the hypothetical wren

It is hard to overemphasize how depressing some of the documents I’m looking for are. Not in an obvious way — I’m not researching mass slaughter or anything — but more in the sense that you start to see, bit by bit, how some of the worst parts of the present world are slowly being created by deliberate actions (or just as often, inactions), ignorance or apathy. The WTF factor with history is always high — things in the past are often genuinely strange in ways that are hard to comprehend — but in my time period (the 1960s and 1970s — not 1956), it’s off the charts. So I’m taking a week off to go visit my dad and play with the dog and befriend television once again.

Pictured above is a park in Denver that has had many names — it was once Robinson Park, then Arlington Park, and then (finally) the Hungarian Freedom Park — a small, triangular, and frequently empty (especially compared with Alamo Placita park, just across Cherry Creek from it) park along Speer Boulevard. There was no one there when I took this picture — but as you can clearly tell, someone had been there in the recent past.

Capitol Hill, Thursday at dusk.

• The breakfast burrito at the 20th Street Cafe in downtown (just on the edge of the Skyline Urban Renewal District - any further to the west, and it would have been demolished in the 1970s) is almost to Burqueño standards. They also have “breakfast fried rice,” which I did not ask about.
• Pacific Mercantile, the Japanese grocery store downtown, was full of hipsters buying wasabi peas.
• Someone at 14th and Larimer a dog, “How’d you get all wet, boy? There’s not a river around here for miles.”
• Macchiatos: they’re not cappuccinos.
• 25% of the reading in this city must be done on the bus or the right rail. 7% of this seems to make place on my own bus line.
• People leave photographs in the library. I take pictures of them.

People often ask me what my dissertation is about. When I don’t want to talk about it, I just tell them that it’s about zoning. Further inquiry? Non-existent.