From our Big Yellow Ball Slated to Appear In East Department comes this headline from the Bibleburg Gaslight: “Study: Jobs are shifting from downtown to suburbs.”

Do tell. The source of this staggering revelation is a report by the Brookings Institution, the first in a series to include “Topless Dancing: Performers Mostly Female, Customers Mostly Male,” “Punching Cops: A Great Way to Get Your Ass Kicked,” and “Sticking Butter Knives Into Electrical Outlets: The Shocking Truth.” The upshot seems to be that when a metropolitan area spreads out like a fat ass sinking onto a barstool at a chain “pub,” the jobs do, too. Go figure.

Everything in Bibleburg has been rushing outward from the center like the Big Bang since before my family arrived in 1967. Urban renewal tried and nearly succeeded in croaking downtown in the Seventies, sprawl continued the pummeling in the Eighties and Nineties, and the Great Recession is getting its licks in as we speak.

We live just north of downtown proper, east of the snooty Old North End in an area called the Patty Jewett Neighborhood. But very few of our neighbors work here, and the shopping is iffy. Java (Dogtooth Coffee) and booze (Coaltrain) are within easy walking or cycling distance, as are The Safeway of the Living Dead and an Ace Hardware store at the Bon Shopping Center. But the closest reliable organic grub is farther off, at Mountain Mama or King Soopers, both on Uintah west of Interstate 25; the Vitamin Cottage-Natural Grocery outlet off Cheyenne Mountain and South Nevada; or the Whole Paycheck on North Academy.

Downtown is a short hop away, easily reached on foot, by bicycle or via scooter. But there’s not much reason to go there, unless you work there, because there just aren’t many shops selling stuff we need. Running gear from Colorado Running Company, check; bike parts from Old Town Bike Shop, check; scooter stuff from Sportique, check; outdoorsy gear from Mountain Chalet, check; bread from La Baguette, check; cooking utensils from Sparrow Hawk Gourmet Cookware, check. The other only reasons to go downtown are to eat something and/or get hammered, sort of a yupscale imitation of homeless people rising up out of the weeds around lunchtime at Marion House.

Is there a specialty grocer downtown? Nope. A solid local bookstore along the lines of the lost, lamented Chinook Bookshop? Nuh uh, though there are a couple of lightweight contenders, Adventures in Books and Poor Richard’s. A consistently solid yet affordable restaurant with a respectable wine list and a selection of the local beers? Nah. The closest thing is The Blue Star, especially on Sunday, when bottles of wine are half price; but it’s still expensive, and well south of downtown proper.

This being a military town, of course, plenty of the local jobs have always been far from the city center — at Fort Carson, the Air Force Academy and Peterson AFB. But these folks are transient, especially during wartime, and a vibrant downtown is probably well down on their lists of must-have items.

Selling stupid shit to tourists is another pillar of the local economy, and downtown takes its best shot at that, with any number of absurd knick-knack shops, but both Old Colorado City and Manitou Springs have the upper hand with their cutesy ambience.

Bottom line, if you want loft-dwelling hipsters, tourists and other dazzling urbanites downtown, plus jobs, there has to be a reason for all of them to be downtown. And these days, in this place, there just aren’t many. Unless they’re into the whole free-soup thing. So we got that going for us.

• Addendum: Another reason to go downtown (though you don’t really need to be downtown to enjoy it) is KRCC, Radio Colorado College, our local NPR affiliate. Right now they’re airing “Hearing Voices,” an episode called “Comedy With a Beat,” hosted by David Ossman of The Firesign Theatre. Greg Giraldo layered over Lazyboy, Charles Mingus jazzing up Jean Shepherd’s “The Clown,” and select bits from TFT — hey, what’s not to like?

• Addendum the Second: Now that I’ve decided to forgo healthful outdoor exercise in favor of cooking and drinking, the sun has come out. Perhaps it’s time for me to emulate Medium Ráre, our mystic chef and guru, and begin meditating on the pure white light of stupidity.

Mondays always remind me of work, a recurring affliction that gives me a painful rash on the frontal lobes. And today was no exception.

First, I had to give up on trying to make a cheap USB 2.0 wireless adapter work with this elderly MacBox, which has been limping along for years with a Bronze Age 802.11b internal Airport card. But the adapter wouldn’t let the old bastard sleep, and at its advanced age, the MacBox needs all the Z’s it can get. This perverse product would let the monitor sleep, but wouldn’t let it wake up. It also crashed me a half-dozen times, just ’cause. So off it went, exchanged for a more upscale PCI adapter that should finally let me crank the wireless connectivity in these parts up to 802.11g. Look out. Nothing can stop me now.

Then Lance Armstrong went and crashed himself out of the Vuelta a Castilla y León, collecting his first broken collarbone in the process (I’ve done ’em both, and yes, it hurts), and nobody had any oh-the-humanity crash pix we could run over at VeloNews.com, where the merest mention of LA draws more eyeballs than Pamela Anderson attending a frat party wearing only Jäger goggles, kneepads and a smile.

And finally, spring and its 70-degree temps waved bye-bye. As we speak, it’s 40 and raining, with a chance of snow. If we’re lucky, we might be back into the 60s by next Monday.

I want to shoot the whole day down.