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.