They had worked their way across some of the best rooftops in Boulder that night. The hot spots along the Pearl Street Mall, a few choice locations on the Hill, then a brief stop at Jimmy John’s for subs before hitting the red-brick buildings of the University of Colorado. But…

The problem with being a creative person in Colorado is that in order to get truly big, you have to leave. There are a few exceptions, of course: the author who carves a successful career from his Boulder home, the painter who gains renown out of his LoDo studio, the…

Why, yes, it is a beautiful day for a baseball game, a beautiful day indeed! What’s that? No, thank you, I’m fine. Really. Well, if you insist, I guess I will have a hot dog before I begin. Do you have one of those Rocky Dogs? Fantastic! A foot of…

I probably should have taken a year off between high school and college. Though I was eighteen years of age, fit as a fiddle made entirely of awesome abs, and smart enough to predict the outcome of Goosebumps adventures long before reading their conclusions, I still was not ready for…

On a brisk Tuesday evening in February, concerned citizens, town council members and a cadre of T-shirt-clad firefighters gather at the town hall in Castle Rock — the largest enclave in a county with the second-highest median household income in the nation, a county in which less than 2.1 percent…

Like many of you, I watched Super Bowl XLI — better known as the Showdown Between the Guy Who Does Too Many Ads vs. the Guy Who Makes Jake Plummer Look Competent. I’m sure in Chicago and Indianapolis, people were glued to their seats, but for the rest of the…

It is at this point, and this exact point, that I would like to channel the Ghost of Bill Owens Past and boldly proclaim, “All of Colorado is on fire.” Of course, by “Colorado,” I mean “Park Hill,” the neighborhood that belched me out of her fecund loins, and by…

Thursday, February 15, marks a day of reckoning for several area charter schools. That’s the day the Denver Public Schools Board of Education will make its final decision on renewing — or revoking — the charters of eight different schools, including P.S.1, the state’s oldest charter school at twelve years…

The cheesy theme music blares from the speakers, all keyboards and horns, as the topic of the day’s program scrolls across the screen in bright neon: “I Can’t Lose, I Have Two Women, Why Choose? Ricki, I Want Them Both!” It’s the Ricki Lake Show, sometime in 1997. The camera…

The only thing better than a teenage girl’s body is a tan teenage girl’s body. Lao Tzu said that, and it makes perfect sense if you think about it. Would you rather sleep with Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls or Lindsay Lohan in Herbie Fully Loaded? For Mean Girls, they…

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to frolic on city buses. Paleolithic paintings from the Lascaux cave in France clearly depict nomadic hunter-gatherers sitting in orderly rows on a giant stone slab the size of a bus, with the one in front wearing a wild boar as a…

I have a friend whose name is Hot Gary. This is not his actual name, of course, but it’s my duty to protect his identity, so I’ll refer to him as Hot Gary — even though everyone knows his real name is Gabe and that he still lives with his…

Dusk. Day 376 of a torrential downpour of white vitriol, spat from the angry heavens. The camera pans in on a humble home in the Baker neighborhood of Denver, Colorado. A large purple recycling bin sits on the porch, filled to the brim with beer cans. It needs emptying, pathetically…

Sometimes I’m amazed by how much of a man I am. I’ll be at the gym, 35-pound plates on both sides of the bar, just ill bench-pressing, and I’ll catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror — muscles taut, beads of sweat cascading down my forehead, iPod blazing Eminem…

The door of the bus opens, belching a stale blast of vomit-scented air into the night. Inside, empty plastic bottles that once held rum and coke, whiskey and coke, gin and tonic, you name it, are scattered everywhere: on the floor, on the plush chairs, in the pockets of the…

Every year at this time, people start acting real antsy around me. I’m half Jewish and half Christian — what biblical scholars refer to as a “mulatto” — and as a result, people don’t know whether to greet me by exclaiming, “A most fecund Jesus harvest to you, kind brother…

There was something strange in the air when I walked into the indoor soccer facility where I regularly fucking dominate, out there in that legendary Arvada coed adult B-league you hear so much about. And it wasn’t the stale oxygen of an aging space mixed with the bittersweet stench of…

Whenever we visited my grandmother in Virginia, my mom would take us all to see some Civil War battlefield, after which she and my grandmother would mutter under their breath about Yankees and my father would feel uncomfortable. Once, on the way to a battlefield, my mother calmly informed my…

You would have thought we’d landed on the moon the way people were falling all over each other at the opening of Southeast Light Rail last Friday, with every politician from Lone Tree to Denver — as well as every administrator, router, bus driver and guy-who-cleans-the homeless-from-the-undercarriage-of-buses for RTD –…

Heather Cameron heard the sound of the gunshots that killed her mother. On Saturday, April 20, 1996, the twelve-year-old was waiting for Debra Cameron — Debbie, to her friends — to return from a charity auction at Graland Country Day School, where Heather was in the sixth grade. Debbie had…

I have a great idea for a T-shirt, one that I feel captures the current situation in Colorado Springs, our wacky neighbor to the south. It’s a picture of Ted Haggard, the shamed former head pastor of New Life Church, on all fours — and mounted firmly behind Haggard is…