Walking Around: Denver Thorax

A Story by Abishai100

A vignette about everyday-normal life in a US city and why we take American definition for granted, arguably!

A daily-life vignette about what it's like to be American...and designed.

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Imagine you live in an iconic US city like Denver, Colorado. You enjoy the sociocultural merits/benefits/fruits of American culture and may become a fan of the Broncos (pro-football) or Buffaloes (college-football) or a fan of the city's plaza-shops and/or metro-subway system. You might think about the 'general layout' of the 'grid' of American city-diagonals and how it conforms to your 'mental ergonomics' about mobility and adaptation and speed and emotion and even love.

Consider a university professor in Denver who's walking around the city on a warm September day, as the college-football season has begun and he prepares for a Denver Halloween harvest festivities season on campus. This professor, Amlan (that's his name) imagines he's going to the aquarium with his kids after picking them up from school one day.

AMLAN: The greatest error I'd make as a teacher in my life is to delay in picking up my kids from elementary school!

He makes it to the Denver Aquarium with his kids after-school that day on time and appreciates/enjoys the inside exhibits featuring various aquatic life such as goldfish and stingrays which help him talk to his kids about the 'imagination' of human evolution or physical flexibility and swimming around in a gravity-lightened condition under-water. He tells his kids what's it like to live in an iconic US city like Denver and not take for granted all the amenities and fortunes of adaptive flexible mobile life in Western civilization and appreciate homeland securities after 9/11 and what it tells us about Western theater and even joy.

Maybe Amlan has brought with him to the Aquarium in Denver that day a special university-office 'gold briefcase' in which is an iconic historic cartoon comic-book political-thriller image of Irish revolutionaries in sectarian (Catholic-Protestant) troubled Belfast hijacking an off-duty British armyman as the man's walking out of a Protestant-patron Northern Ireland pub. Amlan intends to show this political-thriller cartoon-comic image flyer to his kids at the Aquarium that day in Denver to tell them about the odd contours between animal kingdom dance and human civilization dangers.

AMLAN: Notice in this image of Belfast (Northern Ireland) how human beings are engaged in poses of great dilemma.

Perhaps you're not a schoolteacher in Denver but rather a housewife and instead on that very-same day, you visit the local Target department store with your kids who're off school that day for a holiday that autumn season as Halloween approaches. You're thinking of buying some nice Halloween decorations and a nice toy or gift for your son and/or a nice dress for your daughter (Elena) who notices and starts admiring/stroking one of the fashion-designed mannequins in the store pedestal inside!

ELENA: I want this classic awesome Pippi book mom from Target today, before Halloween --- to please get it for me!

Your husband calls you on your handy-dandy iPhone which happens to be one of the original models, and you still have it functioning but it ain't perfect but workable, and your husband's call comes in staticky but it's audible, and you tell him it's good to hear his voice and tell him you're buying Elena that Pippi book she adores at Target, and he tells you, "I'm having an adulterous affair with one of our neighbors." You'd decided to throw away your iPhone in the trash as you walk out of Target in Denver on that day!

Imagine instead you're a policeman in Denver and you're buying some Halloween decorations a month-ahead of time and go to an arts-crafts store and find this terrific customized Halloween film-franchise poster featuring the iconic serial-killer of America, Michael Myers, in some poses/designs significant of that Halloweentime experience in Denver. You have to have it. The owner tells you it's $75, which is pretty expensive, but you decide to fork over the cash, because, hey, you're lucky to be American and not living in some god-troubled place like Northern Ireland or North Korea.

Perhaps you're just a regular politician in Denver and decide to take in a night-time little-league boys' baseball game that warm summer day in September in Denver and enjoy what Americans take for granted in this post-9/11 20th-anniversary commemoration year of that awful terrorism-day when we're all awakened to the gory notion that American homeland security ain't what it used to be, and it hasn't felt 'this way' since Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, that Denver night little-league game reminds this politician (you!) that what Americans will always have is a sense of bodily-motion in a nation that just caters to an easy-going sense of living dialysis.

Maybe you just broke up with your boyfriend and want to go to a vintage video-store in Denver where they still sell old-school VHS-tapes of classic '80s-90s films, and you find this awesome Jennifer Connelly movie about getting trapped inside a department store to find the serendipity of shared daydreams. You decide to get the VHS copy which comes with an autographed piece of film-memorabilia. This has been a terrific 'normal' day in Denver for you, a terrific American.