7:38 p.m. The sun has gone down. And it’s 105 degrees under the ventilated shade structure on the back porch.
Central Arizona. Maricopa County. What a HELLISH place to live! Why do people settle here, anyway?
I got here because my parents dragged me here, when my father attempted to retire. (Failed, thanks to a major recession: he had to go back to work for another couple of years, much to his despair.)
Yeah. They thought Sun City was about the most brilliant village the human mind had ever conceived. Fine ticky-tacky houses. Gravel yards — no grass to water! Kids prohibited: no brats screaming outside your window when you’re trying to take a nap. Blacks prohibited: no negroid types pushing down your property values.
Yech!!!!!
As soon as they got moved and settled into their new brick hovel, they sent me down to Tucson and enrolled me in the University of Arizona. Because I was a National Honor Society scholar, they accomplished this by pulling me out of high school a year early: I never even set foot in a senior-year classroom.
Sun City is grim enough. Central Arizona forms the cake beneath that frosting: hot, intellectually backward, graced with bigotry….what a place! The UofA is a more or less adequate intellectual institution…though nothing like the school where I was set to go: U.C. Berkeley.
So…my arrival in Arizona was an encomium to disappointment.
And I do have to wonder, sometimes: if you don’t have a well-paying job here, WHY would you come here, and why would you stay here? Given that you have any choice in the matter…which I did not.
Why do I stay here? Well…I’m pretty well glued in. Everyone I know these days lives here. My son lives here. My jobs have been here. My paid-off house is here. My freelance business is now based here. Reckon I’m set here.
But it wouldn’t have been my choice….