Temps are supposed to hit 120° today. We’ll believe that when we see it. But it probably will get fairly warm. Just now it’s almost 9:30 and the backyard thermometer reads 100 degrees, not especially out of the ordinary for this time of year.
A light skiff of high clouds has moved in, and that will cut some of the supposed heat. Monsoon dust on the New Mexico border killed six people yesterday evening; as you can see from the video, some serious clouds were in the offing. If that moisture moves this far west, it will lower temps some, even if it doesn’t come all the way into the Valley.
The pool is spotlessly clean — the scheme to brush it down at least once a day is working. Last night I shock-treated it (part of the scheme is to do the weekly shock-treat that you’re supposed to do and that I’ve managed to avoid for the past several years…) and so this morning backwashed, a PITA that I could do without. Very many more of these weekly backwashes and the filter will have to be taken apart and cleaned again, to the tune of another $125 or $150.
Supposedly you need to clean a pool filter only about once or twice a year. I’ve found that to be hogwash (heh… backwash? back-hogwash?): every time I turn around I have to pay someone to come disassemble the thing, haul the parts into the alley, scrub it out, haul the parts back in, and reassemble it.
Pretty soon I’ll need to replace that old thing, and I’m thinking about making a retrograde move: replace the fancy DE filter with a sand filter. DE does a better job on a pool the size of the one in this yard. However, a sand filter does not need to be cleaned on a regular basis. You backwash and you only backwash. After a number of years, you have somebody come and dump the sand into the alley, then replace the sand…but it’s years, not months or weeks.
The pool water would be a little cloudy — maybe — with a sand filter. But the pool has to be replastered…very soon…and if I were to get a darker color plaster or Pebble-Tek — the height of style — it wouldn’t be noticeable. If I were very clever, I might figure out a way to backwash onto the trees without excavating the landscaping, thereby saving a little on the water bills and no longer having to drag the hose out into the alley.
Leaving the gate open while I’m fiddling with the pool gives me the heebie-jeebies, given the “neighbors” who inhabit the alleys. The dogs have to be locked up during the backwash procedure; otherwise Ruby will take off for Yuma. Wouldn’t make much difference anyway: they’re not big enough to do much more than love the meth-head to death.
Who knows? Maybe that’s what meth-heads need.
Heh! The Corgi Drug Cure. Good, very good.
One-twenty in the shade or no, at this time of year I have to cover up the rose bushes. Otherwise they fry. This does not make for high aesthetics in the garden architecture department.
With inflation, make that a three-dollar cookstove. Wow!
That was my father’s saying. Think it derives from “Hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” though the “sayin'” waayyy predates George Jones. 😀
’Tis about 98 here now — around 7 p.m. But I’d guess the thermometer went north of 105 sometime today.
The Midwesterner immigrants have a hard time with this. They just don’t get it. That’s why, I expect, so many of them migrate back to Michigan along about the end of March. Some of them, though, foolishly take up residence here.
One of them, the poor dolt, tossed a hair spray can into a black plastic garbage bin, a bin that spent its days a-sittin’ in the full sun. Bet you can picture the result, can’tcha?
Yes. The can exploded, as spray cans left in an oven are wont to do. It blasted a hole in the trash bin’s lid and launched itself toward orbit.
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Okay, okay, it’s not funny.
Heeeeee!
Yes, yes it is.
The pool is holding its own against the Invasion of the Algae King. I’ve been sweeping it down twice a day, which isn’t as annoying as it sounds because it creates an excuse to jump into the drink. And it provides some mild exercise, which — believe me! — is hard to force on oneself in an Arizona summer.
Otherwise, I’ve spent most of the day — after a frustrating junket to Costco and Target around noontime — dealing with the font corruption fiasco brought on by the endlessly annoying Mac OS upgrade. Having finally concluded that the only solution would be to reformat any books in the production process with a font resident in Mac OS 10, I spent most of what passes for my productive time rebuilding the book in progress in Big Caslon 11 pts.
Like the endless pool cleaning, this, too, is easier than it sounds. Fortunately the entire document is formatted in Word “styles.” The beauty of this is that when you reformat any part of one type of copy, you reformat it all. Change one paragraph of body copy from Alegreya 11 pt roman to Big Caslon, and every graf that is not a first paragraph, not hanging indent, not a footnote, not indented block, not a cutline, not a running header or footer and PRESTO CHANGEO all the body copy changes to Big Caslon 11 points.
Big Caslon is so close in size and kerning to Alegreya that the entire book came over without changing the pagination! The author’s note appears, yea verily, on page 432, same as it did in Alegreya. The index: p. 423; opening page of the last chapter, p. 407.
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
The heads and subheads were less accommodating. Those required some screwing around. But the serious screwing around was elicited by Big Caslon’s answer to boldface. For reasons incomprehensible, this font’s boldface is weirdly airy: the characters are spread out like somebody dropped the letters on the floor and they scattered across the tile. To fix: one, two, three, four, five, six seven, eight, NINE keystrokes for every goddamn word or passage set in boldface!!!!!!!
And since I used B.F. for all sorts of little sub-sub-subfuckingheads and stylistic cutenesses, that was a LOT of goddamn words and passages. So to my profound undelight, I spent most of the day highlighting and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and… Tomorrow I’ll have to go over the entire damn thing and proof it carefully.
But I did find two typos…a friend of mine, the dean of scholarly editing, once remarked on the fact that every time you read a book, you find something else wrong with it.
Oh well.
At any rate, I have more news but just now am too tired to relate it. So..tomorrow.
Okay, I admit to it: spending WAY too much time loafing.
The weather’s gorgeous. The laundry’s laundered, the groceries are shopped, the house is clean, and I. do. not. feel. like. doing. ANYTHING. creative or constructive! I did manage to backwash the pool today and ascertain that once again I need to call the pool guys to come clean out the DE filter. Again. I should’ve gone into the pool bidness.
Had to get up and go away from the computer to get anything done at all today. With the exception of Mr. Comey, reading about the doings in Washington is like watching the antics in a snake pit: at once hypnotically fascinating and revolting. I’m finding it so difficult to keep from flipping over to the news sources to stare in horror at the goings-on that I simply can’t get any work done unless I’m a long way from this contraption.
But by sitting down at a table with a pen in hand, I did manage (somehow) to draft four or five pages, once transcribed to type.
It’ll be interesting to see if this story turns into anything. Once again — as usual — my mood tends to straddle the line between literary and genre fiction. It’s too tacky to be literary, and too intellectual to make good thriller, sci-fi, or romance. What can I say?
I’ve signed up for a MOOC through the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It starts tomorrow…that should be an amusing way to pass the summer. As voltage goes, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty…low-tension. However, it’s free: you get what you pay for, I imagine. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.
Nothing, I expect, of value for the present imagined world. But nothing ventured…
So while I’m galloping across the city last Thursday morning, I stop at (among other joints) a huge Fry’s superstore, appropriately Scottsdaleian, the sort of place where Mazeratis populate the parking lot. It is just a Fry’s, though, despite the addition of some fancy cheeses, a full-service sit-down sushi bar, a wealth of Target-like household goods, and a section peddling pricey loafing-around-the-estate clothes. This means I can grab a few fruits and veggies and some cleaning products at about the same price on offer at Albertson’s or Safeway.
We’re almost out of custom-made dog food here at the Funny Farm. So it crosses my mind that if by some miracle this Fry’s has chicken on sale, I could grab enough to fend off another Costco trip for a week or so.
Nope. No sale chicken. However, I do stumble across a gigantic package of pork butt — almost 10 pounds. Dang! That’s as much as you’d buy in a giant Costco package. And it’s on sale: marked down to $9.71 from $17.79.
Well…that’s a bargain! (Or so it appears…) The same or less than Costco’s price.
Grab.
This morning I go to cook up a lifetime supply of dog food from this stuff. It’s packaged, in the manner of a slab of Costco pork, squished inside a layer of tightly wrapped, melted-together plastic wrap. The package says CUT AND WRAPPED FREE!!!!
ohhhh, be still my heart!
So I think that like Costco pork, it’s chopped roughly into big chunks, which makes it pretty easy to stew up in a pot preparatory to food-processing with some veggies and some starches to make dawg food.
Not so much.
It’s one huge 10-pound chunk, and…it has a big bone running through the middle of it!
The package is not marked bone-in, and you cannot see the bone by looking at it through the plastic wrapping.
Fuckaroonies. What a hassle! I had to hack as much of the meat off the bone as I could, and was I mad! The bone weighed exactly 1 pound, meaning instead of 9.94 pounds of meat, I got 8.94 pounds. Meaning I threw $1.09 into the garbage.
Exactly one pound…
No, I do not feel up for turning a pork bone into soup. And no, there’s not enough room in one of those kettles to hold a bone on top of all that meat, which itself produces close to a quart of broth (because as we know, commercial meats are soaked in saline and a substantial part of what you’re paying for is, yes, water).
Aside: You don’t even have to add water to cook these meats for the beasties. Just drop the chicken or the pork into a pot and turn on the heat. Within minutes, enough salt water exudes to keep the meat from scorching, and by the time the meat is cooked, the pot is literally half full of liquid.
That’s convenient, I guess: you can use it to cook the rice or oatmeal for the dog food. It doesn’t taste very good, mostly because commercial factory-made chicken tastes awful and pork just tastes depressing. So I don’t use it for my own cooking. But it finishes off the dog food…the pooches seem to like it. But…they’ll eat mummified oranges. Tells you something about doggie taste.
Okay, now for the English-major math:
At the discounted price, $9.71 for 8.94 pounds of usable meat came to $1.09/pound, a dime more than Costco charges. Only the Costco product is hassle-free: open it, drop it in the pan, and turn on the burner.
At the original price, which no one was foolish enough to pay, the pork would have run $1.99 a pound: a dollar a pound more than Costco’s price.
So. The Fat Lady is not pleased this morning.
I deeply resented discovering a bone in the wad of meat, when the package was not marked “bone-in.” I probably wouldn’t have bought it, had I known: there wasn’t that much rush to make another batch of hound food, and Costco’s bone-free 99-cent pork is a much better, much lower-hassle deal.
In other gnus, however, check out the frozen wild shrimp I found the ‘tother day:
Oh, the magnificence!!!!!
I sautéed these with some garlic, herbs, bottled artichoke hearts, cut-up Campari tomatoes, a handful of frozen peas, and a splash of cheap white wine.
The strangeness that is humanity… In the “weird people” department, we have our honored US Senator from the Great State of Arizona, the aptly named Jeff Flake. This idiot is actively crowing on and on and ON at his Facebook site about how proud he is of throwing millions of people off health insurance and guaranteeing that people who are sick or who have been injured will not be able to get health insurance. What a guy! In response to his latest cock-a-doodle-doo, about how great he is because he voted in favor of killing the few limits on your network privacy and mine, 95 people slammed him. Two supported the jerk. Given the outrage these guys whip up, you have to wonder HOW they keep getting elected. Gerrymandering and money, for sure; probably a bit of fraud, too.
What a bunch!
Yesterday was consumed by boring and mostly fruitless tasks: paying bills, updating Excel spreadsheets, farting around on Facebook, not doing one thing with socially redeeming value.
In the weird department, given how evil and destructive the Republican party has become over the past couple of decades, it never ceases to astonish me that the corporate world in general still thinks having it in power is a good thing. It is not, of course. What’s bad for Americans ultimately will be bad for business. But for the nonce, they’re all excited.
The amount by which my investments are growing simply beggars description. If this growth were to continue for another six months or a year, you probably would be able to describe me as a wealthy woman. Despite all the money I was forced to take out of the stock market by the mandated Required Minimum Distribution from my IRA, I’m still worth more than I was at this time last year. That’s despite buying a car with $3,600 worth of payments a year, despite several pricey house and yard fixes, despite one damnfool expensive thing after another.
But of course, we know all that is easy come, easy go. That truth makes me want to cash out all those funds, convert them to gold, and bury them in the backyard. Sooner or later the bubble will burst, and we’ll all be broke again.
I’m getting too old to weather another spate of “broke again.”
Speaking of “weather,”that has been insane in these parts! A couple days ago, we hit 108 degrees. This morning when I let the dogs out at 6 a.m, it was 60 degrees out here on the back porch. Just now — three hours later — it’s barely 70. Last night it rained a little — apparently not much — and this morning the sky is adorned with fluffy, low-grazing clouds. It’s quite lovely right this minute…conditions swing madly from “pushing intolerable” to “exquisite,” as it was last night when the dogs and I went out to defile the neighborhood lawns.
Because of this unpredictability, I’ve held off repainting the outdoor furniture. The two wicker chairs and the old mid-century metal things in front need new coats of paint, which awaits them in a large collection of spray cans arrayed across the dining-room table. The wind has been so fierce and given to coming up so unpredictably, I’ve been afraid to wave a can of spray paint in the air…afraid, day after day after day.
Oh well. Neither the chairs nor the paint is going anywhere.
Instead, then, yesterday I fertilized all four citrus trees, each of which is getting pretty big and pretty hungry. Used up the better part of a big sack of fertilizer, and then ran the water all afternoon trying to get the stuff started soaking its way down to the plants’ roots.
In doing so, I also fertilized a length of cat-claw vine that’s been suffering for lack of water. Apparently the watering system has crapped out along the vine’s base. Gerardo is going to be deployed to dig up the ground and fix whatever’s broken…won’t he be thrilled?
Speaking of Gerardo and Luis,one of those guys hacked an entire branch off the lime tree. Admittedly, the tree was a bit overgrown and was in the way — to some degree — as you were walking back and forth. Of all things, you had to walk around it. What could be more outrageous, hm?
The result is, the remaining limbs are now fully exposed, west-facing, to the afternoon sun.
Citrus trees are vulnerable to sunburn. This is why — unknown to most yard guys, and evidently unknown to the city’s public information nitwits — you do not prune citrus to look like a tree. It’s a shrub, not a tree. When you cut its lower limbs up off the ground, you expose the trunk to sunburn, which will weaken or kill the damn plant.
That’s why you see white paint on citrus tree trunks: in the absence of leaves to shade the trunk, humans have to smear reflective paint on their mutilated flora.
So I am not pleased. I could paint the tree higher up, but brushing paint on the thing halfway to the roof is going to look damn funny. An alternative is to wrap it with this stuff they make to wrap citrus with, but getting that around three or four large branches that are growing almost together is going to be…damn near impossible.
WhatEVER. Something will have to be done within the next few days, because summer is here, officially or no, and the minute this cold snap passes, that tree is gonna fry.
And speaking of weird, doesn’t it strike you as strange that, in the Phoenix area, nary a yard man, be he black, white, purple, or (preferably) Mexicano, has a freaking clue about how to care for citrus? To a man, every one of them wants to hack them up and trick them out as trees. Then the city, pandering to the residents’ terror of (ohhhh eeeek!) roof rats, urges people to hack off their citrus trees’ branches, on the theory that this will keep the ratties from climbing into the trees and hopping from their canopies to your roof, thence to climb down your chimney and chase your children around the living room.
Argh.
If a roof rat, a creature the size of a middling cat, can hoist itself up onto the low-hanging branches of a grapefruit tree and can climb up a block wall, does it not follow that the little guy could scamper right up a tree trunk?
The correct response is not to destroy your (freaking valuable) ornamental and food-crop trees. The correct response is to secure your attic so that Ratty can’t get in. This is not very hard. It’s something you ought to do anyway, since Ratty is not the only critter who would like to take up residence in a nice roomy attic. We have swarms of flying termites here, which happily enter an unscreened attic. Those things will cause havoc that even the most rambunctious rat could never hope to match.
Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking:
Take one of the old sheets of shade fabric, presently stashed in the shed. Tear or cut it into strips. Carefully wrap it around the most exposed part of the lime tree and…hang onto your hat…pin it into place with safety pins.
Et voilà! Doesn’t cost anything and probably will last for a year or so, until the tree’s foliage fills back in.
Moving on in the weird department, yesterday I tried to download Apple’s Pages and its iBook Author program. Couldn’t. Apparently you’re not allowed to download those marvels into a MacBook as old as mine, no matter what OS you’ve installed.
So…I am going to be mightily pissed if I discover I spent something over $800 for updates that were promised, among other things, to accommodate those programs, and those programs still can’t be used. Today, among other time wasters, I’m going to have to call up Apple’s customer service again and spend another hour trying to accomplish this.
Today I’m forced to get up off my duff and carry the busted external hard drive back to Costco, there to beg for an exchange or a refund. I’m a little wary about doing this, because the thing does have backups on it. Discussed this with my son, who agreed there’s some risk in returning it. I’m almost inclined to take (yet another) bath on it, bash the bejayzus out of it with a hammer, and then just go buy a new one.
But…the damn things cost sixty bucks!
And of late I’ve taken so many financial baths my financial skin is peeling off.
I think I’m going to buy one of these, speaking of things that cost sixty or seventy bucks…
It’s a Hunter fan tricked out to look like a real fan, as real fans were back in the day when we made real fans. In America.
Back when Fry’s Electronics carried nice black “retro” (snark!) fans, I bought four of them. These adorn the kitchen and front rooms of the house, making it possible to keep the thermostat around 80 degrees (or so…) in the summertime. But I don’t have one for the bedroom, so instead use a plastic thing that makes a racket and is uglier than pussley. I’d like to have one of these for my bedroom. But I don’t know. With expense after expense after endless expense whapping me upside the head, I’m running out of spending money. It looks like I’ll just break even at the end of my personal fiscal year, come September, when another RMD will replenish the checking account for another 12 months.
It’s getting late. I’ve consumed two pots of coffee. Costco is opening. I must fly.
Arizona drivers have always been aggressive. That’s why I insist on a six-banger…so I can dart out of the way of my fellow homicidal drivers, or dart around them. But we have exceeded ourselves. We’re no longer merely aggressive: we’re all batsh!t crazy.
On the Arizona Road
Yesterday SDXB and I decided to drive to Tucson. We wanted to revisit the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and a couple of art collections on the University of Arizona campus. We’d planned to leave at 7:30, but we got (as usual, with me…) a bit of a late start. It was about 8 by the time we got out the door, headed for State Route 51, therefrom (is that a word?) to connect to the hideous Interstate 10 freeway.
Understand: I personally will not drive on the 10 at all. It is way too dangerous for my taste. Given my choice, I would have taken the slow boat to Tucson via Florence, which crosses the Rez and goes through far more scenic territory and is nowhere near as heavily traveled. But normal people — SDXB, for example — would never dream of adding an extra 40 or 50 minutes to the travel time just to avoid a little lunacy.
So we set out.
Oh, my Lord the traffic was gawdawful!Holy crap. The surface streets were essentially stopped. We got on Main Drag South and didn’t even get a quarter of the way to the 51 before I realized I’d brought the wrong glasses. So had to instruct SDXB on the Native’s back-road access into the ‘hood, so we could circumvent the mess. Starting again from the Funny Farm, we decided on another route, which entailed going across GangBanger’s Way as far as you can go, then heading south and connecting to Main Drag South at a point past the roadblock.
Now we’re merging onto the 51, which is barely moving. And — in a typical Arizona driver stunt, a woman decides we are not going to get on ahead of her, so she speeds up to cut him off. He doesn’t see her because she’s in his blind spot. Instead of braking to avoid a collision, she lays on the horn.
He swerves back into the on ramp. Then, with her out of the way, he gets into the first (outside) lane.
She now slows down to get behind him, pulls into the onramp so she can fly past him on the right. She goes along a ways…this onramp doesn’t go away: it turns into an offramp to the next east-west main drag. Now she merges into the lane ahead of him, and within three seconds swerves back into the on/offramp! Just to show she can do it.
What a woman!
Now SDXB tries to merge into the center lane when he spots a gap in traffic. The guy behind him lays on the gas and speeds up, again to cut him off. You know…when you have 10,000 cars in front of you, what the hell difference does one more make?
Apparently it makes a big difference to a sh!thead.
You never saw such traffic in your life. The freeway was jammed in both directions — SDXB figured we were averaging about 30 to 35 mph. We could have driven down to the I-10 on the surface streets faster than that, without risking our lives.
We’re now in the HOV lane, moving along at this breakneck speed — which is far faster than anyone in the normal commute lanes is going.
Next we come across a feckless semi driver. This poor guy, a big muscular-looking blond dude (very scenic) is pulling a medium-sized trailer whose contents, alas, were not what we could call “secured.” A heavy workman’s wheelbarrow had fallen off his load, crashed into the middle of the freeway, and scattered God only knows how many cinderblocks across four or five lanes of traffic. The cinderblocks shattered into tire-puncturing, fender-denting chunks. Naturally, even the crazies were picking their way slowly through the mess. He had pulled off and stopped in the HOV lane, bringing an abrupt stop to any progress there, and was standing in the road looking stressed and talking into a cell phone.
Can you imagine the conversation?
“Yes, boss.”
“All over the 51, boss.”
“Secured? Well, sure I secured the load.”
“Boss. I don’t know what happened. Must have been Jose’s fault.”
Finally moving on, we managed to get onto the I-10 (transit through the spaghetti involves maneuvering not one, not two, not three, but four lanes that disappear within a few hundred feet…get left (no ya don’t, damn ya! HOOOONK!), get left again (die, you bastard!), get left again (I can’t believe I left my .45 at homethis morning), and get left again (outa my way, ya crazy fool!).
On the 10, traffic was bumper-to-bumper all the way to Casa Grande, which is effing halfway to Tucson. Traffic westbound into the city was almost stopped, just barely crawling along, from Chandler all the way into the city — and we didn’t see any westbound accidents.
Godlmighty. Imagine having to do that every fuckin’ day of your life, twice a day morning and night. Ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!!!!
Traffic remained very heavy once we got past the bedroom suburbs — not bumper to bumper, but so thick there was no way you could leave enough space ahead of you to stop safely in an emergency. At that point the speed limit jumps to 75 miles an hour. With not enough room to stop safely at 65 mph or even at 55 mph, it’s one long suicide corridor.
Using SDXB’s yapping GPS — those things annoy me so much! — we were directed to an exit different from the one I would normally take. This carried us around the backside of Marana, a farming town just west of Tucson. I’d never taken this route, but we were delighted to find it led us straight through the middle of the Saguaro National Park! Well, naturally, we had to stop in there…
Saguaro National Park
This is a forest of giant saguaro cacti, which grow at specific elevations only in the Sonoran desert. Some years ago I wrote a story for Family Exchange about this attraction. If a gentle breeze is blowing when you’re standing next to one of these amazing plants, you can hear the wind whistling through the spines.
The saguaros were in bloom, mirabilis. They bloom briefly in the spring or early summer, when they feed bats and birds and insects and, once turned to fruit, used to help feed people, too.
Lots of other things were blossoming. Prickly pear, in particular: in gay profusion.
It seems as though most flowers in the low desert are yellow. The Sonoran Desert is the richest bee habitat in the world…and interestingly, bees are especially drawn to the color yellow. They dearly love yellow flowers.
It really was very lovely in the park. I wish we’d selected that as our destination, because the place is full of hiking trails taking you to amazing scenic vistas through a great forest of strange giants. And you know…it’s quiet there. Very, very quiet.
No planes roar overhead. No sirens pierce your hearing. No damned helicopters buzz you and peer down at you. No dogs bark. No cars roar. No damned train honks and bonks its way up the tracks. Just birdsong and the whisper of the wind in your ears.
Please, God. Let me move to Yarnell.
Or to Picture Rock, Arizona. This seems to be an unincorporated worker’s camp out in the middle of freaking nowhere, probably for farm and national park workers. A whole bunch of trailers and shacks squat on the desert, far enough from the 10 and from Marana that you can’t hear the racket, enough out in the desert to make you feel like you’ve found a hive of desert rats. At night, that place would be so dark you could even see the stars.
Movin’ on…
Arizona Sonora Desert Museum
This place, a great local favorite and still a center of research in geology and biology, has become more of a tourist trap than it used to be. It hasn’t changed significantly since I last visited, 15 or 20 years ago.
By the time we got there, the heat must have been pushing 100 degrees. SDXB, being a Michigander, doesn’t do well at all in the heat. He was beginning to get unhappy.
We took refuge in the shade of a tourist ramada to consume the lunch he’d brought: ham sandwiches, potato chips, and snacks like cinnamon-sugared almonds and Cracker Jacks and sunflower seeds. All of them highly salted: if you weren’t already thirsty in the hot, dry air, you’d be parched by the time you finished that stuff. 😀
Even though it was hot and mid-week, we still shared the space with kids on school excursions, their fried and cranky teachers, and a number of misbegotten tourists. Better than when the place is over-run, but…oh well. At one point we heard two men and two women, all middle-aged imports to Arizona, going on and on in the single stupidest conversation I’ve ever heard in my life, on the subject of how you must kill every rattlesnake and every black widow you see.
The more I get to know people, the better I like my dog…
Among a variety of educational exhibits aimed at the second-grade level, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum has some first-rate botanical gardens and a few animal exhibits that, not having been visibly updated in decades, now seem cramped and out of date. There was, for example, a kind of zoo enclosure that held a lonely black bear, the poor beast evidently bored stupid.
And a captive blue heron, also apparently alone, trapped in a wire cage. The fake rocks and fake ponds, while awe-inspiring and attractive when we were younger things, no longer seem either humane or convincing here in the 21st century. Strange: I used to think this place was so neat and so top-of-the-line. Now, not so much. As a botanical garden it’s good. As a zoo…maybe it’s time for them to get out of that business.
It still has its spectacular vistas, although those are inexorably being encroached upon by development: what appears to be a sprawling water treatment plant, the tacky structures, the handsome trailers.
Pave paradise, put up a parkin’ lot… Even an area like Southern Arizona, which tends to house people of a more enlightened turn of mind — it’s dominated economically and influenced culturally by the University of Arizona — can’t resist the devastation wreaked by simple population growth. The more people, the more mess.
Once there were green fields, / Touched by the sun…
On the Road Again…
The moreness of the people was very much in evidence when we got back on the 10 to head to lovely Phoenix. Now it was pushing rush hour (which starts at 3:00 p.m. in these parts), and again the road was just mobbed, even more crowded Phoenix-bound at 75 mph.
We began to see the antics of the road warriors as comic. Delirious with heat, maybe?
At one point a guy in an old white truck with an equally run-down old white trailer charged up behind a big, later model pick-up, climbed up the tailpipe, then swerved right into the adjacent lane, passed the pickup (which was going the limit), and swerved back in front of it with maybe three feet to spare.
So it went, gathering drama as we approached town. Through the ugly sprawl of the East Valley, along the border between Third-World South Phoenix and sparkly gentrified downtown Phoenix, around the bend and up toward the ‘hood. Another guy in a pick-up swerves around irrationally. SDXB speculates: Must be on the phone. As we pass him, I glance over and see…yup! He’s yakkin on the phone at 65 mph.
We get off on the surface streets, which are no less crazy. At the parking lot of one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, some guy is trying to get out to turn right onto Conduit of Blight Blvd. But an idiot on Conduit of Blight has decided he must go into the parking lot, and so he has headed in and stopped his car, nose to nose up against the guy who’s trying to get out. Both are blocked, and neither will give way.
The red light changes, thank goodness, before the bullets begin to fly.
So it was good to scurry back into the Funny Farm and shut the door behind us.
In recent months, I’ve felt myself growing more and more reclusive. I hardly go out at all anymore. I don’t go shopping. I don’t go to events. I go only to those places and activities to which I’m already committed or that I can’t escape — like grocery shopping or the dentist. It has occurred to me that something must be wrong with me: maybe it’s a function of age. Early Alzheimer’s? Or a mental problem. Nascent agoraphobia? I used to love to drive around, even in city traffic. Now the very thought gives me a flinch reflex.
Am I losing my marbles?
But no. I don’t think so.
You would have to be crazy to want to go out and do battle with those teeming, rabid, sweaty mobs. To risk your safety on roads best described as homicidal. To rub shoulders with people who need only open their mouths to demonstrate how far an IQ score can fall and still leave its holder ambulatory.
No wonder I don’t want to go out. No wonder I’d rather stay in my house and in my yard and in my pool than engage this Brave New World.
