Pour Me A Story, Vol. 59
feat. Mailbag Part 2 and some fresh Air
greetings pals, and welcome back to Pour Me A Story!
a note about last week: I had every intention of putting something incredibly heartfelt to paper (so to speak) about the murder of school children in Nashville, and about the deep sickness that guns are in this country, but I sat down and just couldn’t bring myself to do it. what good would 1,300 more impassioned, angry words on the topic do anyway?
subsequently I tried to piece together a newsletter with one of the “pre-recorded” interviews I have on deck but it wasn’t in my heart, and I apologize for that.
nevertheless! here we are again to welcome the weekend with some stories. more specifically, they’re my personal brand of bullshit stories because we’re doing another mailbag edition which I like as a mental exercise.
shall we?
Anyway, We Have…Mail?
cast your minds back to Vol. 57, if you will, and you may remember I put out a call for questions in an effort to flip the usual interview format on its head and put myself in the hot seat for once.
I’ve had a crushingly busy week of work and a couple of sick girls in the houses well, so the newsletter was the furthest thing from my mind until around noon Thursday when I went “wow, I’m deeply unprepared again, maybe I’ll just do a mailbag.” feels like the old days!
so let’s jump in with one question I kept in the holster from last time around and then a fresh one from today’s pleading on Twitter.
Question: What was the biggest “anticipation to letdown” about the US? Maybe a particular type of food or place you wanted to see that fell tragically short of your expectations? — Danny Bauder, my good pal in Philly
this initially gave me pause, but then I laughed and realized the answer is very simple, and will have patriots and the French kicking down my door: it’s the Statue of Liberty.
as I assume is many folks’ experience, all I’d ever seen of Lady Liberty before my first visit to this country in 2008 was flyover shots in disaster movies shortly before aliens or a tsunami or a meteor or the second Ice Age completely destroys her.
I vaguely recall there being some security restrictions about going out to Liberty Island (or, at least, accessing the inside of the statue) during the summer of my first visit, plus there were a lot of hangovers during my time in New York that had nothing to do with the National Parks Service, so I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the trek out there.
but like any good first-time tourist to the Big Apple, I’d bought a hop-on, hop-off tourist bus pass to “learn some shit” or “stay out of the bars” during the day, and it included a ferry ride out into New York Harbor to at least float by the statue. two friends and I showed up at the pier one extremely stifling August morning, nursing the aforementioned hangovers, and dutifully lined up with the crowds to navigate the high seas (or whatever).
the boat had a bar, because of course it did, and the three of us put away nine beers in the hour or so we were on the water. when we finally got out by Liberty Island, I was…somewhat taken aback at how small it was. I assume I’d expected an absolute monstrosity rising out of the harbor, but looking back that seems unreasonable given it’s fucking made of copper and was shipped from France. in her further defense, she’s 305 feet tall, which is pretty big. I was a dumbass at 22.
in any case, here’s a picture of a very hungover, exhausted-looking me moments after laying eyes on her for the first time. I think I was still growing into my face in 2008.
Question: [What was the] most blatant/pertinent to you difference in Denver between your time away? Very open ended as to subject & experience. — @NotaliePortman on Twitter
this one actually is kinda tough to answer because life changed so much during that time. for further context and for new readers, I relocated to Denver in 2017, then we moved to Cincinnati for around 10 months between the summer of 2021 and the spring of 2022 for family reasons.
my life between April 2017 and March 2020 looked very different to how it does now, for reasons both obvious (pandemic) and extremely obvious (parenthood of a near-3-year-old). compounding these major world adjustments was that we lived in an apartment building adjacent to downtown before we left Denver, but upon our return we’ve settled in a slightly more suburban neighborhood a couple miles east of the city, so daily life is significantly different to what it was.
that’s not to say it’s a bad thing at all! it’s way better to raise a toddler in a house with a yard than it was with a sixth-floor apartment in a building with the world’s slowest elevator, and it’s a lot more family-friendly in our current neighborhood.
what I will say in terms of major Denver differences over the past two or so years is that when I’m in the old neighborhood for some reason, or walking around downtown on streets I used to frequent on my commute to work or hanging out after, is that covid changed this city pretty noticeably. some businesses didn’t survive the pandemic and new spots have sprouted up in their place, but other storefronts and restaurants just haven’t been replaced. I guess this is like any city, pandemic or not, but having spent my first three years in Denver eating and drinking in restaurants and bars pretty frequently, it’s the most glaring change I can notice.
some things stay the same though. the Broncos still stink.
Worthy Consumables
as I mentioned earlier, I went to catch a movie on Thursday night (conveniently located right by a TGI Friday’s which offers $2 Miller Lite drafts all day every day). I saw Air, the new Ben Affleck/Matt Damon flick based on the story of how Nike signed a rookie Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal in 1984 before he’d ever set foot on an NBA floor.
because I’m a longtime sneaker weirdo, there was absolutely nothing in this movie that I didn’t already know (except that Chris Tucker was cast as Howard White). for the average moviegoer who doesn’t know much about shoes, I would imagine it’d be a pretty interesting watch. in any case I enjoyed it a lot — there were some good laughs along the way, Affleck has a great turn as Nike CEO Phil Knight, and Viola Davis was a stone-cold killer as Deloris Jordan. I like Affleck movies as a fault (do not ask how many times I’ve seen The Town, and I’m half-watching The Way Back as I write this) but he doesn’t carry it or outshine the story by any means.
like I said, if you’re already clued in on sneakers or have read Knight’s book Shoe Dog, you’ll pretty much know what’s coming, but it’s a fun flick all the same. give it a whirl if you’re a shoe person, or just wait three weeks and it’ll be out on streaming.
Parting Note
ah shit, now I have to pick the song because I didn’t have a guest to interview. when will I learn? alright well here’s Meek Mill with Uptown Vibes, which is the first song I thought of when the second question above got me thinking about our pre-covid life in Uptown (and how I’d listen to this album walking to work at the bar every Saturday morning).
that’s it for another week folks. thanks for rocking with me, and I’ll catch you again next week!
— adrian ✌🏻