoning. There are what appear to be light-industrial, commercial, residential, and open-space uses of land, right next to each other, all over the place. Part of it seems to be the lack of socioeconomic clustering — there are some very large, expensive houses in a gated community right next to what look like sleazy liquor stores and check cashing places. There’s a Starbucks, but it looks run-down and the sign looks half-assed. Then there is what looks like a brand-new, upscale mall with a Whole Foods and a Dick’s Sporting Goods, less than a quarter mile from a Planned Parenthood clinic.

The Wife suggested that our unease at the lack of enforced urban planning says more about us than it does about Denver. She’s probably right.

Lots of chicken wing places. Don’t get me wrong, I like chicken wings as much as the next guy but there seems to be a morbidly intense interest on the part of residents of suburban Jefferson County, Colorado in chicken wings.

It’s hot and dry, which certainly feels familiar to a desert dweller, but there is also a lot of vegetation, which makes it look more like Tennessee. So there must be rain — and the buildings all have pitched roofs, for the snow during the winter, of course. Some of it is seeing a pitched roof and other alpine-style construction during such a hot, desert-like day.

The Wife pointed out that except for a few Latinos working at the Denny’s, we’ve only seen white people out and about. (The crowd at the airport seemed pretty diverse, but where did they all go?) The lack of racial diversity was not something I initially noticed but now that The Wife pointed it out, it’s kind of creepy.

And there’s lots of hippies. Real hippies — girls in peasant dresses, guys with long hair and beards in tie-dyed T-shirts, smoking weed and hanging out in VW Vans. They all look to be in their mid- to late-twenties, but could be either older or maybe even younger than that. That’s not surprising, really; Colorado has something of a reputation for that. The quantity of them is a little surprising.

So I can’t quite figure out exactly what it is that is a little bit… off about the place. Maybe it’s just the sudden transition from the hyper-activity that I had been immersed in for several weeks back home to having little to nothing to do that is so disarming.

It won’t matter when we’re with our friends at their wedding festivities, though. We’ll leave for that in a few hours and maybe I’m better off between now and then just reading a book.