Denver or Dumpster?

Bitchiness Scale: 9/10

photo by Kevin Butz on Unsplash

I’m about to get real Larry David, re: Curb Your Enthusiasm, real fast, so brace yourself. Keep in mind I fucking hate that show, so do with that what you will. There’s this comic where two pigeons are sitting on a snowy bench. One says, “It’s kind of nice when the snow hides all the trash.” That, in one sentence, is how I feel about Denver. Denver is 35 minutes from Boulder (one of the most desirable places to live in the country) and it’s 1+ hours from some of the most beautiful mountains in the world. Yet there’s trash everywhere. Now, I live two-ish miles from downtown. But the houses around us are 600k! This ain’t rough living. This is a nice neighborhood. But there’s still fucking trash... everywhere. I asked a friend if he noticed the trash in Denver. He looked absolutely mystified, like he had never seen a piece of trash in this city in his whole life. But guess what? He’s moving near 20th Street and Park Avenue, and he’s in for an abrupt awakening. Not that it’s trash-related, but there’s a Safeway there that everyone calls the Not-So-Safeway. So, yeah. Anyway, I was walking my dog, Beatrix A.K.A. Pookie A.K.A. Dog Dog A.K.A. Butter Butt, last summer and there was a toilet bowl brush sitting in a patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street. This patch of grass belonged to a nice, tidy surgical clinic. “Where did the toilet bowl brush come from,” you wonder. I can’t say. Dump truck? Random passerby? Regardless, what is it doing there and why is the clinic not throwing it away? I know it’s not the clinic’s trash, but it’s their property. Don’t they care? I will say, I think sometimes trash blows out of people’s trash bins and into the street. Because when storms come through here, it can get pretty windy. But y’all. That doesn’t account for all the trash in Denver. I know San Franciscans are probably rolling their eyes because at least Denver doesn't have a sanitation team designated to cleaning up human shit. And they have a point.

People like to say Denver is the Austin of the mountains. Ha HA hAAA. No. It ain’t, and it ain’t even close. Austin is clean AF. I’m sure there’s trash here and there, but I never noticed it and I lived there for two years. And while we’re at it: Denver doesn’t hold a candle to Austin. More on that later.