Thursday, June 07, 2007

It's Coloradical

I'm on a business trip to Longmont, Colorado. The mountains are spectacular, the people agreeable and kind and I really don't care for it all that much. There's something about this particular part of the country that sets me off and it leaps into dreary, banal life the minute the car approaches the center town on the 119 approach.

Longmont is relatively new, spurred into growth from the embryo of an old rural town by the encroachment of a satellite tech industry. Searching for a cheaper place to drop a pile of engineers, a handful Silicon Valley tech companies demonstrated prudent financial wisdom by opening offices in the sprawling plains seated at the feet of the Rockies. Mimicking the outer reaches of greater Sacramento, the cookie-cutter homes plopped out on the bleak expanse by the over-enthusiastic rectum of the house shitting machine nestle up as close as humanly possible to a crop of newly sprouted strip malls replete with an Applebee's, a Staple's and a Best Buy. Just add a multiplex movie theater chain it's called a community, or maybe even a city. Just don't nestle up too close, of course, lest that precious buffer zone around the house that keeps the family "safe" be sacrificed. There are dangerous people out there who want what's inside and they'll do evil things to get in. Evil.

I keep the trips short, zipping in the night before and vacating without so much as a cloud of dust behind me the next evening. It's a sullen view of a part of the country that must have some charm buried somewhere, but so long as Longmont remains determined to reinvent itself as a bland facsimile of Anaheim I'll elect to keep my distance and visit only when I'm ordered.

3 comments:

La Cubana Gringa said...

And here I thought that The Brit was the one with the most overly enthusiastic rectum!

RBT said...

You kill me dead! That house shitting machine has a real problem with the amount of material that exits its back door—more than even that Brit.

Catherine said...

Next time you're in Colorado, I recommend coming down a little further south. You'll discover a pile of farmers instead of engineers, only without the Applebees or Best Buy to balance things out. We do have plenty of banal life and dreariness here, though.

Would you believe that nobody's knocking down my door asking me to come up with ad campaigns for this state??