Still Rolling Around: Denver Traffic and the Week Gen X Took It on the Chin

 

Welcome to Still Rolling Around — the new home for all the things that never quite fit anywhere else but refuse to be forgotten.

Like the back cupholder in your car, this series is where the dog treats, busted pens, loose change, and crumpled reminders of real life collect. Not important enough to organize, but way too real to toss.

These stories don’t belong in a travelogue or a shop tale. They’re the random moments, small observations, and everyday chaos that make everything else make sense.

They may not follow a theme, but they hold the glue — the in-between parts of a life lived wide open.

So here they are, finally, where they belong.
Still rolling around.

Denver Traffic and the Week Gen X Took It on the Chin

There are bad traffic cities, and then there’s Denver.

You’d think with all this wide-open space, the roads would make sense. But no—Denver makes you exit the highway, crawl down some random surface street, sit through three red lights behind a Subaru with a kayak and a "Coexist" sticker, and then maybe lets you back on another highway.

At one point, I ended up on Colfax Avenue—Denver’s infamous “Longest, Wickedest Street.”
The commercial stretch runs 26.5 miles the longest street in The US,, but if you count the rest, it’s over 50 miles of pawn shops, old motels, neon dive bars, and sketchy charm. Colfax doesn’t end—it just changes personality every few blocks like a road with multiple personality disorder.

And all I could think about was Interstate 587 in Kingston, New York.
Just 1.2 miles long. I’ve driven it more times than I can count. You can fly through it in under a minute and still have time to question why it’s even called an interstate. It’s funny how far you can travel and still find roads that mess with your head.

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But That Wasn’t Even the Worst Part of the Week

This week? Gen X took a direct hit.

We lost three icons—back-to-back-to-back—and it hit hard.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner.

Theo Huxtable. The smooth, steady center of one of TV’s most memorable families. The guy who made being the middle kid cool. He was familiar, funny, and easy to root for. Losing him feels like losing a part of our own families.

Ozzy Osbourne.

The Prince of Darkness himself. The man who survived bats, booze, reality TV, and decades of chaos finally left us.
I was driving from Colorado Springs to Denver when the local FM station went full Ozzy tribute mode. And when Changes came on… that was it. That lump in the throat showed up out of nowhere. I wasn’t even a diehard Ozzy fan—but the emotion still hit. That’s how you know someone mattered.

And then—this morning—Hulk Hogan.

Gone.
The red and yellow. The mustache. The flexing, shirt-ripping, “say your prayers and eat your vitamins” icon.
Whether you were a full-blown wrestling fanatic or just caught the Saturday morning madness, you knew Hulk. He wasn’t just a character—he was larger than life. And for a lot of us? He was childhood.

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Greg Was the Biggest Hulkamaniac I Knew

My buddy Greg?
He lived and breathed Hulkamania. He took it seriously. He actually said his prayers and ate his vitamins. He believed, man. That kind of unshakable kid faith we all used to have before life got messy.

Wrestling was huge when we were kids.
And back then, you couldn’t just stream it. You had to know someone whose parents shelled out for pay-per-view—or had one of those sketchy black cable boxes with the dials. That’s how we watched WrestleMania, Royal Rumble, SummerSlam. Piled on some old couch in somebody’s basement, screaming like lunatics. It was electric.

Those weren’t just matches. They were events.
And Hulk was the sun everything else revolved around.

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When Prince Died, I Cried in Traffic

This week brought that memory back.

I was driving home from New Jersey the day Prince died.
Every station was playing him. Wall to wall.
And when Purple Rain came on, as the sky started getting dark... man, I just sat there in traffic with tears Filling my eyes. I didn’t even try to hide it. a few times I noticed others in traffic were doing the same.

That one wrecked me.

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The Weirdos, the Rebels, the Icons

Gen X didn’t worship polished people.
We connected with the wild ones. The weirdos. The broken geniuses and flamboyant freaks. The eyeliner, the guitars, the leg drops, the chaos. We didn’t want perfect—we wanted real.

And now, those real ones are leaving us.
The faces that lived on our walls, on our tapes, in our Saturday mornings... fading, one by one.

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So I’m Asking You:

Which one hit you?

Was it Kurt?

Was it Robin Williams?
Chris Cornell?
Dolores O’Riordan?
David Bowie?
DMX?
Carrie Fisher?
George Michael?
Prince?

We’re at that age now—the one where the soundtrack of our youth starts going silent.
It’s brutal.
And we feel it. Deep.

So yeah… Denver traffic sucks. But this week?
This week sucked a hell of a lot more.