DGO: Does Colorado have an issue with body-shaming?

art entertainment food drink music nightlife September 10-23, 2020 Sept. 24-Oct. 7, 2020

DGO Does Colorado have an issue with Body-Shaming?

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Fat phobia is more ingrained within our state’s culture than you might think

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FREE!

OCTOBER 8-31 • 2020

Pick up a map and swag-bag at The Green House and start your crawl for all the best deals in town! First 200 bags will include an official Cannabis Crawl T-Shirt and a lighter.

The map will guide you to awesome deals, giveaways, Q&A sessions, and other related events happening throughout the month.

This year we are including businesses outside of Durango! Visit any of the businesses in Pagosa, Mancos, or Cortez between October 8th and October 31st.

Drop your map off at Kinfolk Farms for a chance to win the $500 prize!

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STAFF

What’s inside Volume 5 Number 20 Thursday, September 24, 2020

Editor

Who’s the highest in the room?

Angelica Leicht aleicht@bcimedia.com 375-4551 Staff writer

We were, thanks to Her Highness, the strain we reviewed this week from Prohibition Herb.

Time to crown this bud the newest member of royalty.

Nick Gonzales ngonzales@durangoherald.com Sales Chandler Sommerfeldt csommerfeldt@bcimedia.com 375-4553 Contributors

4

From the Blog

5

Eat & Drink

Durango Beer & Ice Co.

5

Mountain Munchies 6

Blue Corn Whiskey 7

Fresh Food Connect 7

8 Mysteries

Mitchell Stehling update 8

Amanda Push

Forrest Fenn

Laraina Hailey

9 Costumes

Erin Brandt Megan Bianco

Reader Services 375-4570

DGO Pufnstuf for DGO

Douglas Bennett Jamie Opalenik

5 More booze, less fanfare at Durango Beer & Ice Co. Without much fanfare – understandable in our virus-gripped times — a new brewery has opened on the north side of Durango. Wave a socially-distant hello to Durango Beer & Ice Co. 6 We found a vegan haven at Mountain Munchies

DGO is a free biweekly publication distributed by Ballantine Communications Inc., and is available for one copy per person. Taking more than five copies of an edition from a distribution location is illegal and is punishable by law according to Colorado Revised Statute 18-9-314.

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Durango may have quite a few places to get snacks, but few of them cater primarily to people with restricted diets. At Mountain Munchies, however, vegans and those who are gluten- or dairy-free can find food to fit their lifestyles.

10 Visit this old Flagstaff mausoleum for kicks Northern Arizona has all sorts of cool natural wonders — the red rock buttes of Sedona, Monument Valley, Meteor Crater, the Petrified Desert, that Grand Canyon thing.

But once you get bored of marveling at Earth’s surface, one of the most fascinating places to go is Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory. /dgomag art en drin tertai km nm usic ent Sept nigh food em . 24be tlife -Orct 10 . 7, -220 3, 20 2020

DG O

D ha oes C v o Bo e an i lora dy s d Sh sue w o x-x xx a m ingith ?

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Fa ing t pho Sta rain bia is e te’s m cul d with ore in mig ture th our ht thin an y ou k

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ON THE COVER Colorado, we have a (fat shaming) problem.

Nick Gonzales for DGO Mag

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Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 3

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[news]

From the blog

News from our site on the interwebs you may have missed The existential world of Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”

ible with through the video service, Andy seems to take offense, trying to drive a wedge into their burgeoning relationship. Bloody chaos ensues.

Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is clearly made by someone who truly appreciates and absorbs film history, because only someone who loves all aspects of film would include a whole scene that is a wordfor-word, verbatim monologue of film critic Pauline Kael’s infamously negative review of John Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974). This is just one of many sequences in Kaufman’s new movie that is both fascinating and baffling. The much-anticipated follow-up to the acclaimed writer-director’s “Anomalisa” (2015), as well as one of the few, fresh releases to come out of 2020, is really neither a surprise nor a predictability. Anyone who has been following Kaufman’s career for the past two decades knows what they’re getting into by now.

The title alone makes us think the theme of the movie is going to be about suicide, but the trailer gives off the impression it might be about the end of a relationship. Well, it’s kind of a little of both. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons star as a young couple—his character’s name is Jake, but we’re not quite sure on hers—about to spend a day out of town visiting Jake’s parents. Through narration during the opening scene, we hear the young woman contemplate the status of their new relationship as well as her own mental state.

After the two make it to Jake’s family farm and we’re introduced to his parents, both also nameless and played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis, things quickly become increasingly surreal and non-linear.

“I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is based on a 2016 novel of the same title

by Iain Reid, which admittedly I haven’t read, so some of the story choices here could be his more than Kaufman’s. But my first reaction after completing the adaptation is the same as I’ve felt since “Synecdoche, New York” (2008) and “Anomalisa”: it’s not boring, it’s very unique and very Kaufman-esque, yet, it didn’t captivate me. Back when Kaufman started his career, as a screenwriter, I was completely enthralled by his first two films, “Being John Malkovich” (1999) and “Adaptation” (2002), both directed 4 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

The film does a fantastic job in creating the depressingly empty world David occupies, and Folkins captures the feeling of a devastatingly isolated but optimistic shut-in perfectly. Perhaps a bit too much so.

During the first two-thirds of the movie, its easy to forget you’re watching a horror movie and not just a particularly depressing drama. And when the depression turns into a descent into madness, it does so rather abruptly, giving you whiplash in a way that the previous hour of the movie didn’t really prepare you for. It’s kind of like if “Friday the 13th” spent its first hour developing a sense of dread at Camp Crystal Lake, but nobody died until the last 15 minutes.

by Spike Jonze. And if you want to see a brilliant portrayal of Kaufman’s type of characters in a romance-themed movie, there’s his “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), directed by Michel Gondry. Buckley, Plemons, Collette, and Thewlis are talented enough actors to keep scenes interesting in “Ending Things,” but somewhere near the middle of the 135-minute runtime, I began to wonder what the point was to finishing a story that clearly wasn’t going to have a satisfactory outcome for its characters.

“Star Trek: The Next Generation”) as the main horror element, we’re even further intrigued. And that’s why we sat down and watched “Rent-A-Pal,” which came out on Sept. 11.

The film, written and directed by Jon Stevenson of Denver-based production company Pretty People Pictures, also stars Brian Landis Folkins, Kathleen Brady, and Amy Rutledge.

This isn’t to say it’s not an entertaining watch. The backdrop of the story and its characters are spot-on, with quirky details that make the film feel far from rote.

And Wheaton comes off particularly deranged, especially if all you know him as is the helmsman of the Enterprise and one of the kids from “Stand By Me.”

Despite being set three decades ago, “Rent-A-Pal” seems particularly resonant Set in 1990, it follows David (Folkins), with the present day. David’s frustratinga lonely, unemployed bachelor who ly unfruitful search for love and accepworks around the clock as a caregiver Yes, I’m aware it’s deeper than just tance through VHS tapes is a pretty to his elderly mother (Brady). He hasn’t beginning-middle-end, but I’ve seen obvious analog for a lack of success on given up on meeting people, though, Kaufman already tackle similar, existenthe Tinders and Bumbles of the app using a VHS-based dating service in tial and psychological themes in “Adapworld. And his embrace of a champion hopes of getting a date. Frustrated with tation” and “Synecdoche”. And between his lack of matches, one day he also takes of toxic masculinity through the same those two, I felt Jonze knew what to do home a copy of “Rent-A-Pal,” a novelty medium echoes the way angry, socially visually better than Kaufman, whom tape that he finds in the dating service’s maladapted men find their way into the I still believe is best at writing and collabbargain bin. When he watches the tape, orating. online incel (“involuntarily celibate”) we’re introduced to Andy (Wheaton), a community today.

—— Megan Bianco seemingly Fred Rogers-esque character who engages and befriends the viewer of “Rent-A-Pal” isn’t the best horror The new, moody, Colorado-based horror film ‘Rent-A- his video with pre-recorded dialogue. movie we’ve seen, and we don’t foresee Pal’ is terrifyingly lonesome After several rewatchings, David it landing on many top 10 lists, but if you begins to believe that Andy is actually If you hand us a movie, call it horstumble across it on a streaming service conversing with him, and Andy’s stories ror or thriller, and tell us it was filmed or at a film festival, it’s certainly worth a and views take on a misogynistic bent. in Colorado, we’re probably going to watch.

When David finally meets Lisa (Rutwatch it. If it also happens to feature —— Nick Gonzales ledge), a woman he’d actually be compatWil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher from

[food/drink]

Durango Beer and Ice Co. pops up in the place of its north Durango predecessors Brewery gets creative with its beer styles and flavors

Nick Gonzales/DGO

Nick Gonzales/DGO

Nick Gonzales/DGO

»» The Pie Car Blueberry Ale at Durango Beer and Ice Co. is not

»» DBI’s Eternal Bliss is flavored with cucumber, juniper berry

»» The DBI Dreamsicle tastes just like a creamsicle

as sweet as you would think a beer with pie in the name would be.

and basil, but it’s the herb that comes through most clearly.

that has been transmogrified into a golden ale.

Without much fanfare – understandable in our virus-gripped times — a new brewery has opened on the north side of Durango.

Blueberry Ale,” another golden ale, but

Durango Beer and Ice Co. is located at 3000 Main Ave. — the water tower-bedecked location most recently occupied

by Chainless Brewing, and the home of Durango Brewing Co. before that. It appears that it’s also known as High Trestle Brewing (at least that’s what’s on the taps, menu, and liquor license).

name, you might think that this one

The brewery’s name seems to be an homage to both local history and the history of that particular spot. The past is murky, but depending on who you ask, either Durango Beer and Ice Co. became the original, pre-Prohibition Durango Brewing Co., or vice versa, right around the turn of the 20th century. (It may also have been the Smelter City Brewing around that time.)

makes the name quite apropos. It does

It doesn’t seem like the new brewery is related to the more recent Durango Brewing Co., which closed up the last of its Durango operations, fired everyone, and moved everything to La Junta in August 2018. You can still find Durango Brewing Co. beers in liquor stores, but that’s about it. Even the La Junta operation’s taproom at Dean & Co. Brewery closed in October 2019.

But enough dwelling in the past — are the new brewery’s beers any good?

On our first visit to the brewery, we tried three beers.

The first, “Eternal Bliss,” immediately

this time brewed with wheat malts and the essence of blueberry. Based on the

would be sweet (Dreamsicle certainly was), but you’d be wrong. The blueberry definitely adds a fruitiness to it, but not in a sugary way. And the beer itself, with its wheaty tones, lends a quality that

taste a bit like a pie, crust and all, but not to the extent that it’d make a great Nick Gonzales/DGO

»» DBI does a decent burger. We liked the fries. caught our eye thanks to its ingredients.

The beer is a light lager, think cucumber, basil, and a hint of juniper berry. Whether you like it or not will depend entirely on your personal relationship with basil.

The cucumber and juniper — as well as the lager-iness of the beer — are all there, but by far, the most dominant flavor is the basil. We loved it.

About halfway through the pint, we started eating french fries, (we ordered the house burger with our beers — it was good, especially the spicy aioli, and the fries were cooked just to the edge of golden) and that’s when we discovered how well the salty potato chunks complimented the basil lager. Next time we go, we plan to combine the Eternal Bliss

dessert. We can imagine drinking it while eating a bowl of chili.

with the brewery’s garlic parmesan fries, as that sounds, well...blissful.

For our second beer, we ordered the “DBI Dreamsicle.” The menu describes it as smooth golden ale with creamsicle notes, and they’re not kidding. It tastes very much like the frozen treat, with a creaminess to it (but just slightly... it doesn’t have the heaviness of, say, a milkshake IPA, and it’s not quite opaque) and just a bit of citrus to it. It immediately evokes nostalgia for midsummer childhood afternoons but in the form of a beer. We imagine it would be great as a light dessert beer, or as something to drink in to-go form while floating in a body of water like a pool or the river.

Finally, we went for the “Pie Car

If you can’t tell, we liked all three beers (though Eternal Bliss was our favorite) and we’re headed back in the near future. So far, we’ve only tried a handful of DBI’s lighter beers with unconventional flavors. Next, we need to try their IPAs (such as the “Taste Lift Hazy IPA”) and their dark beers (including the “Cascade Creek Coffee Stout,” which is described as a nitro stout with notes of chocolate and caramel with coffee roasted at 81031 coffee house).

—— Nick Gonzales

Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 5

[food/drink]

Mountain Munchies provides tasty, local, vegan, dairy-free, and gluten-free snacks But was the vegan green chile ice cream just temporary?

Nick Gonzales/DGO

Nick Gonzales/DGO

Nick Gonzales/DGO

»» The shaved ice at Mountain Munchies (including this piña »» The Falafel Waffle, Mountain Munchies’ flagship snack, with green chile

»» Mountain Munchies’ artisan vegan green

colada one) is vegan ... like ... normal? (*Squints suspiciously*) tzatziki.

chile ice cream. (Insert gif of James Franco saying “So good,” in “Spider-Man 3” here.)

Durango may have quite a few places to get snacks, but few of them cater primarily to people with restricted diets.

At Mountain Munchies, however, vegans and those who are gluten- or dairy-free can find food to fit their lifestyles.

The eatery held its grand opening on Sept. 16 at 3701 Main Ave. We dropped by during its soft opening phase right before that date and walked off with a handful of treats.

Always great deals & the best selection in town!

6 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

The business describes itself as “the home of ‘THE’ Falafel Waffle,” so we got one of those. The item is exactly what it sounds like — a falafel pressed into the shape of a little waffle, with the squareshaped surface impressions and all that.

It is then topped by local greens and microgreens, tomatoes, carrots, cucumber, and either a vegan chive tahini or a green chile tzatziki (that isn’t dairy-free).

It otherwise hits all three of those aforementioned diet restrictions (it occurs to us that if it’s vegan, it’s dairy-free by definition) and you can add roasted gold beets or sweet peppers to it for $1.

If you like falafel and, well ... vegetables, you’ll almost certainly enjoy it. We got it with the green chile tzatziki and liked both the waffle itself and that the veggies tasted fresh in the way where you know they were grown somewhere nearby. It’s relatively small and not super filling — we’d never order it as a replacement for a meal — but it’d be great if you’re looking for something tasty to hold you over at say, 3 p.m.

non-dairy milk. And froze it. It was all we could do not to eat the entire pint in one sitting.

We’re a bit worried, though. As we write this, we’re looking at Mountain Munchies’ official menu and ... the green chile ice cream isn’t on it. There’s artisan vegan ice cream (which is also gluten-free for what it’s worth), and it comes in 14 flavors — including wild blueberry & lavender, salted caramel, Palisade peaches & cream, apple cinnamon, and matcha, which all sound great — but our favorite capsicum cultivar ain’t one of them. Maybe it will come back later on.

Last but not least, we grabbed some piña colada-flavored shaved ice. It tasted exactly as you’d expect. While we were eating it, though, we noticed that the menu notes that the shaved ice is also vegan and gluten-free. Since then, we’ve been doing our best to avoid thinking of We also ordered a pint of artisan veg- the kind of shaved ice that would contain an green chile ice cream. It was displayed animal products. (Wait ... does the blood prominently on the pre-opening menu of a tiger actually taste like strawberry, and we had to try it. If you’ve been folcoconut, and watermelon?) lowing us for a while, you know that we Now that MM is officially open, we’ll absolutely love green chiles, and you can be headed back to try its hummuses and give them to us in pretty much any form.

This includes vegan ice cream, it turns “paleo skittles” (dehydrated strawberry, out. The ice cream had the consistency raspberry, carrot, blueberry, lemon, and of a sorbet, but was, in fact, creamy. If we pear, apparently). We’ll also be keeping had to guess, the “cream” of it all comes an eye out for that delicious green chile from some form of plant-based milk. The ice cream. flavor was not unlike a green chile dip if you replaced the sour cream part with —— Nick Gonzales

[food/drink]

Durango Craft Spirits has some new bourbons aging, and we’re excited Blue corn and single malt bourbons should release in 2022 form (as it sits in the barrels, it’s at a considerably higher proof than that at which McCardell plans to release it), the whiskey is indeed sweet and has a soft, almost pillowy mouthfeel. He attributes this to the wheat in it. It tastes completely unlike DCS’s Cinder Dick Bourbon.

Fans of local whiskey, we’ve got something to look forward to ... albeit in about 1.75 years.

Durango Craft Spirits has two new spirits aging — a blue corn bourbon and a single malt bourbon — both of which should be ready in 2022, according to co-owner and distiller Michael McCardell. The limited releases will join the brewery’s existing Soiled Doves Vodka, Mayday Moonshine, and Cinder Dick Bourbon.

If you’ve never had blue corn before (in which case, live a little and vary your tortilla chip purchases for goodness’ sake), it tends to have a sweeter and nuttier flavor than yellow or white corn, and in our experience, those qualities actually survive the brewing or distilling process.

Beer drinkers can find a number of blue corn beers — even within our immediate region.

The blue corn in this particular spirit comes from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Bow & Arrow farms in Towaoc. The rest of the ingredients in both liquors come from Colorado Malting Company in Alamosa.

The blue corn spirit is heavily wheated, with a little bit of rye and a two-row malt, he said. He has put away eight barrels of the stuff this year and plans to do the same in 2021. And, if you’re curious, it’s aging in new American white

McCardell is hoping that it will be ready to distribute in the early summer of 2022. The single malt, on the other hand, will likely be ready in December 2022.

He began making it last year, and in its current, also undiluted form, it has a butterscotch-iness to it, at least on the palate.

Jerry McBride/BCI Media

»» Michael McCardell, distiller and co-owner of Durango Craft Spirits, is currently aging a blue corn bourbon using blue corn from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Bow and Arrow farms.

oak heavy-charred barrels. McCardell prefers heavily charred barrels because they bring out different flavors and add some smokiness and a slight hint of cinnamon.

“It’s real fun to work with ... it smells nice,” McCardell said about the blue corn.

He had planned to make a blue corn bourbon even before he opened up shop in downtown Durango five years ago,

he said, and was inspired to do so again recently as other craft distilleries have started experimenting with exotic corn varieties.

“It’s really surprised me that this blue corn had such a high starch content, which of course produces more sugar and produces more alcohol. The taste of it is really a little bit on the sweet side, and it tastes just fantastic,” he said.

McCardell plans to make about 500 bottles of the single malt and 2,500 of the blue corn bourbon per year for the foreseeable future. As you can probably tell, the single malt will be a bit more exclusive than the blue corn bourbon or the distillery’s existing spirits.

We’re fans of DCS’s existing spirits (even the vodka has a taste that we enjoy — and we’re really not vodka drinkers), so we can’t wait to try out the finished versions of the new bourbons. But we have to get through the entirety of 2021 and then some first. So for now, we wait.

—— Nick Gonzales

In its current unaged and undiluted

Have you done a bunch of COVID-19 gardening? Consider giving your homegrown produce to Fresh Food Connect “The more users we have on the gardening side, the more folks we can get the food to and the more we can serve the community,” Helen Katich, who runs Fresh Food Connect, told Westword.

As far as donating to the program, you should “garden and think about the Thanks to a Colorado non-profit called abundance and what you can share.”

Fresh Food Connect, you can use that When Fresh Food Connect first began new hobby to do some good for your in 2016, it focused on delivering fresh community. Fresh Food Connect allows foods to Denver neighborhoods. Howfor gardeners to donate produce from ever, as they began to partner with food their plots that they don’t think they’ll rescue and hunger relief organizations, use. The non-profit volunteers will pick they spread chapters all over Colorado, up any food you decide to donate and even as far as Durango. then hand it off to one of their food “This program is for (the) communidistribution partners. The distribution ty by community,” Katich said. “These centers then get the produce out to wherever it is needed. groups are really phenomenal.”

If you decided to pick up gardening as your chosen COVID-19 hobby, you might be considering what to do with all that extra produce you just harvested.

Sure you could give it to friends and family, but perhaps consider donating that overflow since you’re so #blessed.

With the effects of COVID, Fresh Food Connect is currently looking for more distribution partners to spread its reach. Because of COVID-19, many people are stuck at home rummaging for ways to occupy their time and have resorted to new hobbies like gardening.

In fact, the trend blew up so much that consumers depleted many seed companies’ supply of products.

“It’s the largest volume of orders we have seen,” one seed supplier told the Washington Post. At one point, his company processed about 4,500 orders a day, double the usual demand which peaks in the spring. The supplier even closed their website for three days and stopped taking any orders so staff could catch up with the long backlog of orders.

While COVID’s impact has obviously been negative in many ways, this new interest in activities like gardening resulted in a sea of new opportunities for organizations like Fresh Food Connect.

Now that more people are growing, there’s more food that can be shared amongst people who need it.

“When you look collectively, it’s more than (someone’s) two and a half pounds of food; it turns into something beautiful,” Katich said.

To learn more about how to get involved, visit Fresh Food Connect’s website for more information or download the Fresh Food Connect app.

—— Amanda Push

Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 7

[mysteries]

Found? Remains at Mesa Verde may be those of hiker missing since 2013 Mitchell Dale Stehling vanished without a trace on what should have been a quarter-mile hike thorities were unable to get a signal from it after his disappearance. According to phone records, he tried to access his voicemail at about 7 p.m. on the evening of his disappearance.

After his wife reported him missing, searchers learned from witnesses that Stehling had veered off onto the Petroglyph Point Trail, a 2.5-mile loop that branches off of the Spruce Tree House Trail. The trail he wound up on features a lot of steep switchbacks, narrow stairways, and areas where hikers have Courtesy of Denean Stehling

Courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service

»» Mitchell Dale Stehling went missing in June 2013, sparking an intensive two-week search.

At 4:30 p.m. on June 9, 2013, Mitchell Dale Stehling set out on the quartermile-long hike to Mesa Verde National Park’s Spruce Tree House ruin. He never returned, sparking a massive search that never yielded any evidence of what

panel of petroglyphs about two miles

hike to Mesa Verde’s Spruce Tree House, from which he never returned.

into the hike. After that point, it ascends

happened to him.

Until now.

After the National Park Service received an anonymous tip on Sept. 16, search and rescue crews found human

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to scramble over stones, leading to a

»» Denean Stehling and her husband Dale posed for this photo before he left on a

to the top of the mesa and becomes a remains the next day at the location described by the tip, which also indicated simple gravel trail that circles back to the that the body might be that of Stehling. trailhead.

Montezuma County Coroner George The family that reported that they had Deavers told The Durango Herald he seen him saw him twice on the trail, the is “99%” sure the remains are that of last time at the petroglyph panel itself.

Mitchell Dale Stehling because of items found at the scene: a driver’s license, credit cards, and a Social Security card that had Stehling’s information on it.

A team of scent dogs showed interest in

Barring that 1% possibility that somebody else died in the park but somehow ended up with Stehling’s possessions, this puts an end to one of the strangest mysteries in the modern history of Mesa Verde.

what happened to Dale or point search

Stehling, his wife, and his parents, of Goliad, Texas, were on a road trip visiting national parks when they stopped at Mesa Verde.

park for the missing hiker.

The Stehling family had originally planned to stop at just the lookout points and admire views of the ruins from a distance, but after watching a video on it, Dale decided to explore the Spruce Tree House, the third largest and best-preserved ruin in the park.

When he left his family for what should have been a short hike, he was wearing a khaki-colored “Mesa Verde Museum Association” baseball cap, sunglasses, a brown t-shirt, khaki shorts, and brown walking shoes. The only items he was carrying were his cell phone, cigarettes, and his wallet. He also left without water on a day when the temperature exceeded 100 degrees.

Dale had his phone on him, but au-

the area beneath the petroglyphs, but were unable to locate any evidence of teams in a new direction where he might have gone. At the peak of the intensive two-week search that followed, between 60 and 70 people were searching the Jodi Peterson, a writer and editor for High Country News, wrote that she hiked the Petroglyph Point Trail the day after Stehling went missing and heard a man in distress. “After an hour of walking, I suddenly heard a weary male voice call ‘I need some help,’” she wrote.

Peterson reported what she heard to the park.

The remains found on Sept. 17 were “quite a distance away” from where Stehling was last seen, Mesa Verde National Park Superintendent Cliff Spencer told the Herald. The area, in a remote part of the park, which took search crews about two hours to reach, was searched in 2013 when Stehling went missing.

—— Nick Gonzales

[costumes]

Still celebrating Halloween this year? Here are some COVID-appropriate costume ideas

During a normal year, right about now, a month out is when most of us would be figuring what to wear for Halloween. This year nobody would really blame you if you wanted to skip the holiday altogether. After all, it’s not like you can safely mingle at parties or anything of that nature. Then again, do you have anything better to do?

If you, like us, plan to dress up anyway — even if only to celebrate the season at home, work, or standing slightly obscured behind a tree at the park just after sunset — we have some costume ideas.

The masked If there’s one article of clothing that has come to define this year, it’s the face mask. And plenty of pop culture characters were wearing them before they were cool, er ... necessary. Sure, many horror villain masks aren’t COVID-19 friendly – Jason Voorhees’ hockey mask and Hannibal Lecter’s mouthpiece both have holes in them around the mouth and nose. But plenty of non-horror characters fit the bill.

Adobe Stock image

»» Ninjas are masters

Ninjas, for instance, are almost always depicted as cover- of espionage and, it ing the lower half of their faces turns out, not ejecting their facial fluids onto (and, perhaps, everything but people. their eyes). Want to get more specific? The Mortal Kombat video game franchise has at least a dozen masked characters. Whatever you do, just don’t dress up as Scorpion, yell “Get over here!” and

some sort of transphobic sign/printed tweet, but if nobody gets it, you just look like a transphobe. Do something fun from “Game of Thrones,” “His Dark Materials,” If you’re a Marvel fan, a number of full-body costumes, such as Spider-Man and Iron Man come to mind. or “Artemis Fowl” instead.

If you’d rather not cover up everything, the Winter The musical Soldier is a pretty simple DIY costume. The defining In the before-times, there used to be places called characteristics of the look are just shoulder-length hair, a mask that covers your mouth and nose, and a silver clubs (OK, not so much in the Four Corners) where arm with a red star near the shoulder. Assemble those you could go to listen and dance as people called “disc and you’re ready to fight Captain America. jockeys” created music with a catchy beat. (At least we assume they were actually doing something, not just The magical and mystical holding headphones to their head, gyrating, and hitting Remember back in January when Durango’s Snowrandom buttons.) down organizers announced pull people toward you with a spear. We’re supposed to be social distancing, people.

that the 2021 theme would be “A Magical Mystical Snowdown: We Put a Spell on You”?

Oh, what a simpler time. The upcoming winter festival has been canceled, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bust out your robe and wizard hat for Halloween instead. Then, if they decide to carry that theme over to the 2022 event (*fingers crossed that this will all be behind us by then), you can dust off your getAdobe Stock image up in ... 15 months. »» Your upcoming Harry Potter and Lord of Snowdown plans may the Rings costumes tend to have disappeared in a be multi-layer and a bit warm, puff of smoke, but your perfect for autumn in Colorado. wizard costumes don’t Just resist the urge to dress up have to. like beloved-children’s-authorturned-TERF J.K. Rowling herself. Yeah, it may sound clever at first to combine a Hogwarts robe, a wig, and

Some of the most popular DJs adopted personas that completely obscured their faces. Artists like Deadmau5, Marshmello, and Daft Punk all wore some sort of easily-identifiable headpiece.

What’s great about dressing up as any of them is that, for the most part, the helmet/mouse head/white cylinder is the only important part. You can totally get away with just wearing your casual everyday clothes, or, like, a tracksuit otherwise. If you want to get real creative, though, make up your own persona. Hey, maybe if you learn how to make electronic music too, you’ll find yourself on a new career path.

Courtesy of Q1q2q3qwertz/ Wikimedia Commons

»» Marshmello — an easy but easily recognizable celebrity costume.

—— Nick Gonzales Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 9

[travel]

Get outta town: Visit the mausoleum of Percival Lowell, who mapped Mars’ nonexistent canals Astronomer set the stage for the discovery of Pluto Northern Arizona has all sorts of cool natural wonders — the red rock buttes of Sedona, Monument Valley, Meteor Crater, the Petrified Desert, that Grand Canyon thing. But once you get bored of marveling at Earth’s surface, one of the most fascinating places to go is Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory.

Located above the city at over 7,000 feet, the complex has a bunch of interactive exhibits, educational scientific programs, and telescopes they’ll let you use to gaze out into the cosmos. It’s also a stellar place to people watch, as it’s an active research facility with astronomers coming and going all the time.

But while visitors head from the museum to the telescopes, one structure tends to go overlooked: the mausoleum of the observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell — a man who, in devoting his life to something that doesn’t exist, advanced human understanding of the universe considerably.

The canals Percival Lowell mapped on Mars’ surface later turned out to be an optical illusion.

Lowell studied math, ran a cotton mill, and traveled extensively in Asia, eventually serving as a foreign secretary

A wealthy Bostonian born in 1855,

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and counselor for a Korean diplomatic mission to the United States. But then in the 1890s, he read French spiritualist and science writer Camille Flammarion’s “The Planet Mars and Its Conditions of Habitability” and “Life on Mars,” a book featuring the Martian observations of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. The latter detailed a complex system of canals that Schiaparelli had observed on Mars’ surface, and upon reading about them, Lowell was obsessed.

The astronomer figured that the existence of a system of canals implied a deliberately-constructed irrigation or transportation system – and thus the Martians who built them. So he moved out to Arizona, built the observatory that still bears his name, and began mapping every canal he could see on the red planet.

Courtesy of Michael-Rainabba Richardson/Wikimedia Commons

»» Percival Lowell’s mausoleum in Flagstaff, Arizona, features a glass dome through which star light can shine.

Lowell may have been misguided when it comes to Mars, and Venus, but his study of astronomy and the construction of the observatory actually paid off. During the last decade of his life, he shifted his focus to the search for Planet X, a proposed planet in our solar system beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Lowell died in 1916, having never found that hypothetical planet. In 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, another astronomer searching for Planet X at Lowell Observatory, discovered Pluto. (Sure, it’s no longer considered a full-fledged planet, but it was a major discovery nonetheless.)

Meanwhile, Lowell’s idea that an alien had built canals across Mars’ desert, maybe even dying surface. influenced pop culture for more than a century.

H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and Ray Astronomy has advanced considerably Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” since Lowell’s day, to the point where both owe at least part of their existence we’ve actually sent robots to Mars, to Lowell. The astronomer’s mausoleand it turns out the canals were just an um on the observatory campus, which optical illusion. There’s no liquid water features a glass dome through which its on the planet’s surface, and definitely, occupant can gaze out upon the stars, is no Martians as far as we can tell. Oops. even alluded to in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ (Lowell also tried to map Venus – which “John Carter of Mars” series and the has an opaque atmosphere that renders (unfairly maligned) 2012 movie. the surface impossible to see from Earth As a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, — describing it as having spoke-like Lowell Observatory is currently going features that radiated out from a central through a phased reopening process, so dark spot. Scientists later figured out check what’s open before visiting it. that Lowell was looking at an image of his own eye.)

—— Nick Gonzales

[mysteries]

Forrest Fenn’s death: A new twist to the hidden treasure debacle It’s been a year of unraveling, one could say. A year where we do the big no-no of asking ourselves how things could possibly get weirder. After all, how could it get any worse?

It turns out, 2020 is not the year to test that question. After months of back and forths regarding an infamous treasure that was hidden in the Rocky Mountains, the treasure’s gatekeeper, Forrest Fenn, has died.

The chest, hidden by Fenn in 2010 in the Rocky Mountains, was apparently filled with gold and valuable antiques.

For the last decade, more than 350,000 people have scoured the wilderness in search of it. Some of them have gone as far as to give up their jobs and spend their savings in search of the treasure.

As many as five people are believed to have died.

In June, however, Fenn claimed that a man (who did not wish to be identified) discovered the chest. To confirm he had found the treasure, Fenn said the man sent him a photo of the chest. He claimed the man who found the cache

For some, Fenn’s release of new details has confirmed the story’s authenticity while, for others, it’s only added to their doubts. Linda Bilyeu, the ex-wife of Randy Bilyeu, a Colorado man who died hunting for the treasure in 2016, is one such outspoken skeptic.

“I believe he never hid the treasure,” she told Westword. “He needed attention and this is how he got it. Fenn needed more attention, which is why he said the treasure has been found with ‘no proof.’”

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“The finder wants me to remain silent and I always said the finder gets to make those two calls. Who and where,” Fenn wrote.

was able to locate the treasure in the Rockies because of a poem Fenn had written in his 2010 memoir, “The Thrill of the Chase.” The poem apparently held clues as to the treasure’s whereabouts.

Fenn wrote the poem to inspire people to go on a good ol’ fashioned adventure, and boy did they take him up on that offer.

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Because Fenn was so tight-lipped over the details, some speculated whether the treasure was ever actually found. To push back, Fenn released photos of the cache.

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“Because I promised the finder I would not reveal who found it or where, I have remained mostly silent,” Fenn claimed on dalneitzel.com, his chronicler. “However, the finder understands how important some closure is for many searchers, so today he agreed that we should reveal that the treasure was found in Wyoming.”

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According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, in early September, police concluded that the 90-year-old Santa Fe antique dealer died of natural causes in his home. Fenn, a military veteran and writer, attained a bit of a celebrity in this life, especially this year, because of a $2 million bronze treasure chest he hid somewhere in the Rockies. The cache was allegedly found earlier this year in June in Wyoming by an individual Fenn would not identify.

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Since Fenn first announced the buried treasure, the quest has drawn its fair share of controversy.

SALKA SALKA

According to the Santa Fe New Mexican, a Chicago attorney, Barbara Andersen, said she filed an injunction in federal District Court. She alleged that it was actually she who solved the case but a mysterious hacker stole her answers.

Building Bridges:

COUNTY COMMISSIONER, DISTRICT 3 Across Political Divides

Building Across Bridges: A Generations fresh

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Another treasure hunter, Brian Erskine of Prescott, Ariz., filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court claiming that it was he who solved the mystery. Erskine believed the treasure was located in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, Paid be- for by Matt for County Commissioner, Matt Salka, Registered Agent Across Political Divides tween Silverton and Ouray.

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Real mattsalka.com | Life 970-444-2210 YOUR VOICE Building Bridges: EXPERIENCE

Fortunately or unfortunately, how- Across Generations ever, with this new twist to the story, to a Renewed AcrossEconomy political and generational divides, we may never know the whole truth to Affordable Housing to a renewed economy, and affordable housing. of what happened with the treasure of Forrest Fenn. Perhaps the alleged finder salka2020Divides @matthewsalka Across Political will come forward now that Fenn can no longer serve as their mouthpiece, Paid for by Across Matt for County Commissioner, Matt Salka, Registered Agent Generations but for many, however, this strange and to a Renewed Economy deadly tale will remain unresolved.

Building BRIDGES

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| 970-444-2210 Buildingmattsalka.com Bridges: Paid for by Matt for County Commissioner, Matt Salka, Registered Agent to Affordable Housing Political Divides

—— Amanda Push Across

Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 11 Across Generations mattsalka.com 970-444-2210 to a Renewed |Economy

Paid for by Matt for County Commissioner, Matt Salka, Registered Agent

By Nick Gonzales DGO STAFF WRITER

Why fat acceptance matters in 2020 Even in ‘fit’ Colorado, weight based-stigma rears its ugly head

It’s safe to say that, as a year, 2020 has sucked. At the same time, though, and perhaps partly because of it, many Americans have begun reexamining our roles in the treatment of people of other races, genders, classes, and so on. But some types of discrimination receive more attention than others.

Fat-shaming pervades every aspect of our culture. If you’re fat, there are few, if any, aspects of your life that it will not impact. It will shape your social relationships, affect your ability to find employment, and alter the quality of the healthcare you receive.

“This is a cultural problem and the more we can identify that the problem is in the culture and not in our bodies, the closer we get to changing it,” said Lindo Bacon, author of “Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight.”

Fat phobia is such a part of our everyday lives, most people don’t recognize it when they’re actively perpetuating it. If anything, they think they’re helping. Instead, the blame for size discrimination is placed on its recipients, who tend to be perceived as too lazy or unwilling to change their lives to improve their situations.

The intersectionality of fatness Hailey Otis is a Ph.D. candidate at Colorado State University who experienced fat phobia throughout her life. After becoming aware of body positivity and fat activism in college, she decided to make it the focus of her academic career.

“This movement has done a lot for me and made me sort of more able to live in this world and survive and thrive. And so I felt like it was kind of my responsibility to give back to the movement by researching it and uplifting it and sort of bringing those voices into my own

12 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

work,” she said.

For Otis, fat acceptance intersects on a basic level with most forms of social justice.

“Our cultural understandings about fatness and fat bodies are rooted in so many other forms of marginalization,” she said. “Our cultural hatred towards fat bodies has a lot to do with the fact that fatness was read as a property of blackness or minority identities for a really long time within our history. White people tended to be thin, or at least that was kind of the common perception, and people of color were larger and therefore less civilized.”

In other words, the bias against fat people is inherently racist, and questioning assumptions about body size also means recognizing how they’re connected to race. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, that fat-shaming is a feminist issue as well.

“Fatness is often linked with the inability to perform femininity. Women are supposed to be thin and dainty and all these things, and when they’re not, that’s a problem that gets in the way of these gender roles that we’re so invested in,” she said. “And with sexuality, fatness is kind of this refusal to perform sexual desirability in the way that people want them to.”

But that’s certainly not where the cross-connections end.

“Anti-fatness is also super connected to capitalism and how we understand bodies that can perform the labor that needs to happen to keep capitalism going. ... Our assumptions

about body size are never just about body size, or about all these other things, and all these other ways that people get marginalized,” she said.

What fat phobia looks like Many forms of fat discrimination, such as bullying and harassment, are obvious. On a more subtle level, studies show fat people are less likely to be chosen as friends and romantic partners. They’re more likely to have lower levels of education, live in poverty, be unemployed, and experience lower standards of living. People perceived as fat, particularly women, are less likely to be hired or promoted within workplaces and tend to be paid less than their thin counterparts.

Anti-fat bias is particularly dangerous within medical settings.

Obesity (a problematic word in and of itself because it pathologizes a body type), is defined medically as a category on the body mass index, calculated based on height and weight.

Obesity is the result of several factors, including genetics and environment. But studies show that healthcare professionals, including those who specialize in treating obesity, often treat it as a character defect and associate fatness with stereotypes of laziness, lack of intelligence, and less personal worth. In practice, medical professionals spend less time with fat patients, develop less of a rapport with them, and leave them feeling dehumanized.

As a consequence, fat patients are less likely to seek care for ailments or get medi-

Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 13

cal screenings to, for instance, detect cancers that are easier to treat and less deadly when you catch them early.

It’s also worth noting that the “obesity epidemic” the pop culture likes to warn us about is based on a bad Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004. The article reported that more than 400,000 Americans die as a result of being overweight or obese every year — and the news media publicized the heck out of it. Much less popular was the correction JAMA published the next year in which better methodology and proper computation placed the number around 26,000 — less than guns, alcohol, and car crashes, according to Otis’ white paper, “Improving Healthcare Professionals’ Communication to Reduce Fat Stigma.”

This is all compounded by the fact that stigmatization isn’t great for your health in the first place — it has both psychological and physiological effects, Bacon points out.

“We tell people that they’re not worthy of respect, and it’s bound to make them feel bad and increase levels of depression and anxiety and fear going out into the world,” he said. “It’s also pretty well documented that when people feel bad about themselves, they’re less able to take care of their bodies. And we also know that regardless of what somebody’s self-care behaviors are, when people are treated poorly it affects their stress levels, which in turn has a major impact on health — things like diabetes and heart disease and irritable bowel syndrome.”

14 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

And it’s not just fat people who suffer from the stigmatization. Thinner people often live their lives in fear of fat, which leads them to adopt bad behaviors and to be scared of food, he said.

Colorado’s subtle health obsession Thin people tend to engage unknowingly in another form of fat-shaming, Otis said, when they talk about their own bodies.

“People think that when they’re talking about their own body, they’re

not implicating other people. People talk about wanting to lose weight or not feeling good because they’re feeling fat.

The idea of feeling fat is really problematic,” she said. “When people talk about their own bodies in a disparaging way, because of their perceived proximity to fatness, I think that’s one way that comes through. I’ve had a lot of family members and friends who are thin, but any moment that they think they’re getting fat or gaining weight, they talk about it a lot and how upset they are. ...

They’re not trying to apply that to me,

but it always will because the way we talk about our own bodies automatically implicates other people’s bodies.”

Similarly, congratulating people on weight loss, let alone chastising them for not achieving it, can be a very negative thing.

“When we congratulate people on weight loss, we’re automatically affirming this idea that losing weight is good and being fat is bad — often without knowing anything about why somebody lost weight.”

“SARS” in “SARS-CoV-2,” the name of the virus, stands for “severe acute respiratory syndrome” — it makes your respiratory system fail.) Even when the comorbidity is something like diabetes or cardiovascular disease, both linked to obesity, in the vast majority of COVID-19 deaths, the virus has been determined to be the trigger for mortality.

“I think any moment that public health comes into question, people automatically want to turn and blame fat people. And they also want to make sure that resources don’t go to fat people because, you know, we are to blame for not being healthy, whatever that means,” Otis said.

The entire situation is also aggravated by the fact that many people lost their usual means of self-care during COVID-19 shutdowns and turned to food instead, resulting in weight gain, Bacon said. At the same time, others are taking advantage of the situation to sell more diets, all while the government promotes bad assumptions about the relationship between health and weight.

People lose weight for many reasons — eating disorders, losing a loved one, fighting an illness — but we’re culturally ingrained to assume that any kind of weight loss is a positive thing.

“When somebody congratulates somebody else on weight loss that sort of sends a message to everybody else in the room about what types of bodies are valued and what kinds aren’t,” she said.

These more subtle forms of anti-fatness are especially common in places like Colorado, which is consistently rated as one of the “fittest” states in the country (often based on little more the arbitrary measurement of average BMI). Colorado has an affinity toward fitness culture, but likes to pretend that outdoor exercise activities are part of the lifestyle of Coloradans and not what people choose to do to stay fit or thin, Otis said. Hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking, and the like are activities that are not accessible to a lot of fat or disabled people.

“That obsession with healthiness is super interesting in Colorado because for the most part people aren’t calling out fat bodies for being problematic, but there’s a lot of judgment toward people that aren’t perceived as healthy — which tend to be fat people. Fitness-and-health culture is a super interesting, coded way of still excluding fat people and enforcing stigma against them,” Otis said.

COVID-19 and fatness Fat stigma goes hand in hand with healthism — the idea that only healthy bodies have value. This was already a widespread problem, but the discourse about the coronavirus epidemic has brought it right out into the open.

“Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like, ‘Oh, this thing is only going to hurt or kill people with underlying conditions. Therefore, we don’t all have to worry about it.’ Which was always sort of a very ableist argument — that disabled people and people with health conditions don’t matter and that we can happily sacrifice them if it means that we all get to live our life the way that we want to,” Otis said.

That ableism quickly overlapped with anti-fatness when people began pointing at obesity as a risk factor for COVID-19. Studies suggested that weight was not a factor, and some even suggested that being overweight was protective against the coronavirus (something true about a lot of illnesses), she said. Many studies that now include weight as a risk factor don’t account for race or socioeconomic status, two forms of marginalization linked with health disparities.

“We have all this sort of problematic data that wants to blame fat people and say that they’re going to die or get sick and it’s their fault, when we

actually don’t have the data to support that because we aren’t accounting for all these other factors, and we’re not accounting for the fact that things like medical bias and not treating comorbidities — specifically not treating fat people’s comorbidities — all of that leads to poor health outcomes,” she said.

In medicine, comorbidity is the presence of additional conditions that co-occur with a patient’s primary condition. And it became a hot topic at the end of August when a CDC statistic — indicating that 6% of people who have died of COVID-19 have only the virus listed as the diagnosis on the death certificate — became popular on social media. Conspiracy theorists, including President Trump, shared the stat, suggesting that it was the CDC sheepishly admitting it had wildly inflated the virus’ death toll by lumping in people who were killed by conditions unrelated to the virus.

That’s not what the statistic actually means.

“Death certificates list any causes or conditions that contributed to the death,” the CDC/NCHS Mortality Statistics Branch told Health.com in a statement. For instance, over 30% of that remaining 94% also have “respiratory failure” listed as a cause of death.

They stopped breathing ... probably because of the coronavirus. (That

Where to go from here What can people do to fight fat stigma and fat phobia?

For one, listen to the people who are most affected by it and take them seriously, Otis said. A ton of information is already out there through organizations such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

Bloggers such as the anonymous Your Fat Friend are useful resources to follow on social media.

“That way you don’t have to bombard your fat friends with all these questions and put that emotional labor on them,” she said.

Making a commitment to questioning your own internalized fat phobia — sitting down and thinking about your beliefs about bodies and what those are rooted in and what experiences led to them — is also important, she said.

You can also see if there’s any kind of fat activism going on in your region, repost activist content on social media, and bring up arguments against fat phobia in conversations with friends and family.

“Most of the work that people can do to help the cause of fat activism and be an ally honestly happens at that interpersonal level — just tweaking those conversations and disrupting them when fat phobia kind of rears its ugly head,” she said.

Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 15

[weed]

Her Highness is a hybrid strain fit for a queen (or king, or some member of royalty, anyway) This strain deserves to wear every single royal crown we can get our hands on Ever pondered what role you would play if you were a member of a royal family? Yeah, me neither, but this week’s strain from Prohibition Herb is named Her Highness. With a name that regal, this seems like a fitting game to play.

So, let’s do it. Who would you be?

Would you go modern, a la Prince Harry or his hot wife? Good call. Nobody wants to be the bald brother who aged poorly, so we can just skip him. Or you could go way out of the box and be the King of Belgium or something, I guess. Think of all the chocolate you’d get!

Or would we take things back to like, medieval times instead? To be honest, I don’t really care what timeline we’re in, as long as it ain’t this one, but I do want to be in charge of all the shit in the kingdom. Let me rule! This is my fantasy, and we all know that in reality I would be a scullery maid or like, court jester or something. No power but all the dang responsibility. I’m just not fancy enough

for a leading role.

me as hard as it did, but it was a big ol’

You know who would be fit to be the ruler of any kingdom, though? Her Highness. And it’s not just her name that makes her a good fit. It’s also all of the properties that come with this indica hybrid strain, from her royal heritage as an offspring of (White x Tahoe OG) x Cookies) x Face Off (one very confusing and regal algebraic equation) to the natural beauty of her thicc nugs.

whomp to the senses. My body felt tin-

This strain recently landed on the shelves at Prohibition, but it’s been flying off of them and into the hands of potheads at lightning speed. In fact, this strain is so in demand that our buddies up at the dispensary had to hide some in the back for me to pick up. Otherwise, it would have sold out before I could get there.

a case of the giggles.

I learned really quickly why this strain is so popular, though. Not only is this girl a beaut, but she’s also a force to be reckoned with ­— just like any good leader

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gly, my arms were pool noodles, and my brain found everything amusing. What I really found funny, though, was how quickly my eyelids went from open and normal to tiny little eyeball blinds that I couldn’t lift. They were definitely halfmast. Just catching a glimpse of myself and my dumb eyelids in the mirror set off And, once I’d laughed at myself hysterically like a maniac, I decided I was starving. The only problem was that I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to eat.

I was also so high that I caught myself standing in the pantry (more than once) and staring at nothing and everything

Details Where to find Her Highness: Perched on her royal throne at Prohibition Herb, 1185 Camino del Rio, prohibitionherb.com should be. She comes packing an insane amount of THC, and the eighth I picked up tested for, I shit you not, a whopping 28.74% THC. That alone deserves a crown.

She also smells delicious. I’m not entirely sure how to explain it (insert my recent “I have no real sense of smell from COVID” explainer here), but I know it’s good. I guess to my broken COVID nose this strain smells green and earthy, but don’t quote me on that. I was never good at sniffing out the smells in strains, and now I really suck at it. I know enough to say this one is pleasant and clean-smelling, though.

This strain tastes delicious, too. I’ve been smoking out of a Pax vape recently and I could really pick up the grassy goodness of Her Highness. Let’s just call it refined.

The high, on the other hand, was not as refined. In fact, it kicked my freaking ass after just a couple of hits. One hit in and I started to feel the effects, which is pretty impressive given how much I smoke to avoid falling into a 2020 pit of despair lately. Two hits in and the body high was getting real.

I’m not exactly sure how this strain hit

16 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

simultaneously. I ended up eating a crap ton of chips at some point, but I don’t know when.

What was interesting about this strain is that I didn’t have that drop-off or noticeable tapering off of effects that can happen with other high-THC strains.

I stayed high for a very long time... like very long. Long enough to watch the entire “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” movie alongside my royal weed queen.

I must have fallen asleep at some point, but I truly don’t know when — I definitely went to bed high that night.

But that’s OK! I like passing out while stoned. It’s the best kind of sleep. I woke up the next morning well-rested and relaxed.

So, in short, I choose Her Highness as my cannabis royal family. This strain deserves a crown, and I would even play stupid court jester if it meant I could hang out with Her Highness every day.

Besides, all I’d have to do to entertain people in my jester role is smoke a bowl of this strain. My tiny, half-open stoner eyes alone would provide all the comedic relief necessary to keep my ass out of the dungeon. Sounds like the perfect setup to me.

—— DGO Pufnstuf

[weed]

The Gelato Cake strain is delicious — but don’t try to bake cookies after smoking it I’m not what you call a stupendous cook, but this week, I learned that I’m far worse after I’ve smoked a bowl of Gelato Cake. Specifically, I get distracted and burn things.

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Now, it’s long been documented that The Green House tends to put us on our asses with the bud they sell. If you’re planning to smoke bud from this Durango shop, you best clear your schedule because you won’t be useful for a good few hours. That goes for Gelato Cake as well.

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For those of you who are Gelato Cake beginners, let me fill you in. This strain is a mix of Gelato #33 and Wedding Cake.

An indica-dominant strain, Gelato Cake is the popular girl at the party and for a reason. This is one hella potent strain.

Not for triflers.

People attribute side effects such as sleepiness, the munchies, and being long-lasting. Highly citrusy, Gelato Cake also has peppery and piney aromatic notes.

After grinding up some bud and packing into a bowl, I took myself outside with my new strain. The first thing I noticed about Gelato Cake is that it’s super smooth. It’s also almost instantaneously relaxing. True to its indica roots, Gelato Cake is the Empire State building of body highs.

Another major side effect of Gelato Cake was the monster-sized case of the munchies you end up with. Consequently, I decided it would be cool to bake some chocolate chip cookies.

Didn’t even make the dough. Just pulled some pre-made crap out of the fridge and tossed it into the oven. Maybe even quite literally.

Turns out with a body high as killer as Gelato Cake’s, it’s very easy to get distracted and become one with the couch. Again, quite literally. I had turned on some new true-crime documentary I had pettily put off seeing because EVERYONE had seen it and not long into it I figured out why. It was eerily creepy and I was completely immersed. So much so that it wasn’t long until I could smell burning.

Dear readers. I had completely forgotten about the cookies, though

S AY

YES

TO

Details Where to find Sinsere: The Green House, 730 S. Camino del Rio, thegreenhousecolorado.com they weren’t much of cookies anymore.

They’d been burned to a total crisp. Totally black on the bottom. Might as well have been baking chips. Inedible, much to my munchies’ dismay. I would have to satisfy my stoned-self with some other highly processed food and that, friends, ended up being ramen, as usual. My sweet tooth would have to be quenched some other day.

Thankfully, Gelato Cake is also heavy-handed when it comes to getting some shut-eye. If you’re someone like me who struggles with sleeping, this strain will knock you into the next morning. A total sleep miracle worker.

It’s hard to pinpoint any downsides to this indica-hybrid and we’re pretty sure that’s because there aren’t any. Gelato Cake is a great sleep-aid and it launches you into a zone that’s about as relaxed as it gets. How can you pass up a strain like that?

—— Sir Blaze Ridcully Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 17

[weed]

NFuzed sour gummies welcomed us into body high and fuzzy-head heaven Is it just me or does anyone else miss going to movie theaters, spending a butt load of money on snacks (or sneaking them in, of course), as you fat-kid your way through that film? Well, I sure do, and thanks to NFuzed sour gummies I got a little taste of that this week.

During my last visit to the dispensary, I noticed they had stocked up on a brand I hadn’t had the opportunity to review yet, NFuzed. For those of you who are as new to Nfuzed as I am, the company is based out of Grover Beach, Cali. and Boulder, Colo. They sport interesting products like their cannabis-infused inhaler (sorry, Colorado peeps — they’re not available here).

This week though, I snagged a pack of their sour gummies variety pack and they call it a variety pack for a reason.

NFuzed sour gummies come in strawberry, blueberry, green apple, peach, pineapple, watermelon, and grape flavors. The bag comes with 10 pieces and each morsel contains 10 mg apiece.

Side note: this company uses some killer art on their packaging. As soon as I laid eyes on it I thought I was looking straight into Willa Wonka’s factory or perhaps the inside of a snake oil salesman’s suspicious shelf of merchandise.

It was what initially caught my eyes as I stood in the dispensary making my decision on which edible to get this week.

You don’t see a whole lot of cannabis companies with packaging like that.

The first thing I did when I cut open the bag was take a whiff. I was hit with a fruity, sugary aroma that instantly took me back to holing up in a movie theater shoveling sour gummy candy into my mouth and putting my feet up on the chair in front of me (yeah, I know that makes me a bad person - but not if no one is sitting there!).

The first flavor I tried was blueberry.

The gummy was chewy, mouth-watering, and effing delicious with just the slightest hint of sour. Reminded me of movie theater gummies. Sugary perfection I’m telling you - and all the flavors were like that, even grape which I tend to abhor as a flavor option. Let’s just say I’m drooling over them even now as I type this.

18 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

NFuzed sour gummies took me into body high-heaven with the most pleasant of head fuzziness. Everything was coated with a sense of euphoric optimism which is most unlike me. My headspace borders on putting friggin’ Squidward on his worst day to shame.

What had started as a dreary day suddenly felt light and peaceful. There was a pleasant buzzing in my head that thrummed as I shoved Ben and Jerry’s into my mouth. On a weekday. No pants.

The munchies were strong with this one. I wasn’t even hungry. All I knew was there was a deep black hole inside me that only sugar and carbs could heal. I’m sure you’re familiar with this insatiable experience. If you’re not, dear reader, you are missing what it means to be a stoner. It’s like eating a BLT without the bacon. Makes no sense!

But I digress. These sour gummies were killer, close to literally. At one point I’m fairly certain my soul left my body. Cross my heart.

If you’re hoping for a killer high, you for sure can’t go wrong with NFuzed sour gummies I learned this week. Trust us, it could be the Willa Wonka cannabis factory experience you’ve been waiting for — except you won’t get sucked into a chocolate river.

—— Sir Blaze Ridcully

[weed]

Tsk, tsk. Colorado, the birthplace of legal marijuana, isn’t making the grade for medical marijuana access unnecessary burdens on patient access, and ASA recommends that these new rules be revisited to optimize convenience of access for the state’s patients.”

Colorado, the birthplace of legalized marijuana, isn’t getting the cannabis grades it should be.

The state received a “B-” from Americans for Safe Access (ASA), a national advocacy group for cannabis, according to Westword. Just like a dreaded school report, ASA hands out grades on an A-F scale.

However, Governor Jared Polis was a big factor in the ASA’s positive feedback.

While Colorado failed to score high on patient rights and protections, the state still managed to scrape up a B- because of Colorado’s patient access and functionality.

“One of the big problems we have here in Colorado is that we changed the constitution to allow medical marijuana and later recreational marijuana, but we didn’t make corresponding changes to the Colorado Controlled Substances Act,” Martha Montemayor, director of Cannabis Clinicians Colorado, told Westword.

Since the ASA began issuing in 2015, Colorado hasn’t managed to get a grade above a “B.” The advocacy group doles out scores based on patient rights and

civil protections, ease of navigation, access to medicine, functionality, consumer safety and provider requirements, and the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ASA doesn’t hold back when it comes to these report cards.

In Colorado’s case, the bumps seem to come down to legislation. When it comes to patient rights and civil protections, the state only scored 62 out of 100 possible points, and 63.67/100 in consumer

The folks at DGO miss leaving our homes for concerts, drinks and dinners out. We don’t like cooking or cleaning the kitchen — and we certainly don’t like mixing our own drinks, all things we’ve had to do since the start of this pandemic. PLEASE wear your masks and practice social distancing so we can get back to our regularly scheduled (fun) programming.

safety and provider requirements.

“Not all of the state’s 2019 reforms were positive, including a new law setting limits on the amount of medical cannabis products that a legal retailer may sell to an individual in one day,” the report stated. “For flower, the limit is two ounces, for concentrate, the limit is 20 grams, though the law allows a physician to provide an exemption to the limits. The imposition of these limits and need for a physician exemption impose

“In Governor Polis’ first year in office, he did not disappoint, signing into law measures permitting cannabis delivery to medical and adult-use consumers from licensed retail storefronts, as well as approving legislation that authorizes cannabis hospitality spaces. Under the new law, medical and adult-use retail facilities may permit onsite consumption of cannabis products subject to local government approval,” the report stated.

In Colorado’s defense, however, Oregon was the only state to come back with an “A.” Illinois and Maine scored in second with grades of “B+.” Colorado has 83,306 registered medical marijuana patients and 449 medical marijuana retail locations still in operation.

—— Amanda Push

PLEASE WEAR A MASK! [correctly!]

Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 19

s e u s s i t o eg

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[politics]

It’s our turn to carry the torch left behind by the notorious, brilliant, imperfect Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg That’s it. If you’re not sure if you are registered, or what address you might be registered at, go here: https://www.sos. state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/VoterHome.html.

There are moments when hope is diminished.

The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those moments. A light has gone out in the world this day September 18, 2020.

I could spend this time recounting Justice Ginsburg’s legendary career as an advocate for women’s rights, but you all know how to search the Internet.

What I want to talk about, after we pick ourselves up off the floor, is what do we do now?

Before tonight, I would sprinkle little bits of my political leanings into these columns — make gentle or pointed suggestions based on my mood. Since June, I’ve been offering direction to my fellow white folks on how to engage with racial justice. Tonight feels different. It is the proverbial straw and that poor camel’s back.

We asked this badass woman to hold the line for us long past the point of fairness. The safety and security of this democracy and the rights of its citizens should not rest on the shoulders of one person — yet, that is what we asked of Justice Ginsburg. We asked her to stay.

We asked her to do push-ups into her 80s. We asked her to live. We denied her a retirement. Why? Because people could not bother themselves to engage with the gift — THE MOTHERF!CKING GIFT — that is voting. * 61.8 percent of the citizen voting-age population voted in 2012 * 36.4 percent of the citizen voting-age population voted in 2014 * 61.4 percent of the citizen voting-age population voted in 2016 * 53.4 percent of the citizen voting-age population voted in 2018 Sixty-one percent is pathetic, and don’t get me started on the midterm elections (the times when we aren’t voting for a President)! Every election matters. Every race is important. Voting for school board members in your community is as important as voting for the President. I’m very specifically yelling at white people right now. As a white person you are privileged in your access to voting. You don’t have to travel outside your community to find your nearest polling station. As a white person, when 22 | Thursday, September 24, 2020

you present yourself to vote you aren’t dismissed as not being eligible — the implicit bias in the system is set up to do everything it can to help you vote. Access to voting if you are a person of color is purposefully difficult. If you manage to vote, some states, run by white supremacists masquerading as Republicans, throw your ballots out. Don’t believe me?

Do some learning about Georgia and 2018.

Supreme Court associate justice until after Inauguration day. Go to www. senate.gov and use the dropdown menu at the top left to Find Your Senators. Call them until you get through and demand that they wait to fill Justice Ginsburg’s vacancy — as Senator Mitch McConnell demanded in 2016 when he refused to bring a vote for President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, because it was an election year.

Second, VOTE. I used to advocate for The only way a democracy works is folks to vote no matter who they were through the involvement of all of its citvoting for in an election. I wanted to enizenry, not just the powerful few. This is courage more engagement with our civic why a bunch of white folks fled a country responsibility.

How fucking quaint and and brought their disease-riddled asses idealisitic I was. I understood that not over here. Why they wiped out entire everyone had time or energy to meet the groups of native people and forced candidates, watch or attend debates, or them onto reservations — because they wanted free and fair elections. They built volunteer on campaigns. The bare minimum was to vote and I thought that was something with hope (and racism, and enough. Not this year. Vote like your life classism, and sexism) intending to be depends on it. Engage with campaigns. better than the monarchy they left.

Learn about issues and candidates. VolJustice Ginsburg fought to fix those unteer your time. sexist, classist, and racist deficits. She Bonus! Voting in Colorado is extraordid this imperfectly and often as one of dinarily easy because we are a mail-ina few dissenting voices from a majority ballot state. You register to vote when determined to keep power for wealthy you get your driver’s license and/or turn white men.

18 and then your ballot is mailed to you.

So what the fuck do we do?

Mailed to you! You fill it out and put it First, call your Senator and demand back in the mail or into a drop box. No standing in line. No funky machines. that they do not vote on a replacement

Of course, this year the United States Postal Service is under attack by its director so I encourage everyone to put their ballot in a drop box. Don’t mail it.

In La Plata County, there are two drop box locations in Durango, one in Bayfield, and another one in Ignacio. As it gets closer to the election they open other polling places, like the Durango Fairgrounds, where you can also drop off your ballot. Your ballot will include a piece of paper that has a list of the places you can return it to! Colorado is privileged in that we don’t see the type of voter suppression that places like Georgia, or even most recently, Wisconsin have to battle. Does that mean that it isn’t difficult to vote for people of color in Colorado? Fuck, no, because the system is biased. If you have difficulty voting or submitting your ballot please call 866-OUR-VOTE or go to 866ourvote.org.

Make sure you know how to fill out your ballot properly and that you sign the envelope before returning it. Your ballot comes with instructions. Read them. Read them more than once. I apologize to any readers not in Colorado.

Please go to your Secretary of State’s website and learn what you need to do in your state to vote.

Third, take five minutes every day for a week and learn more about the candidates running for office. That same link above for checking your voter registration in Colorado also has links to election information, who’s running for what, and a link to your sample ballot. Talk to your friends and family about voting. Find out what issues are important to them and then decide which candidate is going to address those issues. I guarantee you that there will be no perfect candidate that ticks all the boxes. Why? Because they are human! Because diversity is healthy. Because we are more than one issue or belief. Because the world and the choices we have to make are not black and white but rather varied and gorgeous shades of gray.

Fourth, live your life in the service of others. If you need to do this capitalistically, fine, charge money. But do for othContinued on page 23

Horoscope ARIES (March 21 to April 19)

patient with family members.

Be patient with partners and close friends at this time, because it’s easy to get angry. In fact, someone might get angry at you. (Then you’ll respond.) Stay chill.

LEO (July 23 to Aug. 22)

TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Avoid arguments with co-workers during this time or people who are working with you about your health. People are aggressive right now! Something regarding a pet might even occur.

GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) Parents must be patient with their kids right now. Likewise, lovers should be patient with each other, because arguments are unpleasant and they accomplish nothing.

Your ambition is aroused, and because of this strong energy, you might get into a domestic haggle right now. Not wise. Be From page 22

ers. Humanity cannot continue on its current path, and it takes all of us to build healthy and safe communities.

Finally, do not give up. If Justice Ginsburg could survive years of sexism in school and work, take on cancer (again and again), and still stand up to support gender rights, reproductive freedom, lgbtq+ rights, and civil rights, then we certainly can show up now.

Honestly, I don’t know if this is what I wanted to write in this moment. I’ve gone from tears of grief to numbness. These last four years under the ever-growing authoritarian thumb of a racist, sexist, hate-filled person has weakened my resolve. I fear for my child’s future. And then I fight. I fight for the children that are ripped from their parents’ arms and forced into concentration camps. I fight for justice for Black men, women, and children who are gunned down by police. I fight for women’s rights. I fight for gay rights. I fight for the lives of so many trans folks who have been murdered in this country. I fight with my voice, my money, my vote. It is not my full-time job and it doesn’t take all my energy to care about the health and safety of my fellow citizens, so trust me when I say you can join in this fight.

Yes, right now, I’m weary. We lost a

VIRGO (Aug. 23 to Sept. 22) Squabbles about money or possessions might arise over the next few days. Be cool about things, because this is a brief influence. Take the high road.

LIBRA (Sept. 23 to Oct. 22) Right now Mercury is in your sign opposite fiery Mars, which is a classic combination for outbursts and arguments with others.

But it doesn’t have to be that way if you stay chill.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23 to Nov. 21) Old feelings that have been repressed might

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22 to Dec. 21) Someone younger might try your patience soon. As a result, you might get angry with them or lay down the law. Is it worth it?

Stay mellow for your own sake and for the sake of others.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22 to Jan. 19) Arguments with bosses, parents, teachers or the police might flare up SOON. Be wise and avoid these, because if you get involved, you will regret it. Be smart.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20 to Feb. 18) Avoid discussions about politics, religion or racial issues, because they will quickly become inflamed and argumentative. This

won’t be fun. Chill out.

PISCES (Feb. 19 to March 20) There is no upside to getting into an argument about shared property or the responsibilities or the wealth of someone else. You won’t win; they won’t win. It’s just a lot of hot air. Relax.

BORN DURING THESE TWO WEEKS You are warm, caring and sociable. You thrive in group settings! This year will be more relaxed for you. Do your best to cooperate with others, because your interactions with others will be important. Always look for ways to be kind and helpful. If you are open when engaging with others, your business and personal relationships will benefit you. (c) 2020 King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Bizarro

CANCER (June 21 to July 22)

Many people are aggressive right now because Mercury is opposite Mars. This is why you might end up in an argument with a sibling, relative or neighbor. Try to avoid this.

suddenly come out right now in an angry way, if provoked. It’s as if you finally have your chance to speak your peace. (Don’t do it.)

leader, a role model, and an inspiration.

I’m sorry, Justice Ginsburg, that we asked so much of you. Thank you for never just meeting the moment, but always rising higher and taking us with you.

You were not perfect, but you perfectly inspired millions of girls and women. I would not be where I am today if you had not fought for women’s rights all those years. I stand on your shoulders with a deep yearning to prove myself worthy of your work.

May your memory be a revolution.

Erin Brandt (she/her/hers) has been a sexologist for 15 years. When she’s not spreading sexual knowledge, Erin can be found learning from her child, hiking with her partner, cuddling with her pitbull, knitting with her cat, dancing with friends, and searching for the nearest hammock and ocean breeze. Want more? Visit www.positivesexed.com Thursday, September 24, 2020 | 23

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