
Each Tuesday for the last 2 or so months I go to the IDEA counseling center for my Level II Alcohol class. It is located off of what is basically Federal and Speer in what would be described as the Hi-Lo district of Denver or what as us non politically correct people would call the not quite middle class but not quite lower class Mexican district. So the answer is yes, this place is not only in a semi unsavory area of Denver but also filled with semi unsavory people. The basic outline of the class is every tuesday, starting at 6 PM, a two hour class takes place but usually only runs for a little over an hour because the counselor either gets bored with us not caring or needs to get out of there and grab a cold sud because he has a job that deals with the most dreary/crazy people ever. For the most part, there has been the same people in my class for the whole time but it's revolving enrollment so people come and go thus the circle of life. However, there has been a few people that have been there for the majority or time and have considerable character development and I would like to describe them to you as best I can.
Pablo and Adan: These two guys are the ages of 15 and 20 respectively and have grown up in the neighborhood since they were only little ninos. Pablo got into an accident while drunk by running a light and t-boning a woman but no injuries so there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Mind you this BOY is only 15 and not only drinking but driving on top! All I got to say is pick your battles buddy, either go with underage drinking or driving without a license (not to mention he's not even old enough to get one), don't go with both. Adan on the other hand, was driving home from a party with his girlfriend and got pulled over and got his DUI, end of story. Boring right? Well he has decided to make up for it by being crazy as fuck during his education class. Adan either is in some sort of gang on the west side of Denver or really really wants to be in a gang on the west side of Denver. He spends most of his time in class drawing tattoos on his knuckles and tops of his hands and failing to answer a single question when called on to describe his feelings on his DUI. He prefaces his answer by trying to find the answer in the book because for some reason he thinks he can find out "how he felt" in the chapter we are on. The answer is an affirmative no Adan, the answer of "stubborn and unwilling to accept that any of this has happened" is not on page 147 under the chapter "preventing recidivism." He ends class by giving some sort of fake gang sign and them using 2-3 curse words in a sentence involving how little he has picked up from the days lesson and how stupid everyone in the world is.
Diana: Diana is a middle aged woman who was pulled over at 10 in the morning for slamming into a median on the highway on her way to work. She was not drunk but she was fucked up enough on pain killers to crash her vehicle into an inanimate object at 10 in the morning which is a pretty good indication on how well your life is going. Diana is making her way through the classes by deciding to argue every point that is made in the class and backing it up with points that are not only irrelevant to the question but also followed by anecdotes on her own life and how us "young people" need to find ways to be more spiritual and that she is worried about the "younger generations." My favorite story so far about Diana actually about a story she told a couple weeks ago about a shoot out in Edgewater, not far from our backyard. Allegedly, police were called to a man's house after reports of gunfire. When police arrived at the scene, the man began to fire shots at the police which prompted the police to call in the SWAT team to finally subdue this man. After all was said and done the man had fired over 100 rounds of live ammunition at police officers and somehow no one was hit, not even the man. The man was finally charged with 8 counts of attempted murder and is set for trial sometime this summer. Diana in all of her wisdom came up with this argument in support of the man firing bullets in a neighborhood full of people, mind you this isn't Fallujah, Iraq. It went something like this , "this is just another case of the government trying to get more money out of the people. it's basically a big corporation. I don't even know why he was arrested in the first place, he didn't even hit anybody, they don't even have enough evidence to convict him." Let's just say I differ with her on a few of her view points.
Hoosana: I'm not sure on the correct spelling of this woman's name but it's something like this. It's phonetically pronounced, Who-saan-ah so go with whatever spelling you want. Hoosana is a very nice lady, but is also a very loud and proud spoken African American woman so I'm not sure if she can be classified as a tremendously enjoyable person to be around. Not because she is Black but because she is extremely loud and opinionated, oh and really dumb. Hoosana, like Diana, was not drinking a driving but was also under the influence of legal medical prescriptions. She was found asleep in her vehicle not 20 feet from her house.... crashed into a tree. Her main claim is that she doesn't belong in this class because she wasn't drinking and her only problem was that the prescription medications she was on, "forced" her to become suicidal, which caused her to take too many pills at once, blackout and drive into a tree. She was hired an attorney to take her case against the ER doctor that gave her the prescription because he, not she is liable for the entire situation. I'm not sure how much of a case she has.
The rest of my favorite class members are the pretentious illiterate and the twlight movie extra. The pretentious illiterate is a mid 20 something guy who uses a lot of hand motions when he talks and has a lot of dramatic pauses with a bunch of "uhhh's" and "errr's" while he searches for the word to use but in actuality he really has no idea what he's talking about. The vampire kid is a 20 year old who claims he has some sort bipolar disorder but I think he's just a little emo. He is also wins the award for "most likely to bring a gun and kill all of us." Most of us though are just poor dumb saps who made a stupid mistake and are trying to power through 12 weeks of horse shit while wadding through the river of diarrhea flowing from everyone else mouth.




