Sunday began at noon in MoixaSince Sunday didn't really start until after the walk, I'll begin with during it.
From HAO's and my usual walk on the Highline Canal, several miles south of the part by my house, you can see a long ways. The mountains, downtown, and DTC of course. Today I noticed the Loews Giorgio hotel. On the corner of Colorado Boulevard and Mississippi Avenue, this is a 20- or 30-storey eyesore in a sea of flatness. I've heard it called the Darth Vader building because it's tall and black; I call it the 2001 building because reminds me of the black slab at the beginning of "2001": unexpected and incongruous in addition to tall and black and vaguely disconcerting. When we first moved here and lived among straight streets for the first time in our lives (well, except for RDC's years in Florida), as we drove along Mississippi way east in Aurora, we saw the 2001 in a plumb line with the apartment buildings near our house and realized just how straight these Denver roads are. So on Sunday I looked for the apartment buildings too, but in vain.
Anyway, HAO asked me what I was looking for, and I said, pointing, that because I'd seen the 2001, I wondered if I could see the Towers of February too.
"The Towers of February?" she asked.
"Those tall apartment buildings by our house I call the Towers of February."
"Why?"
I call them so because of one of my favorite children's books of the same title. It involves travel between planes of existence, and the people from here who go there find there pleasant, except that in the journey they kind of lose their memory, and until they remember certain key things, they can't return hither. Which is why bringing along a journal (which you need a mirror to read, because there is a reflection of here) and remembering the Word that allows you to leap is so critical. HPV and I liked it and planned to go thither on February 29, 1980, if we could figure out the word. The beach, where Leaping had to occur, we already had.
"Okay, but why the Towers of February?"
Hadn't I finished yet?
People from here made a mistake or two in their attempts to Leap and mistakenly transferred a pair of large, yellowish apartment buildings thither, which is somewhat like here but pleasantly different, what with school being both voluntary and fun and everyone living in houses not apartment buildings. Hence towers. And the only time to Leap thither is on Leap Moment of Leap Day in February of a Leap Year. Hence February.
While the Denver apartment buildings have more than the book's towers' twelve storeys, I still find the appellation useful because they, like the Loews, are also incongruous, like there might be a Wicked Witch of the East underneath them, and ugly and yellow and unlike anything else, like those in the book.
Naturally afterwards we had to stop at Alfalfa's for midday sustenance. Armed with cookies, we perused HAO's new finds. She has decided to collect dated self-help books, and at a bookstore last weekend found a book on interior decoration and a Seventeen book from the 1960s.
But when I'm Empress...I watched the last few minutes of CNN's "Crossfire" on Sunday. I usually don't like debate programs like it, "Agronsky & Company," and "Politically Incorrect," because usually participants are unable to discuss an issue courteously and effectively. Raised voices mauling a topic too broad or complex for a half-hour treatment is more frustration than I willingly take on. Anyway, while channel-hopping I came upon it and watched a bit; the topic was a network television show, "Nothing Sacred," in which apparently the Catholic priesthood is not portrayed to be as infallible as some would want.
Naturally, the politically-right panelist and her guest wanted the show canceled, muzzled, dropped into boiling oil; naturally, the politically-left panelist and his guest kept quoting the First Amendment as if there were nothing more to the matter. A really useful exchange of ideas.
And if the issue had been about gun control, the Left would've wanted the guns beaten into plowshares, muzzled, and dropped into boiling oil, and the Right would've quoted the Second Amendment as if there were nothing more of the matter. A really useful exchange of ideas.
And at the bottom of both of these exchanges is the assumption is that individuals need someone else to protect them: a religion or church or someone in black to stop heretical ideas; a law or government or someone in blue to stop bullets, the assumption that individuals are not bright enough to protect themselves.
Now, I'm a liberal with both libertarian and socialist tendencies. As should be obvious from every page of my site, I consider the First Amendment to be the most important freedom this country has. From it, all else follows; without it, nothing else is possible. And though I think ideas are more dangerous than guns, I would rather guns, not ideas, be controlled: I control my mind but anyone with a gun might be able to control my body. Merp, what an Objectivist idea. Me and John Galt. Ooof.
Third PartyThe weekend's third fest was B. and C.'s "X-Files" season premiere party. I was Tom Servo. I have to be; that show is so stupid and I am so relentlessly witty. Someone asked something about Skinner and I described him as Newman to Scully's Elaine. Of course, in ten years no one will get that joke. Also there was a montage of cold war images because supposedly UFOs have been a government hoax to divert attention from the arms race. Whose attention? Apart from the X-Files-watching demographic, does anyone else fret so ceaselessly about alien invasion? One of the Cold War images was of Krushchev--whose name I might be mangling but he's not in the Biographic Names section of my Merriam-Webster Tenth Edition Collegiate Dictionary. Why? Better tell ABW--so I took off my shoe and pounded the only available non-floor surface that belonged to me, which was my knee.
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Last modified 18 November 1997
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