In Colorado, they sell a bumper sticker that looks just like our license plates, and in large white lettering it displays the word "NATIVE".

They sell these to many Coloradans who want to deny allegations that they are really Californian or Texan. I've lived in Colorado Springs for all 21 of my years so far, and I'd buy one, too, if my dad had never taught me that a man's car is no place for a bumper sticker. Still, I was tempted to sock it to the permanent tourists that populate my home, until one day. My friend, Kiel, who was also born in the Springs, saw a parked car with one of these "Native" stickers on there and shrugged. "What is anyone supposed to say to that? Thanks for not moving?"

If you've ever been here, you'd probably describe Colorado Springs to be the epitome of suburban sprawl. Driving through much of it seems like watching a looping reel of upper-middle-class housing occasionally interrupted by churches and liquor stores (and there are more of the latter). Denver, which is 60 miles north of here, has around 570,000 citizens and at some point has to start growing vertically, like a constricted city inevitably does. Colorado Springs city limits, on the other hand, encompass such a vast plain of land that we can keep rolling a carpet of houses for years and years, and our population's not that far off from the state capitol's.

Colorado Springs is now populated by 400,000+ residents who subconsciously believe it's still a small town. They're not wrong, in certain respects. I've never lived anywhere else, but from what I'm told, small-town recreation tends to be limited to getting drunk and going to church -- and oftentimes in that order. Colorado Springs can relate, except it offers more for you to do on a Friday night, like go to the movies. Sure, I'll concede that a lot of small towns have movie theaters, too, but they don't have an IMAX theater, and that's just what makes the Springs so worthy of their envy.

Dr. James Dobson.

I can probably end the paragraph like that and move on. But what I will say is that if you don't count The Goose, he's the closest thing to a national celebrity that we have in Colorado Springs. This makes many of us very, very angry, but that's a subject for another time.

"Californication" is not only an excellent Red Hot Chili Peppers album but also a cultural phenomenon that has been affecting Colorado Springs for the past fifteen years or so. Folks from the West Coast who were sick of earthquakes and their tiny $500,000 homes flocked to Colorado in what some have regarded as a "Great White Flight". Contracting and developing companies jumped on this and made a killing here, especially on the north and east ends of town. That's where you still see plenty of expansion going on, which is nowadays punctuated by a new Chipotle/Panda Express/Noodles & Co./Cold Stone in each area that gets the developers' attention. It's nice, in a way, because I like the food at those places, but they make me feel dirty. It's not what Jews feel if they are to eat bacon, I'm sure, but it does hurt my soul to eat at Panera.

This might give you another idea of the town's metamorphosis: Before the Californian rush, Coloradans typically drove 1,500-dollar cars with 3,000-dollar bicycles mounted on them. Now we drive vehicles akin to panzerkamphwagens in which you can fit five bikes or more, if you want to. Sounds like much of America, to be sure, but we were doing this before it was a national joke.

Then there are the Texans, who also certainly influenced the SUV thing, but this post is getting long-winded as it is.

Both natives and "semi-natives" can agree on what keeps them here, though: the weather and the scenery. There's an advantage to the suburban sprawl because you can get a view of Pikes Peak from almost anywhere in city limits. To someone just visiting the Springs, the view is often described as breathtaking, nothing less.

To native Coloradans, it starts to seem like wallpaper. Still, it's very nice wallpaper, and that's enough for a lot of people.