Just an hour's drive from the Bullhorn office sits another world, 15 square miles of overpriced real estate, scented with patchouli and unperturbed by reality. The name of this American Shangri-La-Di-Da is Boulder. A spot on the map barely an inch away from Denver, Boulder is light years above the mile high city, and floating further out into the stratosphere by the minute. Boulder has as much in common with the rest of Colorado as Disneyland's "It's a Small World" ride has with the greater Los Angeles area. Join us as we visit this autonomous anomaly on the Front Range.

Our tour begins at Alfalfa's market on Broadway and Arapahoe. We can park here, or in the library parking lot across the street (for a few hours, at least). While we're in the parking lot, let's have a look around at the vehicles and their bumper stickers. While official census figures of Boulder's racial make up are unavailable, a quick survey of bumper stickers leads the visitor to the erroneous conclusion that a majority of Boulderites hail from Tibet, Jamaica, or have other tribal origins. Despite the handicap of having the collective melanin of a Neil Diamond concert or a Winger concert in 1986, Boulder is, in fact, a veritable Mecca of appropriated multiculturalism, where all residents are respected regardless of race. Any of the town's nine black residents will attest to this, as will the many Mexicans who work at deli counters, supermarkets & restaurant kitchens throughout Boulder.

With a business philosophy that's part Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and part Ayn Rand, Alfalfa's is, in many ways, a microcosm of Boulder itself. Whether you are looking for new contacts to build up a naturopathic pyramid scheme or looking for a place to crash between Rainbow Gatherings, Alfalfa's is the place to see and be seen. A salad will set you back between $5 and $10; depending on how many heavy organic foodstuffs you pile into your dish. If you're broke, cheese cubes, fruit chunks and crackers are available throughout the day, and sushi is ½ off after 9:30 pm. A liberal sample policy makes Alfalfa's a favorite among freeloading freelancer and starving CU students. As a further example of local color, please note that the employee setting out the cheese tray is wearing a pair of fairy wings made from coat hangers and construction paper, and that her eyelids are coated in green glitter.

If you're thinking of applying for a job here, Be forewarned…this isn't the "Digger Free Store". Despite appearances, the market's liberal atmosphere ends where the employees-only area begins. Behind the scenes, the liberal humanism of Alfalfa's exterior is replaced by an attitude of corporate efficiency ruthless enough to make Sam Walton proud. In an effort to stem customer worry over employees driving up produce prices by taking over-ripe fruit and aging deli salads home, management has instituted a strict straight-to-dumpster policy. Items that can't profit the store's bottom line are shitcanned, as are employees who challenge this policy by making themselves an on-shift sandwich or putting dumpster bound fruit in their messenger bags. While our three hour tour doesn't make it to Boulder's other two major holistic health food supermarkets, Whole Foods and Wild Oats, the situation there is much the same, with the moneyed liberal population's yen for a guilt free shopping experience indulged through corporate donning of smiley faces and a guru's robes.

Enough, people, it's time to leave this den of homeopathy. After six trips to the sample platter, fairy girl is eyeing us suspiciously. One supermarket doth not a tour make. Onwards we stroll, North on Broadway to the Pearl Street Mall, the place to shop if you've got a hankering to own anything from a genuine rice-paper prayer book imported from Tibet or a hand-blown eight-foot glass bong. Perhaps you just want to watch a six-foot three contortionist cram himself into a 2'x2'x2' plastic cube. Whatever floats your boat, chances are good that you can find it on the Mall. Even Allen Ginsberg got laid regularly on Pearl Street. Let's make haste - we've only been in Boulder for forty-five minutes, and I've already got an urge to buy some wind chimes.

Once upon a time, The Pearl Street mall was an extremely mystical place. Everything was "something-delic," whether it was psychedelic, funka-delic, Buddha-delic. Anything you bought on the mall was imbued with some sort of supernatural essence. But the character of the mall, like much of the rest of Boulder, is quickly lurching towards a neutered sort of yuppiedom as monumental rent hikes force out more esoteric businesses in favor of corporate chain stores. As one stores specializing in the buying and selling of funky European fashions is driven out, three Baby Gaps, Old Navies and Body Shops spring up to compete for its space. So it goes when a town gets consumed by its own success.

So we shut out these unpleasant thoughts of the inevitable corporate domination of the world's every nook and cranny, and walk East on Pearl, to where the stench of filthy lucre gives way to the aroma of patchouli and hemp. This end of the street is more representative of what Boulder used to be like, before it's coolness was co-opted by the highest bidders. This is the part of town to buy comics, skateboards, hippy-dippy stuff from around the globe and then take dance lessons. This end of the street also has a Tibetan store, unusual in Boulder only in that, unlike the previous ones we've seen, it's owner actually comes from Tibet. Did someone just say they had a hankering for a humus bagel and a Chai? Excellent. We're almost at Penny Lane, the finest coffee shop between the Rockies and the Big Muddy.

Penny Lane is a Boulder landmark, a place where Womyn folk acts share the stage with didgeridoo players, and respected authors share the stage with writers of some of the most awful poetry ever heard. Who hasn't scribbled tormented prose and jerkily structured love sonnets into a journal at some point in their lives? In most places, the journal gets stuffed into a bookshelf where it can do no harm save to embarrass the writer in old age. In Boulder, the first drafts are brought to Penny Lane for the Monday night open mike. An example of some poetry you're likely to hear any given Monday night at Penny Lane:

"Your love is a bitter thorn of sadness and lies,
badness and sighs,
I see madness in your eyes.
These tears drip-dripping down my face
the pain in your words
sting my eyes like mace."

"You're why I write these words, baby...
even if you won't let me get to second base,
I'm going to love you forever,
until the stars burn out from the sky,
like Eddie Vedder in that song where he sings
about loving that chick big-time."

"His love is a cold rose,
a flower in ice
withered and dead,
with petals dropp'd off
And starting to smell"

But bad poetry aside, Penny Lane is a magical place where the price of a cup of coffee buys you the right to sit on a plush chair and while away the day. Let's spend the afternoon - we can't be too sure if Penny Lane will even be here the next time we come around. Places like this are an anachronism in a world of Starbucks, and a speed bump in Boulder's transformation into another neutered yuppie enclave of Borders, Starbucks and Barnes & Nobles. Outside of the Boulder homeless shelter (conveniently located way out in "NoBo," or North Boulder) Penny Lane is one of the few places in town to see a homeless person. Distinguishing them from the legions of rich kids slumming it in Boulder is easy. Real homeless folks rarely have cell phones, and almost never do their roadside panhandling with the benefit of laser-printed "spare change" signs.

Fueled with caffeine and second hand porch smoke, we are ready to walk. A few blocks south lies Boulder's spiritual heart, Naropa University. With courses like "Mudra Space Awareness," "Meditation for credit," and "Ikebana Flower Arranging," It's unlikely that a school like Naropa could exist anywhere outside of Boulder. Classrooms are filled with students named Dylan, Krishna & Starshine, who leave the school knowing for certain what they only suspected coming it - that indeed, nothing is real. Upon graduation, students are faced with a wide variety of employment opportunities, such as working telephone psychic lines, slinging nugs on Phish tour, or waiting tables in teahouses where a salad costs twelve dollars and the seat cushions are imported from Tajikistan.

Naropa, of course, is only one of the many fine schools in Boulder. The University of Colorado is just up the hill, located conveniently in a neighborhood known as "The Hill." And of course, there are several famous and semi-famous schools that specialize in teaching massage, holistic medicine, and other "healing arts" in Boulder. You may have noticed the fact that there was a massage chair set up every 25 or so feet along the Pearl Street Mall. In fact, Boulder has more holistic health practitioners than anyplace in America.

Some say that this is because Boulder, nestled between the "hard yang" of the Rocky Mountains and the "soft yin" of the American prairie, is an energetically aware city, attracting like-minded people. Others say that it's because of the many fine schools of massage and physical therapy in the area. A third school contends that the overabundance of holistic practitioners is due to the number of Naropa students who, after graduating $90,000 in debt with degrees in Transpersonal Bellybutton Awareness, had no money to move and needed to find paying work in a hurry. (Such amateur practitioners are scorned by professionals, and their flyers promptly covered up on the bulletin boards in Alfalfa's, Whole Foods, and Wild Oats.) While it would be an exaggeration to say that a rock thrown randomly on Pearl Street would probably hit a holistic practitioner, it's probably accurate to say that there'd be someone within ten feet offering to do Reiki on the unfortunate victim.

But enough on this tangent, for our tour is almost at an end. As the sun begins to recede behind the Flatirons, we head westward along the creek path back to Alfalfa's parking lot, to where our vehicle (hopefully) awaits. For some, our trip to Boulder will soon be but a patchouli scented memory. But some of you may have fallen in love with the town during the tour, and may be considering seriously relocation. If you're one of those, then be forewarned: Boulder wants to stay as beautiful - "like that dready girl at the Spearhead show" - and in Boulder, beautiful means sprawl-free, with plenty of open space to dance around and twirl fire in in. Anti-sprawl legislation has driven the price of housing sky high, with a one-bedroom apartment averaging about a thousand dollars. This lack of affordable housing has created a kind of economic apartheid, forcing many people who contribute to Boulder professionally -schoolteachers, firemen, poets, artists, and most of the Boulder police force - to live in "bedroom communities" like Broomfield and Louisville.

But if you've got luck or money, you can find a place to live, either in town or up in the hills. Boulder residency provides you with instant carte blanche to buy wholeheartedly into the charade of local multiculturalism, slap a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker on your Volvo, and listen to Reggae and Ani DiFranco until your hair dreads up. Buy into the illusion. Never mind that Boulder has about as much in common with Lhassa as George Jetson does with Buzz Aldrin.

In a town that prides itself on it's ability to live in constant illusion, someone who risks bursting the bubble might just find themselves the victim of an ugly lynching, tarred and feathered behind Whole Foods, tied the back of an SUV with a Bob Marley bumper sticker and dragged out past the Foothills parkway, out of Boulder and back into reality.

--- Fin

Joshua Samuel Brown is a regular contributor to the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, and the author of "Politics and Other Dirty Words." He is currently working on his autobiography, "A Child's First Book of Smoking."

Geoffrey H. Goodwin is a Naropa University student. He is doing doctoral work on quantum mechanics, with a minor in Zen Kickboxing.