Boulder

I flew into Denver last night. Took the bus to somewhere in Boulder. Called a cab, which took me to somewhere else in Boulder, where I snuck in the back sliding door of what I hoped was the apartment I was going to be staying at for the next week. I figured it was the right place, but didn’t find out for sure until the first roommate got home a couple hours later, long after I’d depleted the house’s PB&J resources.

The next morning myself and Philip, one of the people I’m staying with who’s a cyclist, headed out for a group ride, which met at a coffee shop. There were quite a few cyclists milling about the place and I ended up heading out with the wrong group. I kept looking back wondering where Philip was as we rode out of the city. Luckily he eventually chased us down to inform me that I’d left with the wrong people. Reminds me of when I was little and I followed a woman in the mall whom I mistook as my mother, last week.

The riding here looks like it’s going to be pretty amazing. We didn’t hit any mountains today, fortunately–since the altitude is killing me, but even the flat stuff was pretty scenic. The temperature was in the low fifties, high forties, sunny, with a bit of snow still melting in the farm fields from a storm they had last week. I was told that it won’t get too much colder than it was today. There’s a Shootout type ride on Saturday that starts up in January and there’s plenty of fast people in town to ride with the other days of the week.

After grocery shopping I spent the rest of the day shopping for a job. I rode to a Fedex, which I never found, printed out my resumes, and then rode home dropping them off along the way, which was basically strip-mall territory. Places I tried: 1) REI because it was right next to the place I printed out my resumes. 2) Starbucks because to work there would be cliche, and also because it was on the way to the…3) UPS store. Because I heard they were actually hiring people. The were not. And they were closed. So actually they could have been hiring people and I just didn’t find out. But I didn’t like the look of the place. Gave me a bad vibe. Seemed like the sort of place that was run by an old, old, old cranky man–the long lost descendent of a 49’er. His great great grandfather never made it as far west as California because he lost both his legs in an unfortunate sleeping accident, his body having accidentally built up calcium deposits in his knee joints while he slept one night. That actually happens by the way. Anyways, the UPS man’s lust for gold had been passed down the generations, growing stronger with each passing year. So the UPS man secretly invested all his money in gold and began stock-piling it in the mountains up above the city. Raccoons and ravens love shiny objects, as everyone knows, and one day when the old man was up in the hills stashing a few gold nuggets he bought from ebay, both a raccoon AND a raven happened to see him. They waited until he was gone then dug up his gigantic pirate-treasure box full of gold tid bits. The raccoon did all of the digging, so the masked bandit thought he deserved a bigger share of the gold. This was not to be, because, as everyone also knows about ravens, they’re highly argumentative animals that poses great debating skills. This particular raven was the grand master of them all. He was the master debater, if you will…aaaaaaaaaaand a thank you. 4) A ski and snowboard shop because I passed it on the way home. 5) An Ethiopian restaurant because their food smelled extremely good, though if it’s authentic I’m guessing they serve tiny portions. 6) Barns and Noble because I like read books goodest. 7) Whole Foods because the Whole Foods in Boulder has an insane infestation of wild cougars. 8) A co-op next to Whole Foods because co-ops smell like spices. And I like smelling spices. 9) a fancy restaurant. The manager looked at my resume and commented that I didn’t have any experience with food. At this, I laughed. Very hard. I’m crossing my fingers for this one because their food smelled really good and they actually seemed interested in hiring somebody.

My novel is coming along pretty slowly. I started writing the one about the zombies, but stopped when I realized that to make a mockery of Twilight, I’d first have to read Twilight. Or at least see the movies. So then I started me next novel idea, which will remain a secret in case any body out there tries to steal my ingenious idea–like the French did with the trebuchet, which I was planning on naming “extra big cat-a-pult.” Anyways, the progress on it is really coming along well. I’m basically just fleshing things out in my brain right. It’s going to basically just write itself once I finish with the creative aspect.

One thing I wonder about book-writing is if the authors just randomly start writing about things that pop into their head just that moment. Say you have a good story idea. You run through the beginning, middle, end through your head and maybe even write out a brief list of events that are going to happen in your book. You write a few thousand words and suddenly you find yourself at the climax of the story line, which of course is near the end. You realize that unless your book has extremely large font, it needs to have about 70,000 words. So you think to yourself (just like you did in English class), “shit, I’m gonna have to have a lot of filler,” at which point you just start typing whatever comes to your mind that instant. That’s basically what I do all the time, even right now in the very paragraph and this very sentence and I’m wondering if actual novelists do this too, or if they let their ideas stew more and create a highly detailed outline first. I like stew. My favorite stew is probably mexican-inspired steak and potato stew. Onions, carrots, and green bell peppers of course. Maybe some tomatoes or tomato sauce. Lots of hot sauce and chili powder. Garlic. What else…a few soft boiled eggs. Damn it! Just popped into my head like bad filler in a book!