Welcome to Boulder, the nation's most powerful magnet for its dumbest smart people
It's only fitting that the softest hardcore runners around love the place, too
Everyone has gripes with the city in which they live, usually revolving around extremes of material security and basic safety. No matter where you are, some residents are using their already considerable means to gain even more comfort through serving on or influencing your local government, usually through diabolically conceived policies that create headaches or resentment among those who have less. And some of those who have less are generating problems by taking property unlawfully or sleeping in parks or alongside freeways, the latter making the scenery unbearable to motorists who prefer tossing butts and empties into uninhabited green spaces. Humans have a unique economic system among animals, and humans behave very predictably around this system wherever they cluster and independently of ambient cultural factors.
The consequences of sharing the same limited public lands and byways—sidewalks, roads, parks, recreation paths—also play a key role in giving each of us* an ongoing reason to label our neighbors and civic leaders uniquely oppressive. That’s more where I come in, since I tend to find myself outdoors and in motion when running, walking, people-watching, and doing pretty much anything divorced from screen-time and its excoriating cascade of banalities.
Regardless of your own standing in the game, if you enjoy publicly ranting about the everyday sins perpetrated by whatever energetically thoughtless ding-dongs are swarming around you—be this in the hope of cheaply entertaining others or just to blow off steam—you’ll never be wanting for material, at least of you live in a town with at least ten stoplights and are not a committed shut-in.
I’ve lived in various culturally disparate regions of the United States. Even after adjusting for the inevitable creep toward an “Everyone is so goddamn inconsiderate these days” mindset that plagues most of us entering the middle of middle age, even and assuming on thin evidence that I’d view my numerous previous cities of residence as worse places to live than when I left them, I’m convinced that Boulder represents by far the most impressive concentration of purely self-interested people and raging hypocrites of all ages and lifestyles of them all. Most of the worst seem to be from elsewhere, and their insistence on transforming the place into their vision of what they mistakenly believed it to be when they moved here has produced a great deal of understandable pushback by old-timers—although this self-labeling group includes some folks who seem to have forgotten that they’ve only been here for a few trips around the sun themselves.
Bear in mind that much of this complaint will reek, accurately, of irony, with the cologne of ridiculing others not really intended to mask the stink. I’m a transplant who somehow wound up here despite his meaningful running days being far behind him, adding himself to the endless list of dilapidated former 100-mile-a-week marathoners flitting about town. (I don’t regret moving here or the not-quite-running-related reasons I came in the first place.)
First, anyone in their right mind would enjoy living here, or at least find the natural features irresistible. Boulder has manageably hot summers and mild winters, at least from the perspective of anyone who’s dealt with serious heat or cold. Even after years of waking up to the sight of sunshine reflecting off the Flatirons looming over the city to the southwest, almost no one who enjoys being outside immune the draw of operating in such a uniquely picturesque enclave.
That means when I yammer unkindly about the raucous specifics of Boulder townsfolk, I’m not presuming merely that a high number of people who wind up here are jerks by nature. That’s a factor, but my core conviction is that any municipality with no more room to realistically add residential housing—Boulder packs 107,000 people into 24 square miles despite a longstanding 55-foot building-height limit—yet quixotically retains a reputation as an anything-goes hangout and incubator of grandiose dreams will inevitably suffer from the same fundamental dynamic.
I’ve mentioned my fascination with the ways the natural landscapes in places I’ve lived have been urbanized and otherwise altered over the years, and my reliance on historical topographical maps to piece these stories together. Ideally, I learn things directly from people who have experienced these changes. One of my friends has lived in Boulder since 1948, was old enough then to remember everything that greeted her when she came, and is sharp enough now to describe, in multiple languages. everything she has seen since. The house she lives in now was built in 1962, when it was then one of the few houses in all of South Boulder. Today, every day of every week, her street is lined with construction vehicles; although building outward or upward is no longer much of an option around here, there is no law against buying $1 million house and putting $200,000 of work into it so you can sell it for $2.5 million. As a result, much of Boulder—with front-lawn porta-a-johns and Tyvek wrap being the most prominent features in some affluent neighborhoods—is, despite a de facto new-home moratorium, is in many ways indistinguishable from an already overcrowded yet still-blossoming boomtown.
Everyday life is mostly smiles from people you run encounter, provided you don’t inconvenience them in any way. Where I grew up, people aren’t unfriendly, but if you do something stupid or uncalled for, the response is usually curt and direct, not conducted on Nextdoor. The city’s motto could be Don’t Mistake Our Politeness for Kindness! But even this veneer, a signature of every affluent mid-sized American town, has begun crumbling. As a reminder, I’m 85 percent purposeless and hate everything, a possible source of bias in treatises of this sort. But I’m not the only one who believes that Boulder has become a more overtly mannerless place since I first arrived eleven or twelve years ago, and not everyone who feels the same way is old or cantankerous generally.
In the interest of offering a sampler plate instead of an all-that’s-force-fed buffet, I’ll focus on how ugly the transportation grid has become, both structurally and in terms of user behavior. I like this one because it takes little imagination to see myself as a targeted victim of much of the mayhem, automatically expanding the scope of what I’m allowed to bitch about.
About a week ago, my street was given what amounted to an infusion of atherosclerotic plaques and emboli. The formal name for this is “traffic calming.” The city decided that the 20-MPH speed limit it instituted last summer wasn’t good enough, despite not a single serious or even amusing accident occurring in that span along the affected half-mile stretch. So, they painted more lines and bolted a bunch of flexible poles to the pavement, creating ugly, minimalist pseudo-bulb-outs and center islands. In herewith degrading a wide, tree-lined residential street, the city also wiped out about half of the on-street parking. The immediate impact? The few people who were speeding before, most of them delivery drivers, now go even faster because they enjoy treating the new layout like a slalom course, while everyone else up and down the street seems to wonder who, if anyone, in the neighborhood wanted these measures.
At one intersection, they installed “rotary” that looks like the result of a weekend community-service project by sullen Boy Scouts. The center part is a haphazard octagon made from chunks of curb, and the other day I watched an Amazon van bang up and over part of it because the driver had no room otherwise.
My house was the only one that both lost a parking space out front and had a center island placed right in front of the driveway. Sure, one can have fun putting something more substantial than a hollow bulb-out inside the suddenly verboten zone, but people who start committing small infractions like these often progress to more unambiguous form of criminality.
Make no mistake; this “construction,” on its own, isn’t really harshing my mellow. It’s a poor use of city money, but almost everything they do here is—read up on the efforts of people here to municipalize the power grid to get a sense of how much sheer money the various dilapidated incarnations of the Boulder City Council have pissed away over the past decade on that arrogant fantasy. It’s if interest, though, that my street and the one it becomes ‘round the bend, where the already failed rotary sits, are the city’s two “pilot” streets for this loveliness. Just a funny coincidence.
Concurrent with these add-ons is another pilot project limited to the relative ghetto of East Boulder: These motherfuckers. For every five or six people who use these in a safe and considerate manner is one drunken or otherwise mentally impaired person whose patronage result in scenarios like these.
These scooters, none of which operate anywhere near where most of the moldy, talking jizz-rags on the current city council live, are an addition to a path and sidewalk system already choked with bicycles (many of them hauling small kids or other cargo behind them), unicycles, tricycle “cabs” for lazy or elderly adults, roller blades, very occasional police vehicles, shopping carts, and a new family of conveyances that resemble billiard balls with nubs on each side—essentially, battery-powered spheres just large enough to support graduate engineering students from East Asia.
All of this makes it difficult to just take up the entire width of the path while running with dog that behaves like a jackrabbit and just zone the hell out. I’m kidding; I represent a significant mobile hazard in my own right, and I’m sure I’m far from perfect out there, but the last thing anyone could or should do at any hour of the day in Boulder is dabble in even G-rated complacency on one of the multi-use paths.
I didn’t mention skateboards—traditional or electric—because they, or more accurately their owners, stand in a class of their own. In my experience, almost everyone using one of these beyond the borders of a designated skate park would do the world a terrific favor by riding in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler or freight train. If every skateboarder in Boulder disappeared, the present and future labor force would be unaffected by this desperately overdue purging, and I’m sure this applies to the U.S. as a whole. If any parents of kids with skateboards are reading this, I’m sorry you hate each other so goddamn much, or would be if my charred and stuttering ember of a heart could still generate even a joule of warmth for anything nice.
It gets worse. The percentage of people who walk, ride or run on the same common paths I do after dark is well below fifty percent, and it’s not just college kids and the plastered or otherwise obtunded transients. I used to prefer using the paths at night, but the addition of the scooters (which, thankfully, have no choice but to emit light) has made that experience a lot less relaxing. It’s kind of a matter of picking my poison. If I go out during the day, I encounter niceties such as trios of lacrosse moms walking abreast and unwilling to fall into a single-file line for even five seconds, usually wearing masks. As I overhear their conversations about whatever fake news has struck a chord, I am reminded that this is Boulder’s New York Times readership, all with permanent vulvar razor-burns and manufactured gluten sensitives for themselves and their children. They don’t know this yet, but in a few years many of them will be flailing about on apps like Tinder and Hinge. Hoo-rah.
Finally, Outside now has three separate physical offices here. I am confident in declaring that everyone on editorial staff of its various Woke and ineptly run publications is some avaricious combination of moron, lemming, and social terrorist. I sincerely hope those offices wind up as unplanned piles of rubble or ash, either before or after the shady businesses inside them go el foldo. Some of the beard-encrusted barking assholes I see tearing up the path at 10:00 pace in the northeast part of town while talking on cell phones probably serve that shithole empire.
(That Boulder proves to be the last stop on many pro runners’ careers, after the bus has been through Burnout Pass and soon before it rolls into Retirement Junction, is of interest, but not germane to any of this grousing.)
It is tempting to frame these events as challenges from the god of my understanding, who happens to be an armchair sexual sadist whose reminders that life is actually pretty good are most often couched in the form of crude jokes, with me serving as the punch line as often as not.
But if this is the case, if god (like adidas and kd lang, the name is stylized in all-lowercase text) is picking a fight with me with this farrago of maddening developments, they cannot win. This is owed not to me being a worthy adversary, but to satan himself plainly running the local show.
These two characters are reputedly ecclesiastical antiparticles. Yet based on their personalities, I honestly can’t distinguish one from the other, so capriciously whimsical and ego-flattening are their cosmic dispensations of wisdom and justice. All I know is who does what, and which side is therefore winning.
In 1998, I wrote a short story called Obits based on my experience doing scut work for a daily newspaper. In the story, the guy who writes up the obituaries discovers a magical talisman that gives him the power to kill people by writing their obituaries, which he soon weaponizes. In 2015, Stephen King published a similar story, also titled Obits. King’s version apparently reached more readers, but I can prove mine came first.
Three years later, I produced another random work of fiction, this one titled Swing Time. In this one, two people in their twenties pull a strange stunt that leads divers into a difficult-to-access part of the Merrimack River looking for drowned bodies. Then, last year, this happened along the same, still-obscure stretch of the Merrimack.
In a post on September 2, I mentioned the show The Wire, the final season of which aired in 2007. Two days later, Michael K. Williams, who played the show’s most memorable character, died of a drug overdose.
It is possible that I am malevolent cosmic force to be contended with, influencing Alternatively, all that stuff represents a series of rather mundane and easily rationalized coincidences.
But I’m not done! Boulder has experienced a dramatic rise in crime in the past two years, the combined result of an influx of meth-heads, poor leadership and whimsical policies at the local homeless shelter (the executive director of which just resigned), a new hands-off-style police chief, a police officer shortage despite a bloated 2021 BPD budget, and, above all, wide-eyed shrieking waterheads at the helm of it all. If you really want a look inside the city’s problems and how those put in charge always make them worse, see Shay Castle’s tireless independent Boulder Beat coverage.
None of this signifies satan’s involvement; there is nothing new or uniquely malevolent about a U.S. city in decline. It’s the resistance of Boulder to quantifiable signs of wholesale collapse that hearken to the dark one’s involvement. Check how things are going here, and you’ll learn that Boulder ranks among the most educated cities in America and is its number-one most desirable place to live.
Moreover, in March of this year, the median sale price of a home in Boulder stood at $1.56 million—up 56 percent from one year earlier. Most people don’t associate the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic with personal prosperity, but America’s rich got richer during that time. Like I mentioned, humans have a unique economic system, and one of its inviolable rules is that the well-off manage to monetize practically everything that hurts others, from wars to viruses to the collapse of financial markets.
Although moving is probably more trouble than it’s worth, and despite inertia being the primary default decision-maker for any feeb devoid of even near-term goals, I’m headed out of here at the end of the month for at least a few weeks. That was coming anyway, but I’m realizing I and my easily portable life would be less unhappy elsewhere, basically anywhere I didn’t have to look at so many well-maintained people with brain damage and runners who trail the stink of unwashed feet and ass around. Any suggestions?