Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

travelogue 4

January 31, 2006
travelogue 4
travelogue 4 by Tim Caynes

its monday and I’m supposed to be holed up in a hotel room in broomfield putting the finishing touches to a globalization strategy presentation that our director will present back to me and a number of other colleagues who are currently making their way to colorado where the world is congregating this week to talk about really important stuff and then some really unimportant stuff but instead I’m holed up in the Boulder Café on the corner of Pearl and 13th waiting for the waitress twins to appear again as if by magic with some orange beer that’s been brewed by a local hippy in an underground cavern at the foot of the rockies using a pedal bike and some healing crystals and today’s special which happens to be a prawn and chicken satay thing which sounds nice but until they arrive plus the gallon of water I need every 5 minutes in colorado I’m just looking out the window with a blank stare wondering why nobody is coming to Boulder today even though its a bit cold but then its always cold in winter and then I remember why I’m not actually holed up in a conference room instead on a monday lunchtime on january and thats because its Martin Luther King day and nearly everybody round here has taken to the hills to stand on rocks on one leg and cast huge shadows or experience the love of life at 10200 feet up in leadville or is probably just sat at home in a house in the middle of nowhere that probably used to be a forge or steam engine or something and posting clutter on ebay so they can get the car in the garage again and that’s why I’m sat here on my own with 2 waitresses looking after me and one old man at the table next to me who thinks I’m some kind of progressive liberal freak because I’ve got a fleece on with the collar up and I haven’t had a shave and my camera is kind of pointing at him in a way which is making him slightly edgy and so he’s rustling the Daily Camera around like an impatient father-in-law shooting daggers at me

the special is special and the amber is nectar and I decide to forego the cheesecake in case its anything like the cheesecake at the renaissance which arrives in 10 seconds but takes about 10 hours to finish because its the size of a flatiron or something and well, you have to finish it even though its not tasting that great washed down with flat tire and so I try and sneak a couple of shots of the waitresses on the way out but as usual I thought they were being nice to me because I was english and on my own and they kind of liked me but now I’ve paid I’ve suddenly become invisible and they’re clearing the table before I’ve even stood up and so I give up on candid for the time being and just get my dad’s killy coat on that I’ve borrowed for the colorado winter which is the one he got free when he was working on the winter olympics in japan years ago and I ding out the door and decide its probably time I took a quick tour of the deserted pearl street mall and then head back to the suzuki for a quick detour around a couple of landmarks around here while the sun is out but wait it looks like snow best be quick and so I screech out of the deserted parking garage like starsky and hutch with slippers on and head vaguely west, no, east, ah well round in circles for a while before I finally point the suzuki getover up a hill and we’re headed into the clouds which might be an interesting thing and a mildly stupid thing depending on what happens in the next couple of hours but its only 1 o’clock and I can probably do that set of apocalyptic web venue slides in a few hours after a couple of beers later so lets just go for it

it’s just the same over here you know

June 3, 2005

Boulder. Norwich. they’re just like the illegitimate children of upper-middle class families separated at birth and rehoused on different sides of the atlantic. I mean, the nucleus of these places is like the result of an illicit conflagration between two drugged-up psychology students from the university on the edge of town, but peel off a few layers and progress a couple of miles into the suburbs and further out to the wilderness, then things get much more like the unfortunate in-bred collision of two disenfranchised and disaffected 15 year olds on crack who stumbled out of elementary with a working knowledge of woodworking and a lovebite on the neck. this is where people start building their own houses out of pieces of wood they salvaged from the local authority rather than getting the thursday edition of the local post and leafing through the property pages thinking about the next progression up the stakeholder lifestyle ladder and how much the difference between what they currently own and what they really need to work from home and walk to school and have an acre and have that one extra room that would make all the difference would be.

and there’s a great big community of hippies that won’t go away. they came to the university in 1975 to study geology and life sciences before there was such a thing as life sciences and they just never went back home. they just moved into the golden triangle with their afghans and tabalas and hung tie-dye on the wall and CND in the window and opened up the alternative pulse shops that Tesco and Walmart are now buying up and turning into drugstore expresses to cater for the burgeoning population of 2005 hippies that come to study, well, geology and life sciences, but have already got cars and mortgages and actually, are soo busy they can’t begin to think about the G8 summit or even cooking their own dinners so they congregate at the microbrewery and pretend to like football and try to shag each other, but in a polite way, cleaning up after themselves.

but always creeping in from the outskirts are the indigenous population of the unintelligable underclass that really own the city. they have been here for generations, often never leaving their own self-made house in the country. mostly they’ve not had any social intercourse outside their own extended family. mostly they’ve had no intercourse at all outside their own extended family. they suddenly appear over your shoulder when you’ve been busy checking out kites in the window of ‘kites and things’, their dribbly grin poking out of their bleached fringe, which is poking out of a baseball hat that you’re wondering just how it could get so unclean. they don’t want anything. they just do that looking at you thing and then gather together again like some idiot mercury in the middle of the high street and laugh. you’re not sure whether it’s at you or just in general, but you check your purse and head into a book shop all the same, because you’re safe in there, if a little grubby after the experience.

I’m only joking of course. I was born here and I’m quite normal.

Archives
Categories
Tags
broomfield california colorado computer troubles content strategy design digital processing dordogne event flickr flow flow interactive flying france globalful globalisation heathrow ia IA Summit interaction design menlo park mobile mobile user experience music NME tour norwich norwich waterfront photoshop post-processing public speaking review sony sun.com sun microsystems travelogue uea user experience user experience design UX wireframes working from home workshop work trip writing wxd

Share

Twitter Linkedin Flickr Instagram Bandcamp Youtube