Diary from the Massacre State
Blue mountains loom over a view of stretched gray prairie. An orange haze clings to the rock’s shoulders, less a game of peekaboo than a retreat.
The 32-foot statue at Denver International Airport, officially titled Blue Mustang and nicknamed “Blucifer,” for its glassy, glowing red eyes, spooked, aggressive stance, bulging genitals, and the tragic death of its creator, Luis Jiménez, who was crushed by his masterpiece before its completion in 2006. And still, it stands warning you.
I glare back at it from the beaten-up white Chevy Colorado taking me home. The sculpture, like the airport itself, is soaked in conspiracy, an object onto which decades of rumor, symbolism and suspicion have been layered like the ancient crystalline rock erected by God before them.
At DIA, broiled in Cold War anxieties, the airport for a long time was imagined as a complex of underground bunkers built to hide special forces (of whom we know not) during bombings or societal collapse. They’ve since taken down the portraits of dead Nazis and sobbing Native Americans and replaced them with barren white walls — the same ones found in Starbucks and the Apple Store — with a plainness that reminds you the untamed spirit of the American West has, in fact, been tamed. Automated check-in lines and plastic overhangs insist on reminding you this is a NORMAL airport shuffling NORMAL people.
Folks in athleisure bustle by me with large and small headphones, reminding me that I don’t exist. On my way home, the bizarre goods shop Jackalope’s, with its maze of leather, hand-woven rugs and kooky metal ranch decorations, has been replaced by Bill’s Tool Kit, a garden-variety garden store.
And then the suburbs. Mine, the one that used to be considered rural, is now lined with cookie-cutter houses in the same horrible dark blue-gray. The fields where the horses once roamed, the endless stretch of plains and Black Forest, the central population at 7,000 feet above sea level, have been eradicated, and people have emerged from the sky.
I smell the clean air and splash the cold mountain spring water (actually from Utah) on my face in gratitude anyway. Twenty wild turkeys lie squat and juicy-looking on our brown lawn, their habitat destroyed alongside my adolescent memories of running into a pitch-black night to build more housing. How bright it is in the Mile High, under the stars and a big moon. Evangelical preaching and weed smoke disappear like ash into the whistling wind.
It rains in Colorado, thousands of feet above sea level, in late November, where the snow once fell.
From 2014 to 2023, Colorado saw 77 mass shootings, with hundreds more before that. It leaves a sharpness in the spine, a readiness to duck and hide, familiar to those who grew up here.
Colorado, birthplace of the mass shooting and the frontier. Of the Gold Rush… glitter, guilt, labor, and loss. Of self-reliance and self-loathing. A place of legal weed, magic mushrooms, rose quartz crystals, and Mexican punks. Colorado, home of YOU and ME.
Denver still feels untethered, wild, and as fucked up as ever. The Mutual Aid Monday line outside the state building, which feeds hundreds of homeless people, has grown since I last showed up. I hear the new mayor is a different iteration of the same money-crazed real-estate developer.
Three years ago, I wrote an article for 5280 Magazine marking the anniversary of the camping ban, a law passed in 2012 to prevent homeless people from sleeping outdoors. No new shelters erected, no low-income housing ushered in. Fentanyl came, and it poured into the streets (made solely for horses and then cars). No walking. No sleep.
Denver, a city originally built as a “home base” for miners breaking their backs sifting through dust in freezing river water, supplied by steel coal trains. A haven for turn-of-the-century men to trade, almost like a military base for the brave few risking their necks for the notion of luck and a handful of gold pebbles. Today, in those mountains, in the town of Breckenridge, the most popular ski resort, an old mine was recently bought by a wealthy foreign family and turned into a tourist attraction. They infuse a small artificial pond with dancing gold flakes for people far and wide, from England to Florida, to win big. Feel the rush.
I’m told the new mayor of Denver has pushed policing further. Homeless families, pregnant mothers and heartbroken sons, veterans and the junkies who run East Colfax and Federal Avenue aren’t allowed to set up a tent at all. Not for a minute, not for an hour. Some look at me with glassy, sad eyes. Others shout about someone touching their stuff. A familiar blare of a train engine screams in the distance. Blue pills melt on a spoon not far away.
Maybe it’s good there’s no snow. And something else hangs in the air.
