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RegularOccurrences

Ear to the ground:

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Unfriendly behavior

When it comes to FB, boomers tell it like it is – which is sort of enviable by Addyson

Santese

4 La Vida Local

5 Writers on the Range

6 Top Story

5 Power struggle

Farmington grapples with energy future amid closing of coal plants by David Marston / Writers on the Range

6 Wheel deal

Bike Durango’s mission is to get butts out of drivers seats and into saddles

by Missy Votel

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Party in the pines

Grab your dancing Chacos and camp chair, festival season is here by Telegraph Staff

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The Durango Telegraph publishes every Thursday, come hell, high water, tacky singletrack or mon-

STAR-STUDDED CAST: Addyson Santese, David Marston, Ari LeVaux, Jeffrey Mannix, Rob Brezsny, Lainie Maxson, Jesse Anderson & Clint Reid

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8 Listen Up

10 Flash in the Pan

11 Murder Ink

12-13 Stuff to Do

13 Ask Rachel

14 Free Will Astrology

15 Classifieds

15 Haiku Movie Review

On the cover

Local plein air painter Cindy Atchison enjoys a cool morning painting downtown with the Plein Air Painters of the Four Corners. The like-minded artists gather bimonthly to create art in the outdoors./ Photo by Renee Cornue, @reneecornue_studio

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“My dad just called me all stressed out because the computer he’s had for years doesn’t have a CD burner.”

– Wait, why does a dad need a CD burner in 2023?

Fasten loose objects

Earlier this week, when weather predictions were calling for a heat wave in Southwest Colorado, it appeared this weekend’s Animas River Days was going to be spicy.

But alas, the “back-door monsoons” have returned, along with cool temperatures, which should keep the Animas River at bay (though flows are still expected to be in the 4,000 cfs range, a formidable level that should be taken seriously).

“We were pretty happy to see that cool weather move in,” Ashleigh Tucker, an organizer of Animas River Days, said. “It’ll still be high water, but it won’t be massive.”

Animas River Days kicks off Saturday, with a full day of canoe/kayak/raft slaloms, SUP races, boatercross and surfing competitions (lineup at animasriverdays.com). There will also be a beer garden and food options. And of course, starting at 4:30 p.m., the infamous River Parade.

Speaking of which – is it just us, or has there been a lot more carnage on the Animas this year? Whether it’s all the new boaters experiencing high water for the first time, or perhaps just more people posting to social media, it sure seems like it’s always a scene down at the Whitewater Park.

Tucker added that a lot of the carnage could be due to the fact this is only the second or third time we’ve seen true high water since the City of Durango altered the top section of the Whitewater Park a few years ago.

The city’s alterations essentially created a series of drops river runners must navigate before the rapids at the Whitewater Park (it’s a long story, but the alterations were necessary to direct more water into the City’s water intake above Smelter). However, the new drops can flip unwary boaters, leading to long and cold swims through the Whitewater Park.

“I think those top drops are causing a lot of problems, which is causing more carnage,” Tucker said.

It’ll at least make for interesting viewing Saturday.

As for Sunday’s entertainment, Tucker said organizers added more events, including bringing back the wild water kayak race, which is a classic event from early years of river days. And yes, the beer garden will be at the ready with breakfast beers and cocktails. Tucker said the event is also looking for more volunteers.

Happy (and safe) riverin’.

I’m not here to make friends

A topic of concern lately has been the growing use of social media among teens. A 2021 study published by Common Sense Media reported that on average, teens spent about 8½ hours per day on screen, with social media taking up a large chunk of that time.

Researchers were shocked by these findings. If you’re someone who happens to have been in the presence of a young person at any point in your life, your reaction might have looked something more like this: duh.

Teens and social media are as inseparable as the Kardashians and American culture. Sure, it’s toxic and probably rotting away some vital part of your brain, but you have to keep up, right?

To be clear, I don’t have a god complex, nor do I view myself as someone who’s beyond the allure of social media. In fact, I had to delete Instagram from my phone and relocate it to my iPad because I was spending way too much time hate-watching strangers’ GRWM videos. If you know, you know.

People love to disparage the digital natives for having “screens glued to their faces,” and as the data shows, this might be true. But in my opinion, there’s one generation whose social media use has gone unexamined for far too long. Baby Boomers.

Unlike Gen Z, for whom an online presence is almost synonymous with existence, Boomers grew up in a blessed time before blogs, vlogs and body dysmorphia-inducing filters. They have memories of the “good old days,” back when seatbelts were communism, you walked uphill to school both ways, and if you wanted to block someone, you just didn’t pick up the phone. I have friends in their late 20s who’ve bought clamshell phones just to chase the high of that kind of freedom, so the Boomer fascination with social media is endlessly interesting to me.

Technically speaking, I’m part of the digital natives because I was born after 1980 and have been surrounded by computers, digital devices and social media for most of my life. As part of the later Millennials, I grew up during a transitional period when we still spent our summer days exiled outside until the street lights came on, then logged onto Facebook in the evening to “poke” our crushes into oblivion before a light game of FarmVille. Thankfully, very few relics of my embarrassing teen years were immortalized online.

For people between the ages of 59 and 77, though, cringe-worthy posts are

Thumbin’It

The City of Durango offering free bus service until Aug. 31 in an attempt to reduce cars on the road and curb carbon emissions.

The Environmental Protection Agency awarding Silverton $800,000 for environmental cleanup projects as part of the 2015 Gold King Mine settlement.

Gov. Jared Polis proposing a wager with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to move Disney World to Colorado if the Nuggets beat the Miami Heat. Just what Colorado needs, another fantasy land!

the norm, a daily ritual that mostly takes place on Facebook. By contrast, a Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok and Instagram dominate the social media landscape for today’s teens (which would probably explain why I was laughed out of the classroom when I suggested my students make Facebook Messenger groups for their team projects). Pro tip: if you ever think to yourself “Hey, I’m still pretty cool and young” and want to be immediately disillusioned of that belief, spend 50 minutes with a group of 18-year-olds. Apparently, Facebook is now for dinosaurs. It’s also the place where your great-aunt will share an outdated GIF with a caption like “kindness is a gift everyone can afford to give,” as if she didn’t just post some of the most unhinged things you’ve ever seen another human being say online.

If you need examples, the perfect microcosm of Boomer behavior on social media exists on my neighborhood’s Facebook page. It’s a lawless land, filled with name-calling, questions that could have easily been Googled, and the ultimate Boomer move: correcting people’s grammar and spelling. (Bonus points if the correction is actually incorrect.)

I’ve been a bystander to some truly gripping interactions on this page. Personal favorites include the grandpa who kept referring to his next-door neighbor as “James Jerk” for an entire thread like they were two kids on a playground. And of course, who could forget the time two older dudes got into an argument and one of them used local tax records to find the offending party’s address, showed up outside their house, posted pictures of their driveway, and then demanded in a public forum that the individual come outside to fight them like it was a modern-day retelling of Troy? Classic.

In all honesty, I’m kind of jealous of Boomers for the way they communicate online, completely devoid of any filters. Thought your niece’s wedding dress made her look fat? Let her know in the comments. Do you have strong feelings about the Bud Light controversy? Go ahead and fire out those thoughts at six in the morning since you’re already awake anyway. Have you decided there are just too many genders to keep track of nowadays? Tell it like it is.

Unlike the rest of us, Boomers don’t use social media out of a desire to be liked. They’re not online to make friends and they’re certainly not anxiously curating the best versions of themselves for the digital world to consume. These folks are baring the unflinchingly honest reality of their souls, unnecessary commas and all, and for that, I admire you.

– Addyson Santese

SignoftheDownfall:

The tragic death of longtime La Plata County resident Russell Hill after falling while crossing a river in La Plata Canyon.

CPR reporting Amazon delivery drivers had to pee in bottles and poop in bags to keep their jobs, ways of relieving oneself that are only acceptable while on a self-support river trip.

Technology experts warning that artificial intelligence could become more powerful and smarter than humans, leading to our extinction. Didn’t we do this already in Will Smith’s “I, Robot?”

Vamp Sire

Multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who once owned Venmo and spends $2M annually on “de-aging” treatments, recently paid a clinic in Texas to give him injections of his own teenaged son’s blood. It’s all part of “Project Blueprint,” as Johnson named it, and in short, he took nearly 1/5th of his son’s blood, turned it into plasma, shared some with 70-year-old grandpa just to kick the creepy up a notch, and then celebrated with an uberinappropriate photoshoot for Instagram wherein the whole family is hugging and wearing wet tank tops. So, this Father’s Day, if your dad already has everything…

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