I decided to compose a blog entry dedicated to my “Man Cave”,
the studio apartment in southeast Denver where I live for four and one half
year from June 2009 through November 2013 . When I returned to Denver in 2008 I
took up an invitation from my friend David to stay with him in his townhouse in
Littleton. By about seven months later it was clear (and understandable) that I
had overstayed my welcome, so it was time for me to find a place on my own.
Since I wasn’t working and planned to travel a lot, a small inexpensive place
somewhere in the city of Denver was exactly what I needed. I found such a
studio apartment in a very suburban apartment complex of two story buildings
named Creekside located in southeast Denver in the Glendale vicinity. With rent
that started out at $435/month my first year for a little bachelor pad of about
400 square feet I couldn’t complain. I took to calling my apartment “The Man
Cave”, a name that caught on even more when my cousin Deb sent me a ceramic
sign The Man Cave, which I placed in my window for all to see.

The location along Cherry Creek South Drive about one mile
east of Colorado Boulevard was close to ideal, near enough to central Denver to
be easy to get into town but far enough out that the rent wasn’t high . Before
too long a major grocery store, the sole location of the King Soopers chain in
the state that sold alcoholic beverages opened within potential walking
distance. I came to calling it the “King Boozers”. And an English style pub and
small microbrewery, the Bull and Bush was also in easy walking distance on
Cherry Creek South Drive.

It now seems kind of strange to me that I found few
opportunities to take pictures of the interior and exterior of my little abode,
but I have few.

Life at Creekside started out quiet enough, but things began
to change around two years into living there. My building of about 20
apartments or so were all studios, so naturally mostly had single residents.
Things began getting very social as people in the building began hanging out
together, having barbecues together, and before I knew it I was living in party
central. My apartment faced away from the rest of the complex to a small slope
on top of which was another larger apartment building . The picnic table about
twenty feet from my window was where all my noisy neighbors began to
congregate, and I can recall Saturday and Sunday mornings when there barely an
inch of the table that wasn’t covered with empty beer, wine, and liquor bottles
and plastic cups filled with cigarette ashes. We sometimes had keg parties, and
they once all lifted me up to drink upside down from the spot. It was like
being in a college dorm all over again. I guess I was kind of the old guy in the
building by that point, but I sometimes hung out and partied with the crowd
until late, some of whom I’ve kept in touch with via Facebook (as I reminisce
about the Man Cave experience a few years after it ended.

The pictures I do have from in and around the Man Cave
relate to several experiences I had while living there. In July 2009, shortly
after I had moved in, I was involved in an accident not too far away in Aurora when
a car going the opposite direction made a left turn at a green light into oncoming
traffic (including me) . The driver was a little 89-year old lady named Juanita.
Why is it that old people forget about yielding to oncoming traffic when
turning left at a green light?

My first months there (June and July 2009) were also
particularly stormy months and I don’t think I can recall ever having so many
hail storms, and seeing such swirling black clouds that resulted in tornadic
activity around the Denver area. At the opposite end of my residency at
Creekside was the deluge of September 11-12, 2013 when many parts of Colorado’s
Front Range experienced nearly a year’s worth of rain in two days. It was great
to walk over to Cherry Creek to see the usual trickle of a stream having become
a raging river.

One of my fondest memories (in a challenging kind of way)
was what I called “The Caveman Challenge” in which I set a goal of not turning
on my heat for the entire winter of 2009-2010. I succeeded surviving in the cold
but should mention that the Man Cave had only one exterior wall and an
apartment above, so I mooched off my neighbors’ heat . I also spent a large part
of that winter skiing in the mountains, frequently staying for several days in
Vail housing for temporary workers where my friend David was living and working
for the season. But I still succeeded!  

A little Man Cave doesn’t really lend itself to
entertaining, but I did hold two small dinner parties there in early 2011 and
had a friend or two at a time over on many other occasions. I took pictures of
a few of my meal creations for friends and just for myself, managing to cook in
a tiny little kitchen where I couldn’t open more than one or two cabinet doors,
the oven, dishwasher, or refrigerator at the same time.

The Man Cave was a place where I didn’t intend to spend too
much time, but the reality is that my attempts at being very social gradually
failed and I reverted somewhat to my natural hermitlike inclinations. On the
other hand, it was a very easy place to leave for weeks or months at a time,
and I believe I was gone for as much as four straight months for a trip east to
help out with my parents during the summer of 2012 . My friendly neighbors were
worried about me that I would never return.

Work eventually reared its ugly head again too, and that was
work or a consulting nature which I did mostly on my computer in the privacy
and serenity of my little Man Cave. At the beginning of 2011 my friend Henry
contacted me and asked me if he could take over the consulting work he was
doing with a policy research group affiliated with the University of Denver and
headed by our mutual former boss at the Colorado General Assembly in the
mid-1990s. Henry had just been chosen by John Hickenlooper, Colorado’s newly
elected governor to be his budget director. “Sure, this will be like the first
real work I’ve done in a long time!” The work was on and off over the next year
and a half which enabled me to do a lot of travel in 2011 and 2012, but then
three significant consulting projects arose through Henry and through the
policy research group from fall 2012 through June 2013. I ended up spending a
lot of time on my computer in the Man Cave and have to admit that the dark
environment of a ground floor apartment with only one window got somewhat
depressing, especially during the winter months when the potential afternoon sunshine
was blocked fairly early on by the building above the incline .

I returned to the Man Cave in September 2013 after a little
over two months in South America and quite quickly decided to follow it up with
a long trip to South Asia beginning the end of November, right about as my
lease expired. It didn’t take me long to recognize my best option was not to
renew and to just go fully nomadic again. It took some planning, as those types
of things do, but by late November I had downsized, put things into storage,
thrown a fair amount of crap away, and vacated the premises to use my friend
Myra’s house in Superior near Boulder as a temporary legal address until I figure
out my next direction in life.

I will continue to have some fond memories of my 54 months
of official residence at The Man Cave. It’s actually the place I’ve lived the
longest since heading off to college in 1985. I owned my house in Highlands
Ranch for a longer period of time (almost six years) but resided in it for a
much shorter period of time because of jobs in Chicago, Egypt, and travelling
during which I rented it out.