Looks Like a Heart

When I drove Uber, I spent many hours looking at this map.

That’s the outline of what you might roughly call the Denver Metro Area. I-70 up top, I-25 running down the left, I-225 connecting the two on the right. I was already thinking about how I wanted to make a Colorado album. I probably thought about how that was the heart of the state. I decided that the shape of the highway reminded me a heart, (medical, not Valentine’s). I originally thought I’d call the album “Arteries,” but when I mentioned that to Brittany she thought it was a dumb name. I said, “but it looks like a heart.” and she was all, “there it is baaeeee.”

That’s the kind of writing advice I give people when they ask me for it. Just say the thing. No need to be cute about it.

Later, we ate (portobello) mushrooms and did this quiz, even though we were already in love, and when we got to the questions about “is there something you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time, but haven’t done,” I talked about this album.

She used to ask me things like, “when you think about your future, do you think about this? (or that?)” and I’d blank out for a second and be like, I don’t think about my future. I think that when you live with mental health problems, it is difficult to think about your future. But when I did think about it, I thought about finishing this album. And now it’s done, and people can listen to it, and Westword covered it, and that’s a local bucket list item. So this is good.

It’s remarkable how you can drive around a map for your whole life and still end up surprised at all the side streets you find when you bring drunk people back to their houses. But why would you ever end up in someone else’s neighborhood — unless you make a new friend, or there’s a show down there, or you start driving Uber. And that is what the road not taken is actually about.