Much like Pee Wee in Pee Wee's Big Adventure, I wondered: Would I ever ride my bike again?

Nothing has been the same since the accident. Okay, that's not true -- I've just always wanted to start a piece that way. But really, after a car accident in February 2012 that followed a disappointing faux-tryst with Demetri Martin put me out of commission, my world -- which revolved around a fifteen-hour a week manic workout obsession -- fell apart. No more yoga, no more boxing, no more riding my bicycle.

I don't know how it is for other addicts, but while I've enjoyed exercise most of my life, the desire went into overdrive when I quit drinking. I did hot yoga to fucking live, man. I own an almost complete line of Nike shirts that say weird shit like "Every Damn Day" and "Girls Score More" that I wear to the gym every day (items of clothing that definitely make my boyfriend question ouer relationship on a daily basis.) I love working out.

After a shoulder injury kicked me out of my fitness orbit, I suffered a profound disconnection with my bicycle. But fifteen months later, we're back together -- and I'm trying to figure out how to be the commuting cyclist I once was, without being overwhelmed by the idea that it has been so damn long since I rode thirty miles in a day.

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Life can be uncomfortable. It's supposed to be: If you're comfortable, it probably means you've settled into a job that pays the bills, you're on a television schedule that rivals the class schedule you had in college, and you eat things that you will eventually resemble (potatoes and boxes of cereal are foods/body types that come to mind).

Or maybe I'm just generalizing about other people because I'm 32, I live in what my grandma calls a "boardinghouse" situation with five other adults because I can't afford my own place, I watch television for free on my computer, and kale is my staple food. I'm really just jealous of others who can afford the comforts I bashed above.

And while part of me loves the boredom of order and dreams of a scripted life where I have a husband, a house and two-point-five kids or cats, part of me is glad I am where I am at this very moment in time. Because I don't know where I would be if there weren't complete strangers staying at my house 75 percent of the year.

Don't have transients occupying your living room on a weekly basis? Well, it's high time you did.

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When I was 25, I left the safety of my shitty apartment in Capitol Hill and moved home to live with my mom and eleven-year-old sister. It seemed like a lot of people my age were doing it, so I thought, well, what the hell, why not? Free/cheap rent, cable television, Weight Watchers ice cream on demand -- it all sounded awesome.

In reality, I had been in college for six years working on my four-year degree, and I had just lost my job as the receptionist/motivational speaker at a ladies-only gym. I had been fired for leaving a story I'd written on the office computer desktop called "whyihatemyjob.doc" or something along those lines. That, and in alignment with an intervention my family tried having regarding my alcoholism (one that ended in me getting drunk and screaming obscenities at them in a restaurant) a few months earlier, it was clear that moving home was my only option.

Fast-forward three years: I was 28, sober, a college grad, into my (second or third) start as a professional writer, and I had moved to New York and back. I was living with my mom and sister again, along with my gay husband, Liza, who had a room next door to mine, just like a real '50s television couple. This is when I discovered The Maria Bamford Show -- and like life imitating art, I had a nervous breakdown after watching it, repeatedly.

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Prom night, 1998: As Tim Gunn would have said to a future fag hag like me, that's a lotta look.

Ah, prom season. That time in life when you get to publicly display your teenage awkwardness by wrapping it in a sequined nightmare from Dillard's and parading it around in a limo that costs as much as your first semester at community college. Or maybe that was just my own experience.

Clearly, from the photographic evidence displayed above, I was the fucking weirdo at prom. When my current boyfriend saw this picture sitting on my dining room table yesterday morning, he said that based on the cheesy airbrushed background (not my choice) and my bizarre ensemble (totally my choice), he couldn't tell in which decade I actually went to prom.

Of course, it was the glorious late '90s (when he was still in middle school), but I can understand how my unintentional Mae West re-creation could be very confusing. This past weekend, as I helped ship my littlest sister off to her senior prom, I thought more about my own anxious, end-of-high-school-life-as-we-know-it experience and realized that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

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I'm naive to a fault. Last week, when my car was hit for a third time in eighteen months (the second time it was creamed while parked in front of my house), I was naive enough to tell the insurance company the truth. They are now doing $2,700 worth of a repairs on a $1,900 car, one which I won't ever be able to sell because it has been in three accidents. I should have lied.

But I've come to understand that my naïveté is just part of who I am -- it's the reason I've never been able to tell which of my friends does coke; I just assume no one really does it. Same goes for why I'm unsure if I've ever been cheated on: I can't imagine that happens, though it does everyday, to people I care about.

And when I watched Dirty Dancing this past weekend for the first time since childhood, I saw how far back my blindness toward adult behavior went -- all the way to 1987, when I was seven and I thought I fell in love with a movie about dancing.

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Instagram user saibot34

When I was in high school, I had a friend whose dad called all porn shops "the fuck book store." Mostly, though, he was referring to the joint next to the Bluebird Theatre, because he was very suspicious that we went to that venue so often -- although for seventeen-year-old, third-wave rude boys and girls like us, it was where the bigger ska shows took place in 1997. Shows that we were old enough to get into, anyway.

We never even attempted to go into that fuck book store (or Adult Book Store, as I think it was called before it became part of the Pleasures chain). We just stood outside and smoked cigarettes, waiting for the show next door to start. Even so, when word spread over the weekend that an even more legendary fuck book store on East Colfax, Kitty's East, had closed, I was a little sad. Partly because I had never set foot in the sordid institution, but also because another piece of the sacred sketchy strip of Denver was going away.

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If you grew up in Lakewood, Aurora, Wheat Ridge or Denver proper like me, chances are good that there's a slice of Colfax Avenue that holds a special, if not dangerous and possibly regrettable, meaning to you.

Last week I passed by Smiley's Laundromat on East Colfax and noticed that it was all closed up -- windows hung floor-to-ceiling with plastic, no sign of life or the burned-into-memory checkered floors that I'd spent the laundry days of my early twenties skating around while hustling my own dirty clothes in a low-cut shirt. The fantastic handpainted signage still adorns the glass, promising same-day service and free wifi. But Smiley's isn't closed for a remodel. It's gone.

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Just around the corner from Colfax on Grant is the eerily attractive Hotel Newhouse sign.

I drove by Smiley's Laundromat last night and felt one of those annoying sighs cross my chest -- a chest pain caused by the sight of possible improvement to a place that I used to enjoy for its utter sketchiness. Smiley's is closed right now for "remodeling," its windows papered over. Could we be losing another landmark? Always a person with multiple jobs since I began my working-class existence in 1994, I used to wash the towels from the hair salon I worked at for extra money. At Smiley's, I could get the best bang for my buck because the machines were cheap, and I could make more of a return on towels if I spent less of my own change. When you wash hair-dye towels, find yourself slanging T-shirts and makeup at the mall and write part-time for no money, every quarter not spent at the laundromat counts.

The Smiley's memory is a reminder of how much I have loved Colfax Avenue for the two decades or so that I've been able to appreciate it. It is also an expression of my diluted sense of reality, one that obsesses over nostalgia as if stepping back in time were a reasonable solution. A solution for the heartache I have when development crushes buildings -- or the signs, in the case of Saturday's Save the Signs on Colfax benefit -- and I can't seem to see the positive in progress.

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Bad Weather California on the main stage at Treefort Music Fest 2013.

Before I explain why last weekend's Treefort Music Fest was amazing, I have to say that I hate big/corporate/non-DIY music festivals. Most of those events are just a bloated excuse for bloggers, record-label people and other industry assholes like myself to get drunk in public for days on end, while we stand around and metaphorically wank each other off based on who knows more bands. The general public's behavior is equally disgusting at these things -- it's like amateur hour for drunk college girls and aggressive bros who love Mumford & Sons, have no manners and want to make everyone around them miserable while they spill beer on non-drinkers and yell at the band.

I see shows every week of the year. So to me, corp-y fests seem like a giant cesspool of stupidity where people cram their live-music participation in during a single weekend of watching. (Because why would anyone want to bother supporting acts that are on tour all year, when you can just wait for your fave destination juggernaut fest to bring the buzz bands together with a handful of reunited, kinda-okay '90s groups for one feel-good weekend of food trucks, car/hotel camp outs and trash cans full of weird corporate swag/landfill material?)

But this past weekend's Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho, changed all of that for me. I enjoyed a music festival and had to put my pretentious, judgmental, un-fun foot in my mouth.

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Brandon Marshall

Clearly, this guy and I are not going to get along.

From the moment we stepped out of the car last Friday night, we were three girls looking for a fight. Being in LoDo will do that do you: There's an air of misbehavior that must be half the appeal of the place. My mom's been an ER nurse for close to four decades, and she says that at least once a weekend, she gets an ambulance carrying a young man from out of state who has had maybe two drinks, then been beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. And at some point, he was hanging out in LoDo.

It's not all LoDo's fault, of course; that desire to rabble-rouse and cause trouble can hit you at any time. And it doesn't just hit men; it hits women, too. I don't think it's just my group of friends who enjoy taunting guys on the street until they look like they might actually be game to hit a woman. Fortunately, we didn't get into any fights over St. Patrick's Day weekend, but we sure tried -- and some of those fights even came to us, strictly based on how out of context we three ratty, pseudo-punk girls looked to regular LoDo patrons.

All this had me wondering: Why is it so hard for humans to function in social situations where there's no context for how they look or act? In other words, why did these bros think we were lesbians? And why did we want to fight them even before they made an inaccurate blanket statement about our sexuality?

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