wild, wild west...

Driving back from Denver today got me thinking. Mostly because I couldn't get This American Life back on my ipod to listen to it while driving, so I was forced to keep Gnarles Barkley on repeat.That's not a bad thing, they're a great band, but after a while I tend to stop listening to music and actually think about things. So I wanted to write some of the things I was thinking about before I forgot them (as has already happened with 97 percent of the rest of the things I think about).

I think the West is the ultimate embodiment of America: huge and expansive, with subdivisions full of enormous houses on their half-acre of land each. There isn't much between Denver and Colorado Springs - it's mostly just rolling hills and blue-tinted mountains going off into the distance. What do they do with all this land, I wonder. It seems like such wasted space to me in my still-kind-of-European mindset. In London, there wasn't a centimetre of land that wasn't a building, or a road, or the Thames (and even that was crowded with boats and ferries). But Here, in the West, there appears to be more land than people know what to do with. The result, intentional or not, is a general feeling of excess, of being big for the sake of being big. American.
On the other hand, the grandeur of the Rockies and the vastness of the scenery - that in some places you can look around you and see nothing but rolling hills dotted with evergreens, huge white puffy clouds and the winding road ahead and behind, give the place a closeness with God that I haven't felt anywhere else. The sheer beauty of the place - of the West - makes me certain of His existence. And His greatness.
Amen.


Oh also.
I guess I should mention the reason for my being in Denver. Unlike my other Denver adventure, this one had a purpose: my family has flown out to visit me for the week. They're staying in Denver for two nights before coming to Colorado Springs, so I drove up after work to meet them and have dinner with them. I ended up spending the night there, in their hotel room, in a double bed with my 18-year-old brother, and leaving this morning. They get to go to Estes Park, while I had to go to work.
It makes me feel so grown up, to have my family visit me in the other place where I live. It's really happening, this growing-up thing.
Yikes.