"This" my former and now coked up acquaintance said to me right before launching a beer bottle into the bars wall "is going to be awesome."

Casting him a queer look, I disappeared from his side right as he was launching the glass projectile. His cackle, as the bottle shattered into a hundred pieces, haunted me for the rest of the night.

Home for a weekend wedding, I spent last Friday night in the warm embrace of The Pour House, a typical lower-downtown Denver hangout. I like the Pour House. The drinks are stiff, the bouncers amiable (the cop on duty that night laughed when my drunken buddy tripped going up the bars stairs, especially after I looked at the officer and said “it’s his birthday, and he somehow thinks he’s getting laid” {which, amazingly enough, my friend did}), and the jukebox has Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” on it. The Pour House has it all. Unfortunately, “it all” also included coked out frat boy douches. Lots of them.

Every time I go home, I miss Denver. Driving through downtown I see all the little dive bars where I used to spend my nights tossing disc on the shuffleboard, or the movie theatre where my roommate and I would catch random indie flicks and midnight showings of Clerks, or the bar where I got a lap dance from a girl dressed like a pirate, or the restaurant where my friends and I would go to get drunk and eat wings after coaching our 5^th grade boys basketball team; all of these places where the memories hang thick. This last Friday I got the same feeling that I’m sure every person gets when they return to a place where they feel some sort of intimate intellectual or emotional connection. It was these melancholy feelings that led me to start thinking about my idealistic notions of Denver, and the question arose: Do I really miss Denver? Our is it that my memories convinced me that my past was something far greater than it actually was, and therefore, do the places of my past take on some over-inflated sense of significance? In other words, I realized that while I miss Denver, I really don’t miss Denver.

Rather, I miss my friends there. I miss the incredible Mexican food. I miss the mountains. I miss the Nuggets, the Broncos, and the Avs. But do I really miss the city itself? The answer, I found, was no.

This point was hammered home with one quick toss of a beer bottle by a coked up douche who I used to party with once or twice a month. I never really liked the guy then, and, my God, I couldn’t stand him now.

When flying back home to Portland, I was sitting next to two of my best friends who went to the same wedding as I. When we started our descent, and broke through the clouds at 20,000 feet, the Columbia River Gorge was laid out below us, and as we all looked out the window our collective breath was held still. We all felt the same thing: I missed you Portland, it’s good to be home.