Popination Rumination
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Oskar Blues and Lazy Dog.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I share with you today, resplendent readers, a Musing that I wrote on a pen-named blog way back in 2017. At this time of my life, I was teaching at three different universities as well as the summer bunheads, the stage combat club at Metro, and doing whatever fight direction was asked of me, which at that time wasn’t as much in the professional realm of Denver but in more within the educational side of things. All around this time, I was teaching stage combat to kiddos at Drake Middle School, Longmont Montessori Middle, Tara School of the Arts, Red Rocks Community College, and of course my (at that time) regular course I’d created from scratch, again at Metro. When Metro’s English department ghosted me (there’s no such thing as being fired or laid off when you’re adjunct faculty), I fled to Front Range Community College in a panic, and they hired me on the spot, on the day of my interview.
This original post was composed a couple years into my stint at FRCC, just before the end of my time there. It was originally written for a shared blog that I and my partner both contributed to under pen names. Those observations, personal essays, and the like began as a fun partnered writing exercise, then became a form of couples therapy, but the artifact after the fact (!) ended up being a literary gem as well as something of a time capsule of both 2017-18, and the first terror-laden days of Lockdown 2020 (™). This post was originally put up in 2017, and I include it here basically in its entirety (with a little editing to preserve the privacy and sorrow of my partner and me). My years of working at Front Range, too, spanned between the first instigation of divorce from my first husband, being trapped in his place in Gunbarrel because of financial abuse, and the subsequent acquisition of the Birdhouse and my reuniting with my partner. It was …a tumultuous time, in other words, to say the least. I was hanging in there, but only by a thread, and my partner and I had a lot of work to do in our future to bring us to where we are today. So. That was then. And this is:
Oskar Blues
The Oskar Blues silo is visible for a long way down the Diagonal highway, as one slants one’s way from East Boulder to Longmont, which is a commuter bus trip I took 2-3 times a week from 2015-2017 to go teach Composition at Front Range Community College, till they summarily stopped giving me classes after I had gotten sick and failed to recruit a sub. I think there was a student who complained about me as well—she had told her mom (who was the department Chair) that I ended classes too early, too often, but that was an unfounded accusation. I don’t give my students busy work, is the thing. So if I give them in-class work time and the student decides to leave, that’s on them. They’re adults, in college, after all. Technically, at least. But I digress.
The main Oskar Blues spot in Longmont has a signature silo that looms up above the restaurant, painted like a giant can of their tasty and most famous beer, Dale’s Pale Ale. I don’t know who Dale is but I love the beer—it’s an APA and you know how I like those bitter types. I’d go to this Oskar Blues quite often after class at FRCC, since my bus to Boulder had a stop right there on the highway adjacent to the back patio. Longmont is about a twenty minute drive from Boulder, but from where I live now it’s about an hour and a half, plus I don’t drive and so that is why I’ve had to resort to the internet for a pic of it instead of using one of my own, which is my regular popinations rule.
This Train
(2017)
I always find trains to have a melancholic sound. Dunno why. Growing up, we could hear the trains go by frequently, as the tracks ran near the trailer park. Well, closer than that to the poverty stricken neighborhood next door, but. That sound, at night, would fill me with deep sadness, even as a kid. And for no reason, as I didn’t have any train travel to relate it to. Lots of good late-’60s folk music, though, and the troubadourish lore which surrounded such luminaries of the genre, such as Bob Dylan, Donovan Leitch, and the demesnes that there adjacent lie*…. but at 8, 9 years old—you know, that age where you’re biologically set up to be terrified of separation from your parents (look it up; it’s science), I would wake up in the middle of the night, hearing that sound. My Mom and Dad had taken a walk down to the garbage, and from there a little further walk around the trailer park (I learned later), as they thought their kids safely asleep. Even with my little brother asnooze in his own bed not far away, I never felt so alone, and sad. And a little scared.
The train went near my place out east in Gunbarrel with my first husband, too, and it would give me pause. I don’t know if he ever noticed. The cats did though. They’d perk up and their little alien antennae would tremble into the air, back and forth, feeling out through the upper loft windows.
I sit tonight at the roadside bar, just on the tracks, clinging to the far edge of the bar, opposite any view of TV sets. I face the other bar patrons instead. Hm: autocorrect just changed “instead” to “onstage,” and I almost kept it. Seems fitting.
Mediocre live rockabilly starts upstairs, and the chatter of the busy restaurant recedes into backup white noise under its amplification. It’s a pleasant way to celebrate the last day of the Summer semester. My students came, saw, and conquered my school bag by filling it with stacks of final writing portfolios, and promptly left, not without thanks. I’ll see several of them again in a couple weeks for Comp 2.
As I sit, the train goes by, right in view of the row of front windows. The train sound is different in rain than it is in sunshine. It’s been raining all day—what the Irish call “pissing rain.” Freight trains sound different in snow, too: more desolate. I wonder if the actual sound waves do change, or if it’s all in my psyche (or in my ears’ perception, as in the Doppler Effect). I am hit with the train’s song. I feel alone. Not all negatively so, either. But it is real easy for me to get literally lost in my own head, if I’m alone for long enough at a stretch, which I have been, the past few days. The train’s sound is a good call and response.
*I feel like I should start a drinking game or some such thing, in my posts: every time I quote Shakespeare or Sherlock Holmes, you all should take a drink. Right? Hydration is important.
—> I need to interrupt my past self again here, and explain what Lazy Dog sports bar is, and why it’s an important popination in my life. It was a big, gorgeous sports bar with myriad taps and some of the best wings in the Denver-Boulder metro area, and occupied a whole corner of the Pearl Street Mall. Not only did it have a lovely column of streetside patio, but it also boasted one of the best rooftops of anyplace on Pearl (which means anywhere in Boulder). The reason I frequented Lazy Dog so often is that it was plunked down right on the corner of 14th and Pearl, which meant it was a mere few steps away from the main Boulder bus transit station. So it was easy to pop in between buses, between home and whatever work, or an easy destination for a bus rider coming in from Gunbarrel or Denver. And I did so often.
I am indeed using the past tense for this place, not only because I don’t go to Boulder too often anymore, but also because it’s closed. It closed right before so many places closed on account of the lockdown, and apparently had nothing to do with that, only that the building had been sold and the owner was retiring. Thing is, it’s still vacant. To this day. Which is weird, because that place was always hopping. I’d imagine if any other restaurant or bar wanted to move in they’d make bank. Then again, it’s more than bank to rent an entire corner in that location, so. What do I know. But that’s why I needs must use an image from the internet yet again, instead of my own. Even if I were to have snapped one on my recent trip to go see my parents at Corner Bar the other day, it would’ve been sad and boarded up and vacant, with the denizens of the neighboring Pizza Colore occupying its ground level patio. So. Here’s a pic from its heyday.
Now we go back to 2017, and my visit to:
Lazy Dog
(2017)
The other day I was at Lazy Dog, resting my feet and finally spending the last buck on this gift card. I was doing a little editing on the first few chapters of my partner’s book, staring down at my wee iPhone like some kind of millennial text zombie, when an older woman, face like a hatchet, two cheap vodkas in, interrupted me by apologizing for interrupting me, and inquired what my tattoo was. The one on my right forearm.
I looked into her face, and realized that neither my story of making the sketch as a Valentine to myself twenty years ago, nor the quote from the Sherlock Holmes canon which dictated where I would put it on my body, would register with her. I pondered for a brief second what to say to her, when she exclaimed, “Oh! It’s a fish! It’s a betta fish?”
I replied that I hadn’t really thought about what type of fish it was when I made the sketch, but it does kind of look like one, huh, and she exclaimed, “You drew that?? You’re very talented.”
I stammered something akin to thanks, when she declared she doesn’t usually like tattoos but that this one is really cool. She then said this, before apologizing again and leaving me be:
“Betta fish are good—they fight, they’re strong, they live alone.”
Yeah. That’s…yeah. That’s why I drew it. It’s why I got it in inked form, too. I’ve been trying to keep it hidden recently, for reasons of psychological pain and other things I don’t feel like writing about. But I got admonished the other day, not to hide it anymore. So. Alone, yet sharing a heart. When I think about it like that, it seems like that’s most healthy. I still see changes in my future, our future, but there’s something important about being alone, having my own fishbowl, yet continuing to fight. My own betta fish existence.
I’ll be taking a light rail type train to go up and see my partner tomorrow. Those trains don’t make a train sound at all. They’re a different type of monster.
Remember that folk song, made famous by Peter, Paul, and Mary back in the day? “This Train / don’t carry no–“ and then it would be a line of what kind of people This Train wasn’t carrying. Gamblers, midnight ramblers…I don’t remember what else, specifically. Sinners, all, though. Various types. This Train…🎶
I wonder which type I am.
CLOSING NOTE: I have since gotten a full forearm sleeve to cover up the fish tattoo I talk about above. It’s a gorgeous piece of incredible art that I am very happy with, and am so glad I did it. For one thing, I have wanted a big dark amazing sleeve for a long time; for another thing, that other fish I designed hadn’t healed vey well and didn’t look too good. So I did a more elaborate version of the image I originally wanted. It’s aligned with this quote from a Sherlock Holmes story called “The Red-Headed League”:
The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. That trick of staining the fish’s scales of a delicate pink could only have been done in China. …
I have also, since this post, gotten a tattoo over my heart, that’s a design by Leonard Cohen that he called The Order of the Unified Heart. I got this one on a very rough Halloween around the same time of these posts (maybe 2017 or 2018? I forget). It’s what they call a stick-and-poke, which means the artist put it on me one needle stab at a time, as opposed to the mechanized gun used by most tattooists today. She burned sage and it was a couple-hours-long process. It was a ritual. It was needed.
