Dispatch Denver

Let’s make that a large coffee. Let’s make it a double of the local whiskey my brother in-law bought. Because four year olds are the enemy. Because you sired the enemy. Because you love the enemy. Because you hate yourself. Because the coffee tastes better when it’s too late in the day to have coffee. Because vacations with young children are meant to remind you there is no release. Work is your escape from family. Family is your respite from work. Everything else costs money. Nothing else works. Your moments with your friends with your neighbors do not balance. These moments fill your cup with Phoenix’s rainwater. I was at a children’s museum today. Loud noises. Balls flying through the rooms. A woman having a long phone conversation. Said she had been seeing a man she liked, had taken him to her favorite Indian restaurant twice. He worked in a factory near downtown. It was great to hear that snippet. Great to have a favorite Indian restaurant. We should all be so lucky.

I got to see the four year old the enemy the angel my heartbeat my heartache send balls up into pneumatic tubes. I got to see her, the enemy the future the laugh track the villain, race around the room, gather the orange balls and find different spots to try them out. She comes to me and speaks: pretend we are construction workers. You’re the daddy construction worker. I’m the baby construction worker. What building are we working on?

I start to talk but an orange ball rolls past and the project is lost. The blueprints sit lonely while she shoots the orange balls into the tubes of the now past future into the walls of a Denver Children’s Museum. An hour later she will scream at me for thirty minutes straight to unbuckle her and let her into the coffee shop that she refused to go into ten minutes prior. I will choke back tears and a shockingly long and detailed litany of swear words and hand gestures while the four year old, the enemy the sunshine the moral center the tyrant, holds me and the seven year old hostage. The rental car A/C blasting while my wife buys coffee drinks. I was on Colfax Avenue near here September 23, 2003. Peter bought Speakerboxx/The Love Below. I bought Bazooka Tooth from Aesop Rock. Denver one of the only places where Heiruspecs felt kind of popular. Denver Duluth Chicago and home. And today 21 years later I drive us to our AirBNB. my wife handles the kid and I start crying in the bathroom. The enemy has won and I have won and we both grow. I turn on Waxahatchee and take a shower largely cause I’m committed to trying to regain the commitment to a good smelling crotch I had in my twenties. I open the window and look out at Denver from the second floor. I wash my whole body twice. I cry. I put on a white shirt and red underwear. I write this. I tell my wife I would eat spinach garlic feta pizza tonight. I will listen to Arkadelphia one more time, I will drink a lot of whiskey and I will be a dad. But a dad with a great smelling crotch.