Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Things Go Better with Pot Heads - NOT!

I was actually banned from the city-data.com forums last year for having the audacity to assert that the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver is full of potheads.

I have a very difficult time believing that anyone who has lived in either Capitol Hill or it's neighboring areas of North Capitol Hill, City Park West, and Cheesman Park have a hard time believing that this area of town is full of pot heads. I can give a couple of perfect examples:

Very recently a man living near me had the police called on him because he was having some kind of bizarre fit, screaming incoherently and throwing things against the walls in his apartment. After upwards of an hour of this, police arrived and he was arrested for acting belligerently and resisting. He refused to open his door and give the police his name. That meant that when the door was finally opened, the police did an around-the-neck grip, dragged him out of his apartment by his neck and slammed him against the wall. The cops inspected the apartment exclaimed that he "broke everything" and even punched a couple holes in the walls. Why? His roommate would not buy him marijuana. This pothead has not been heard from since he was taken to jail and all of the broken things from the apartment were thrown outside upon eviction.

Another example circa 1988:

I had the fortune of having an eccentric man approximately 50 years old living across the hall from me. I think he was a Buddhist or something, I could sometimes hear bizarre religious-like chanting coming from his door. After some months of living by him I noticed a pattern in his behavior. Off and on he would have these odd fits, beating walls, breaking things, stomping and yelling. Shortly following that, the smell of some kind of marijuana would emanate from his apartment for several days nearly nonstop during which time he was placid and quiet. This repeated cyclically for months on end. In time, I noticed he would thrash around his apartment in rage for a time, then storm out of his apartment in utter anger, banging the door shut. He'd return about 15 minutes later holding a plain white package. Give him another five minutes and the smell of burning weed was strong, and his anger subsided, his rants ceased, his apartment quiet. I couldn't figure out where the soothing mystery packages were coming from until one day I was outside down the street and happened to see him emerge from the check cashing joint at East Colfax and Vine Streets, carrying a non-descript plain white box. There were rental mailboxes in that business. Someone was actually using the mail system to send this guy weed.

Ah, Denver.