Now YOU can live in a Chipotle, thanks to Old Town North!

Having grown up in Fort Collins I often recall the old waterfront district north of Old Town, and how in the 50s and 60s it used to be the industrial center that helped put this city on the map. But as the economy changed and people started shipping goods on trucks, planes and trains, our beloved waterfront district, and the old warehouses that defined it, began to fall into ruin. By the mid-90s the buildings had begun to rust and the area was rampant with vice. Then, about five years ago it was purchased and turned into a modern, mixed-use business/residential community, and proudly did urban renewal raise its head, having once again brought new life to a decaying hell-hole. And what became of the old warehouses that were once so iconic? Well, they were worked into the very buildings that replaced them, ingeniously incorporated to remind those who dwelt there of the area's historic past.

Wait, none of that ever happened.

And since it never happened, why is there a half-built neighborhood just north of Old Town that's decorated with faux-rusted corrugated steel? Might it be a cheap attempt to look "edgy"? And so it was that I stumbled across Old Town North, the hippest place to befriend a prairie dog in all of Fort Collins. (Admittedly I don't get out much, as their website says they broke ground in 2007, but since it still looks half finished, I think it's fine to be making fun of it now.)



No, that sign isn't hundreds of feet wide. Yes, there really is a Spanish style mini-hacienda going up next to the gritty, urban condos that give OTN its safe-danger charms. Clearly they want to have it both ways: if the "wrong side of the tracks" gentrification angle is too much for you, you're just a quick walk from the comforts of a regular suburban neighborhood. It's like a yoga studio that also sells crack.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love big burritos. Aside from the countless breweries, tattoo parlors and medical marijuana dispensaries that make this town great, it's seemingly limitless demand for big burritos is another thing that makes FoCo "The Choice City." That said, the decor at Chitpotle has always struck me as forced. Diamond plate and corrugated steel, along with the metal Aztec warrior statue at the Laurel & College locale, never really said to me, "Eat a burrito!" Instead I always got a sort of upscale fight club vibe from it. Like you go in, take off your designer sweater-vest and then kick the crap out of someone, but never talk about it.

As Old Town North also seems to be decorating from the "corrugated metal = urban cool" school of style, I've taken the liberty of adding the statue from the Chipotle entrance (whom I've dubbed Xochipotle, a delightful portmanteau of Xochipilli - the young Aztec god of feasting, painting, dancing, games, and writing - and the burrito parlor from whence he came) to my cellphone pictures of this bastion of edgy desperation. See if you can spot Xoch' in each one!

Here we see just how close OTN places their seemingly irreconcilable want for both The Urban and The Suburban. I'm no professional estimator, but that looks like about 40 feet, ja? Also, Xochipotle is flying on a burrito.



Similarly baffling are the street names. Intellectual religious luminaries, the lot of 'em, or so Wikipedia has led me to believe. Jerome, for St. Jerome, the man who gave us the Bible in Latin. Osiander, for Andreas Osiander, a prominent early Lutheran theologian. And Pascal, for Blaise Pascal, an all around smart guy and staunch Catholic. Amazingly, we again see OTN's ability to unify opposites - it was not enough to, as Jay Z put it, bring the suburbs to the 'hood, they're also setting aside that whole Protestant/Catholic schism thing. God, what a place to live.



At this point you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by all these urbane, big city ideals that Old Town North represents. "Wait a minute," you say in a protestation-y tone of voice, thus revealing what side of the aforementioned schism you fall on (pro pudor!). "I'm just a regular person from Northern Colorado, not some big city hipster impressed by all this book learnin'." Well, here we again see OTN's remarkable penchant for diverse inclusion. Why, it's a veritable Noah's Ark of ideals.

For all the effort that was taken to pre-rust the metal siding that graces the sides of the "cool" condos, it would seem real distress has come to this delightful little faux-urban enclave. As their website was last updated during the 2007 groundbreaking, and the ass-end fell out of the stock-market a short-ish while later, Old Town North has lots of unused lots, at least by humans. Never ones to pass up a new home regardless of the affected pretense associated with it, a large colony of prairie dogs has dug in at OTN, and judging from my rough estimates, they may outnumber the humans. Is that Northern Colorado enough for ya?



Big City, Suburban, and Rural! OTN truly has it all. The only thing they're missing is the "at" that so many other neighborhoods have incorporated as of late. (The Preserve at The Meadows, The Ponds at Overland Trail, Invesco Field at Mile High, etc.) To this end, and as new building seems to be on hiatus, I've decided to help OTN out with this final dash of ridiculous pretense.


Also if they want to use any of my photos for their website, they're more than welcome to. (Arrows added for emphasis.)



Now, who wants a burrito?

SAFETY! - Coming Soon to a Bike Lane Near You!

I was riding to work - 'cause I'm eco-leet like that - when I noticed the head of the familiar, stenciled humanoid cyclist in the bike-lane had been replaced by a largeish, industrial grade rivet. I thought this was odd because you do, in fact, need a head to ride a bike. Then I realized that the little fella - I know it's a guy because female signage involves a skirt, e.g. "Women" restroom signs and the gender diverse "children crossing" signs - had stepped up his personal safety a notch or two by putting on a helmet.


Good for him, I thought. Now when he's run over countless times during the day his little painted pate will be in much less danger of being seriously damaged. And then I thought, why stop with just helmets? Why, there's plenty of other things people do while riding that's dangerous.

I see people texting - or t-ing as I call it 'cause it's shorter, as in "I'll t you the directions," or "I just t-ed him about our impending divorce" - so we should encourage cyclists to not use cell phones while riding. And eating while biking, especially fast food 'cause that's bad for you anyway, isn't a good idea either. Nor is drinking while riding, and of course smoking, which, like fast food, counts as a double bad.

But at the same time I realized that as long we're encouraging people to avoid certain things while riding a bike, or at all, we could be championing causes as well.

"What made the list?" you query in an inquisitive tone, thus utilizing inflection to make sure I know that you're asking a question and not just beginning a sentence and then pausing dramatically. "Recycling?" Natch. "Sunblock use?" 'Course. "What about butt padding? 'Cause one time my cousin hit his tail bone pretty bad and he said it really hurt, and I wouldn't want that to happen while I was riding my bike." Amigo, I heard ya' there.

And in addition to butt padding I thought why not some groin protection, for both men and the ladies, 'cause getting hit "there" hurts everybody. Also: eye protection, knee protection, preemptive neck-brace, football style flak jacket and elbow pads. And, if the stenciled bike-lane-guy had ankles, wrists, feet or hands, I'd have included protection for those, too.

Though this dramatic "re-imagining" - to borrow a phrase from re-make happy Hollywood - would necessitate the use of a second paint color - red for safety, of course - I think it could be paid for by increasing taxes on cigarettes, fast food, booze and cell phones. My better, more utopian graphic would look something like this.


Also, people should empty the lint trap from the dryer when they're done. Leaving it for the next person to clean out is tantamount to murder.

After having my vivid, Constantine-esque vision of what a world with safer cyclists might look like, I realized that some harm is simply unavoidable. Even with the proper padding - and eye, sun, lung and artery protection - every cyclist on the road is just one errant driver away from utilizing that other oft-stenciled street logo. And if it, your-favorite-deity forbid, should ever come to pass that you ended up in a wheel chair, I imagine you'd just say "To hell with it," and quit worrying so much, at which point your street signage might look something like this.

A turtleneck isn't half a tie, or even one-tenth

One of my teachers, I'm not sure which – or maybe an “instructor” if it was in college - once told me that there's no reason for a woman's skirt to come up above her knees, because everyone's knees are ugly. The same could be true, I suppose, for ankles, and even a man's neck. The Adam's Apple, like the other aforementioned joints, is lumpy in a mashed-potatoey sort of way instead of angular and bulgy like a sports car or fitness enthusiast, or even delightfully rounded like Pillbury's mascot, or maybe certain aspects of my own physique.

It is this lumpiness that dictates that the hierarchy of men's fashion is built around covering the neck. To start at the top, or most formal, we have the tuxedo with bow-tie. It's the most formal because James Bond wears it, and he could kill you. Then mixed in amongst the various medals of silver and bronze and trophies for participants are standard neckties, aviator's scarves, ascots, plain ol' collared shirts, hipster's neckerchiefs, and polos. How much of the neck they cover, and of course the context in which they're worn, determines how formal they may or may not be, but the fact remains that if you're going to the courthouse, a funeral, a wedding or grandma's house it's a welcome gesture to not go in bare-necked.

You'll notice that turtlenecks are conspicuously absent from the above list because though they do cover the neck, they simply don't belong in the same class of sartorial formality as England's top super spy or high flying Lucky Lindy.

“Why is that?” you ask in a snide and nasally voice disagreeable to dogs, children and the elderly. Well, for starters, turtlenecks have more in common with a slinky than hundreds of years of conservative Occidental fashion. The excess neck cloth protrudes awkwardly from the collar of an otherwise agreeable sweater like an afterthought, perfunctorily claiming some sort of formality while sitting upright, waiting to be toppled over. Steve Jobs is selling millions of Apple branded doohickeys, but if that style averse man could top his jeans and tennis shoes with even an untucked Oxford shirt, I'm sure that number would be in the billions.

And where as Jobs shamelessly dons his high-necked garments by themselves, it's when the turtleneck is combined with a jacket of sport-coat that true tragedy strikes. Wearing a sport-coat over a turtleneck is about as classy as a tuxedo t-shirt while performing a bris. On paper the logic seems sound enough: formal outerwear + covered neck = ohhh yeah. But in execution we see that merely clothing ones neck is not enough, even when combined with a vest, suit jacket, or most lamentably, a sweater vest, which gets its own rant another time.

And yet I know that sadly this diatribe won't change anything. When Steve Jobs debuts the iSoul it will be in his trademark garb, and when some well intentioned school principal gets dolled up for parent-teacher night it will be in penny loafers, patterned slacks, a sport-coat and you-know-what. And so, I'm willing to meet the turtleneckers halfway, sort of. A turtleneck embodies the want to be classy, just like a coupon proves someone wants to save money, so for those who continue to insist that turtlenecks have class I'll give you the cash value of your intent. Henceforth, a turtleneck will be worth 1/100^th of a Double Windsor knotted tie, a generous offer for a hideous look so richly deserving to be euthanized.

Laundry money almost got me addicted to chaw!!!

Curse this cashless society of ours, it almost made an addict out of me. Though you run into the occasional wise-ass hobo who says he won't mind following you to an ATM, most of the time telling our town's fine collection of pan-handlers that you're not carrying any cash is enough to get them off your scent. However, for all the grocery store self checkout lanes, and even movie self-ticketing machines – they don't even ask for proof that you're a senior citizen! - sometimes hard currency is still necessary, like in my apartment building's laundry room.

Really, is a debit friendly washer/dryer still too much for in a country of electric cars and visits to the moon every 193 years, given that fact that I can buy a single candy bar from a vending machine with my debby at my current place of employ? Despite my complaining, the laundering machines won't run for anything less than cold, hard quarters, and so I head to Safeway to get a couple rolls of them.

My own 11 years in the grocery game taught me that people who want to use the customer service desk as a glorified ATM effectively drain the dignity out of what can be an otherwise very honest cigarette sale, so I don't want to do that. Conveniently, the wife has recently expressed an interest in ice cream, and as science has proven to us that only Communists like our current president don't like ice cream, the question of what to purchase can be answered in the form of a pint of Ben and Jerry's Peanut Butter Cup. Though it has an extraordinary amount of fat in it, I counter this by mentally reassuring myself that I will eat it in moderation, with an air of compassionate conservatism evident throughout the entire consumption process.

Buying things at Safeway is always a pain in the you-know-what ( “ass,” in case you didn't know) because they never have enough people working checkout and the money they might have spent on self check-out lanes seems to have been invested in the yellow t-shirts that all of the employees are wearing. I'd have gone to Beavers Market just up the street from my home, but there's a sign discouraging debit cards for purchases under $5, and the idea of getting cash back or rolls of quarters from Beavers seems like asking a consumptive orphan for a quick run through of the highlights from Mozart's “The Magic Flute.”

Having avoided the express lane because the line was longer than a standard checkout line (I've always prided myself on my observational skills, plus those yellow t-shirts make employees very easy to spot!) I now have my pint of ice cream and $20 in quarter money, so I head to the service desk to exchange my handsome portrait of Andrew Jackson for 80 smaller portraits of that stoic deist of a Freemason, George Washington. Though the service counter is empty when I arrive, a nice lady quickly arrives and tells me she'll have to head to the back to get me my two rolls of quarters. I thank her as she walks away and now, lacking any immediate stimulus, quickly start to zone out.

Inevitably my gaze ends up on the rainbow colored wall of tobacco products that the waist high counter I stand in front of is guarding. Did you know Marlboro now makes something called Snus? Isn't that the square-root of the name of the physical act of love in the Futurama episode with the nympho-Amazons? Dunno.... Anyway, my brain has been thoroughly equipped with years of jaded, ad dismissing rhetoric, and so I casually ignore the various lengths and flavors of cigarette that are now available in these United States – yeah, Camel No. 9 Menthe 100's! - but for some inexplicable reason my eyes take a hold of the chewing tobacco racks and won't let go.

Now I know that chewing is bad, mmmkay? I've discovered enough beer-cans full of tobacco spit while helping party hosts empty half-full beers into the kitchen sink the morning after a rager to know that a rabid chaw addiction is neither self contained nor pretty. Also, I've seen “The Sandlot” quite a few times. And yet I think, “Ask for a can of the mint chew, and take a dip and be a man!” I also get the urge to smoke a cigar every couple months or so, too.

The nice lady who is getting me some quarters takes what seems to be an overly long time getting them, and I wonder if the whole thing is a set-up by big tobacco to get me addicted. I mean, music is tough to keep up on in you want to entertain some idea of relevance, but a big 'ol mouth full of tobacco has a classic cool that transcends generations. Long after The Black Eyed Peas are seen as our generation's Bee Gees, spitting browned saliva into empty 20 oz. plastic pop- bottles will contain that rare aura of social dynamism that I could begin to take part in with just a simple request.

I'm certainly old enough, and I've got cash in hand... “Excuse me miss, did I say two rolls of quarters? I'm sorry, I meant one roll of quarters and one can of mint Skoal!” It'd be so easy. I continue to picture myself with a protruding lower lip until the woman actually comes back with the quarters, and as I slide the frozen cylinder of rich, peanut-buttery cream out of the way I'm reminded of my wife and her abhorrence to such things as beards streaked with chaw-spit. And then I have a moment of introspection and realize that I would also be doing myself a grave disservice by befouling my well cared for face's friend – as beards are often called – by picking up this nasty vice. And so I instead return home with just my ice-cream and my quarters.
In the end I escaped the debilitating throes of addiction, but I had been close to buying in to the simple joy of machismo cool. Too close. And so I say: Damn you coin-op laundry machines, and damn you debit cards. Damn you both to hell.

A day of hunting

So my wardrobe is in a state of transition as my deathgrip on youth slowly fades with the wasting atrophy of age, e.g. the other day I wore a Misfits t-shirt to work with dress-casual slacks and shoes. I either need to drop the skulls and anger altogether and embrace my inner preppy or really invest in some high class slacker-wear and prove myself the committed lifer that the hard rock world so richly deserves. How one looks is important, after all, and the last thing I want is to appear actually how I am. With this in mind I go hunting at a couple of our city’s superlative used clothing stores.

But first a quick diversion to Barnes and Noble to buy a Latin-to-English dictionary. Think of every starving child you’ve ever seen on TV, every homeless person not sure they’ll make it through the freezing winter night, every NPR pledge-drive you’ve ever listened through unmoved – now spend eight bucks and change on a book about a dead language that you only bought to find out what the fake family motto is from Preston Sturges’ film “The Lady Eve.” Sorry kids.

And now the hunt begins. First it’s Savers, where I’m after some wearable khakis, maybe one of those zip-up sweater things that seem so popular now and whatever else I can find that’s: A) not too adult B) not too trying-too-hard-to-be-young, and C) cheap, as I’ve just come off two and-a-half months of binge unemployment. Given these choices it seems I’m taking the slow boat away from rock’n’roll lifer.

The music in this place is appropriately terrible, and one of the many jams that play over the tinny speakers is 80s staple “Land Down Under” by the ever diligent Men at Work. This crappy song provides an excellent score while I skim through racks of clothes separated by garment, color and size. I succeed with the khakis and also see a particularly ugly plaid shirt whose colors are red, tan and black. There’s something beguiling about a really ugly shirt – if you can wear it like it’s not ugly then people might mistake that for style, and style, like acai berry (more on that later), is supposedly one of those things that everybody needs.

While I’m here I also check out the shirts. Now I know that I’m definitely too old for the thrift store t-shirt look, but as I’m grappling with adulthood I wouldn’t mind some cheap dress shirts in good condition. It’s said we evolved from monkeys millions of years ago, but when I try on just about anything with sleeves I feel as though my days of swinging though the trees weren’t that long ago as almost all sweaters, jackets and dress shirts fall a few cruel inches short of covering my wrists. Bad fashion, I’m afraid, but it could be handy when I need to check my watch.

It seems Savers has, for reasons unknown, gone all Ross (more on that later) on me and managed to get a slew of new white dress shirts which hand stiffly on the rack, priced at $7.99 (less that eight dollars!) More amazingly, these shirts seem to have sleeves that can accommodate my proto-human proportions! There are about six of them and I’m not sure how many I should buy. My mind drifts back to a video department regular I sometimes chatted with at Soops who was a nice guy but definitely a little out there. He dressed pretty ragged, probably buying his clothes from the same place I’m shopping at now, but without my discerning eye. Anyway, one day he was in renting some movies and though I couldn’t say why, he looked decidedly classier. Before he approached me with his selections I overheard him talking to a friend who also noticed his snappy new look and as it turns out he had stumbled across a hibernating colony of cheap, well fitting white dress shirts at the Goodwill. Wisely, he quickly struck upon his discovery, buying up all he could, about a dozen shirts in total.

Now the thing is, he was so enamored with these shirts that he wore them almost every day. This wouldn’t have been a problem if he’d had enough nice pants to pair with his windfall of class, but he didn’t, and after a while he just ended up tucking them into his favorite pair of mid-thigh length, cut-off denim shorts. Not wanting my own excitement to get the best of me, I stood staring at the shirts trying to count in my head the number of pairs of suitable pants I owned. Unable to come up with a consensus I opted to buy only two. Also, though I even tried it on, I put back the ugly plaid shirt, deciding that I lacked the level of nonchalance needed to properly pull it off. Oh well.

And now onto the ARC, which like the NAACP, has had the same recognizable acronym for so long that they haven’t risked changing it to reflect more current social norms. According to their website they stopped being The Association of Retarded Citizens in 1992 when they changed their name to the seemingly less objectionable The Arc of the United States, though what significance a curved line has to do with helping the differently abled, as I believe they’re now called, is beyond me. Maybe they could pay me to write a convincing line of grandiloquent BS to draw the connection for them, perhaps playing on the stability of that noblest of arcs, the arch. Something about how the community is the keystone, maybe.

Amazingly, as I walk into The Arc my ears are again treated to those still laboring Men at Work and their one-time #1 “Down Under.” I find this utterly amazing as Savers is a national chain that does their own music and The Arc is just playing a local soft rock station. Either way, the song once again proves oddly appropriate as I scour shelves in search of gently worn, kinda cheap, mostly adult clothes. Sadly, the khakis are all pleated, the zippy sweaters are all too small (damn you holidays) and the one pair of jeans, which I’m also in the market for, that looked somewhat presentable are sized 38x30, and that just won’t do. I leave with only that delightful vegemite referencing song in my head.

And so it’s next door to Ross, where they have actual new clothes, reputedly at discount prices. Ross is the best place in the world to buy socks, because there you can pick up a three-pair pack of designer socks at Target-sock prices. And who wouldn’t want their feet to be ensconced in the rich elegance of Calvin Klein or Chaps by Ralph Lauren? My feet deserve it. The opposite is true for jeans, though. Looking for a pair of understated jeans at Ross is like looking for an understated drag-queen. Did you even know that they make rhinestone studded, silk-screen graphics laden jeans for men? And according to the tag the twenty bucks that Ross charges is thirty to forty dollars lower than the original price, but none of the tags say what store was charging that higher price. Curious.

And so I head to where those jeans will one-day end up, the discount rack. These racks are like the sub-basement of hell, where the things too garish to sell at even half-off department store prices sit and languor at $9.99 (under ten dollars!) and will no doubt eventually end up on the same refugees I failed to support with the money I bought my dictionary with. Sometimes things fall through the cracks though. To my pants-purchasing delight I find a pair of modern cut Dockers, sans pleats, in an acceptable color for only $6.99. Seven dollar pants! Sweet Mary, mother of god! Seven dollar pants are what our boys are over there fighting for right now! Deciding to leave on a high note I take my cheap, nice pants and my designer socks to the checkout and head for home.

Almost. Cruising north on College I’m drawn into a 7-11 by my inborn love of icy sugar water. Having no cash I need to pick out a Slurpee size that is costly enough that it won’t be ridiculous to charge it and small enough that it won’t send me into a diabetic coma. I go with the 32 oz. cup that, with tax, carries a price of over a buck and a half, which in my mind sets it safely in the debit zone. Now what to fill it with? The eternal standby, Coke, just isn’t doing it for me. Neither are cherry, a supposedly new and improved Mountain Dew flavor or the Pina Colada. I pass over the token blue flavor on first glance as well, thinking it to be merely the usual tongue dyeing Blue Raspberry but my disinterest in the other flavors causes my give it another look and I discover that, yes, in their perpetual trend hopping foresight, the store that never closes has paired blue raspberry with acai berry! Now the certain harm that this Slurpee is doubtless doing to my various organ tracts can be marginally offset by that wonderfruit from the deepest reaches of the Amazon. Or at least the flavor of it anyway.

Sic erat in fatis – So it was fated

Why Britney Spears' "3" cheapens an already cheap thing...

So basically every performer has a total monopoly on one thing, themselves. This can be seen by the countless tribute bands in existence, which is to say you can spend $20 on a KISS cover band, but to get the real deal, pyrotechnics and all, you've got to shill out big time, and Gene Simmons knows this.

And whereas KISS, or GWAR for that matter, has a monopoly on shocking and astounding fans in their own unique way, Britney Spears' niche has always been the prospect of having sex with her, and "3" cheapens that.

Subtlety has never been her thing, and so even on her breakthrough at the supposedly naive age of 17 she was selling the idea of having a go with her between the sheets - or, as the video teased, after home room. It's appealing because she's very attractive, and she parlayed it into a ton of money. Good for her.

And yet as time wore on and coquettish gyrations became overt vulgarity, she was still careful to protect her brand, which is to say, when you got a Britney Spears album it was still being sold on the idea of shtupping her, and that's what your 9.99 to 14.99 was going for. Man or woman, it didn't really matter, as access to her sexuality was her stock in trade, so whether you were fantasizing being in her, or merely being her, the Britney brand still sold records.

And then "3" was released and suddenly it wasn't enough to just want Britney anymore. Whereas she had been selling access to brand Britney for your pleasure/entertainment/morbid interest, by making a song about doing her and another guy/girl she's effectively saying, "I'm not enough anymore and I know that, so you can have me and someone else, too."

It's like saying, "Buy Monopoly and we'll throw in Uno!" Or that your new Chevy Malibu comes with a Ford Taurus, just in case driving a Malibu by itself isn't fully doing "it" for you anymore. And how does she come back from this? Will her next song, which will inevitably also be about doing her, have an explanation about how she's once again the gold standard in libidinous fantasy? Or will she put out a song called "Baker's Dozen," an entendre laden gem about her and 12 friends?

I like to think that, since she's already sullied her brand image, her next song will just be about shagging whoever the latest it-girl is, like if it came out soon it'd just be called "Megan Fox" and the whole thing would be Britney singing about how great it would be to have a roll in the hay with the sexy chick from Transformers. Only time, and relevance related desperation, will tell...