Even More Freaky Tucson Landmarks

And now for more funny/unusual/admirable things a person can find just sitting around in the city of Tucson.

This giant Easter Island head used to live at Magic Carpet Golf on Speedway Boulevard until that place closed several years ago. Now it stands in front of The Hut, a bar on 4th Avenue. It's nice that somebody found a use for it beyond smashing it into gravel-sized chunks and tossing it in a landfill. Also, for people with sentimental memories of that particular miniature golf course, this huge head (which everyone insists on calling a “tiki head” in spite of the fact that it doesn't bear any resemblance to actual tiki designs) will serve as a permanent reminder—provided The Hut doesn't close—of a bygone time in Tucson, now serving as a landmark for a place where U of A students can get tipsy on beer and cocktails while trying to get laid. So really, not all that different from miniature golf.

All hail this weird thing! I have no idea what this is or who put it there. It's quite a thing, though. You can find this on 1st Avenue just a block or so south of the Pima Library. Metal sculpture isn't uncommon in Tucson—there's a place called the Sculpture Resource Center near downtown where projects like this sometimes come into being. Maybe that's where it's from. I don't know. I like it because it's a jungle gym with metal flowers on it—how often do you see that? Not every day, I can tell you that much.

Paul Bunyan. So what, right? Lots of towns have a big Paul Bunyan standing outside of a business, especially if it sells timber or pre-cut log cabins or something. I have to admit I have a soft spot for this kind of thing. Don't ask me why, but I like cheesy Americana. It's not like I'm a big flag-waving, truck driving, red-blooded patriot in the Toby Keith vein, but if I go into a mom-and-pop diner with antique farm implements on the walls alongside varnished circular sections of logs painted with airbrushed bald eagles and American flags, I'm positively tickled. Again, I can't even begin to tell you why that is. And big Paul Bunyan statues fit right in there. I think I like the idea that they embody a piece of American folklore, a part of our storytelling history that we've kept alive. I feel the same way about chainsaw art of Bigfoot.

After somebody stole my bike seat, I took off for BICAS to buy a new (used) one. For some reason, I couldn't find it, even though I've been there several times. While riding around the neighborhood seatless, I came across this metal sculpture. Judging from the weathering, I assume it's bronze. The dual fish were the first thing to catch my attention. Then I changed angles and saw this:

There's a horned toad hiding between the fish. I really like this piece, but I find it a little confusing. I get that the horned toad represents the desert, but what do the fish symbolize? The only place you'll find fish in southern Arizona is at a sushi restaurant. Do they refer to the now-deceased Santa Cruz and Rillito rivers, that maybe once had fish in them before they turned into dry riverbeds? I suppose it's possible. No matter what the sculpture is trying to communicate, I like the design. Animal sculptures are the best.

So what's the best animal sculpture in Tucson, after the Snake Bridge? Maybe it's this Tyrannosaurus Rex next to a McDonald's on the corner of East Grant and Tanque Verde. Up until recently, I thought this was another remnant of the same miniature golf course our booze-purveying friend from Easter Island came from. Not at all; the owner of the McDonald's has a son who was a huge fan of Jurassic Park, like any healthy child. So he commissioned a T. Rex from a company that had a connection to the construction of the animatronic dinosaurs from the movies, for $55,000. Some kids have very charmed lives. I like this thing for two reasons: first, as I think everyone can agree, dinosaurs are cool. And second, it's nice to see a McDonald's do something to set itself apart, considering McDonald's restaurants come in about two designs, the exact same ones you see all across the United States. A dinosaur statue such as this one adds a personal touch you rarely see at chain restaurants, or chain businesses in general. So kudos to you, wealthy McDonald's owner who buys his kid super-expensive presents. You've given us something we can all enjoy, even if we go out of our way to avoid McDonald's greasy, weird-tasting food.

An Empty Building Makes Me Want To Write About Gabrielle Giffords' Shooting

I was on a bike ride and hastily snapped this picture of the building that once served as Gabrielle Gifford's Tucson offices. That was, I assume, up until about a year or two ago. Now that she's left the House of Representatives, the building has a For Lease sign out by the sidewalk.

I first heard about the shooting while we were in Hawaii. We were at the Starbucks in the town of Waimea because we needed to do laundry and the laundromat there was the one closest to us (only a 30-minute bus ride away from our little shack out in the sticks). I happened to look at the rack of newspapers and saw the headline on the front page. I cracked open the laptop and sure enough, there were a slew of stories about how the Arizona representative and a number of other people had been shot by a gunman armed with a 9mm. pistol and an extended clip, some of them fatally.

The story shocked me for two reasons. Most obviously, because there had been a mass shooting in the city we had left only months before; and also because there was this weird feeling that some of the city's cross-eyed lunacy had reached halfway across the Pacific Ocean to touch us in a coffee shop in the middle of a small, sparsely populated Hawaiian town.

There was a lot of talk in the aftermath about how the hyper-conservative political atmosphere of the time led to the tragedy. I have to admit that's exactly how I felt when I first heard about it. Obama hadn't been in office a week and the Tea Party was calling him Hitler. Fringe right-wingers were getting semi-serious consideration in the media, when ten years earlier they had to be content with handing out self-published pamphlets at gun and knife shows. At a time when people were muttering things about secession, the overthrow of a “tyrannical” government, and an allegedly socialist Democratic party, it didn't surprise me that a Democrat had been shot by a wacko. The way that left-leaning news outlets and opinion-makers charactarized the event as a real life manifestation of the violent eliminationist fantasies of the extreme right proved to be premature in light of the gunman's obvious schizophrenia. What the shooting seemed to prove was less that the radical right wing poses a real danger to life and limb (as far as I'm concerned, they're just noisy and obnoxious) and more that background checks on firearm purchases are a great idea, along with better medical care for the mentally ill. Guns and crazy people go together like jackhammers and dynamite.

I was in no way surprised, though, that such a thing had happened in Arizona. Mass shootings happen all over the place these days, but it took Arizona for a politician to get shot. This place is so libertarian people deliver their own mail. It's no secret that politics here are totally batshit. What did The Daily Show call it, “The Meth Lab of Democracy”? Yeah, that's what the state is known for, that's its claim to fame. Stuff like SB1070 (the Show Your Papers law for those of you who weren't paying attention then), Sheriff Joe Arpaio tormenting prisoners for his own amusement and racially profiling random brown people, the Tucson Unified School District banning Mexican-American studies from the classrooms, as well as making it illegal to mention any texts that present a pro-Chicano point of view, all of that goes a long way toward making Arizonans look like a bunch of assholes. Plenty are, and a disproportionate number get elected to the legislature, but most are sincerely decent human beings. But does anyone hear about the good stuff? No, it's all racism and attempted political assassinations. If it wasn't for the sunshine and medicinal pot, no one would want to move here.

Public Art on Tucson's 4th Avenue

This is part one of what I intend to be an ongoing series on this blog showcasing interesting sculptural work, graffiti, miscellaneous objects of interest, and other trippy stuff around Tucson.

All up and down 4th Avenue, a commercial district/tourist trap emphasizing small boutiques, bars and restaurants, and resembling in some ways a miniturized version of the Haight in San Francisco, you find lots of sanctioned, professional graffiti art—or is it considered graffiti when it's not illegal? I don't know. Some of it might not even be done with spray paint, but it all adds the kind of bohemian vibe businesses on the avenue like to present.

Some of these have been around for years, others went up in the last year or so.

I'll start with this great collection of images just off of 6th Street and 4th. This is some of the coolest mural work in Tucson right now. I don't know the name of the artist or artists, though some of the work is signed with the crew names.

 

 

 

Here's a rattlesnake and a Day of the Dead-style skull on the outside of a place called Creative Ventures.

 

 

These Spy Vs. Spy guys guard one side of the Magpies Pizza.

 

 

Did you love the 60's and 70's?  Do you wish you were born earlier than 1991 so you could have seen classic rock before it was classic?  Hippie Gypsy knows how you feel.  The exterior of the building is a love letter to an era.

 

This mural has been on the southeastern corner of 4th and 6th Street for a long time. I think it depicts local characters from over the years. It's shown in two parts here, top picture the left side, bottom the right.

 

A medusa head stares from the wall of Medusa Kabob House (side comment: this place used to be a terrible restaurant called The Casbah, where the staff was stoned and the food was the worst kind of vegan).

This would make a great tattoo. It's on the upper wall on the south side of ZOE Boutique.

These patriotic images are on the side of Miller's Surplus, naturally.

This is on a wall on Stone Avenue, just before the downtown underpass.

Here's a woman worshipping produce on the side of The Tasteful Kitchen on Stone (I seem to have wandered away from 4th Avenue).

And finally, this stuff on the side of an art gallery on the northeast corner of Stone and Speedway.

 

Some of these are better than others, but isn't that true of everything? It makes for a better urban environment, as far as I'm concerned, and there's a bunch of it all over town. I'll post more as I collect more pictures.

A Short Meditation On Bike Theft In Tucson

What's missing?

Over seven years of living here, I've had one bike stolen and the wheels stolen off the bike that replaced the first one. I've had the battery-powered lights pulled off and shattered on the pavement. Someone tried to steal the seat by pulling the seat post out of the frame, but stopped midway through and decided not to go any further for some reason, maybe because they were afraid of being caught. On all of these occasions I had left my bike unattended while working a shift at my job. Tucson is many things, and one of those things is a nest of bicycle thieves.

A lot of people in the Tucson metro area ride bicycles. Many are students, some are enthusiasts, and others are too poor or too previously-incarcerated to own a car or a license. In my case, we don't own a car because we are a) too poor, b) too cheap, and c) too environmentally conscious (in a certain light you can actually see rainbow colors refracting through our halos). After a year of riding the bus and finding it to be a stressful and unreliable way of getting around, I switched to bicycles, and they've remained my chief mode of transportation around the city of Tucson. The bicycle I own is important to me, it gets me to places I don't just want to go but need to go, and without it I'd find life in the city much more challenging than it already is.

Which is why I've been in a foul mood for the last few days. On Sept.2, some asshole stole the seat off my mountain bike, including the seat post. The bike was locked to the metal rail right outside our apartment door, meaning the thief was passing by and happened to see a bike with a removable part he could run off with, or worse, is someone currently living in the same complex with us. It doesn't matter either way, I'm just as pissed that I have to replace the seat. On top of everything else we've been dealing with in the last month (trouble getting a land line installed in our studio apartment, an apparent bedbug infestation, difficulty finding jobs) this is the shit-flavored icing on a big crap cake. At least as far as the seat goes, there's a great used bicycle collective called BICAS that sells parts. I've purchased a new seat, but still need a seat post that fits my frame. Most of the stuff I need will cost less than ten bucks all together, much less than I would pay at most bike shops.

I hate to keep harping on the crime in Tucson, but there it is. I've just been the victim of a property crime. What I hate is that, for the person who stole the seat, that part means nothing more than a couple more bucks toward buying drugs. It's not like they're going to get a lot of money out of it. But for me, it's a part of my single best means of transportation, my wheels, something I use daily to live my life here. It was a petty crime, and I can easily replace the part, but it sucks to be a victim. And the incident serves as a reminder that to live in Tuscon, you have to tolerate chronic, consistent theft. That's just how it is here.

Strange Tucson Art, Public and Private

You know what living in Tucson is like? It's like finding an old shoebox in the attic of an abandoned house. You open the box wondering what could be inside, and then: “Whoa...What are these, glass figurines of camels karate fighting? Dinosaurs made from the innards of old alarm clocks and cell phones? An exact replica of Christopher Lloyd's head? What the hell is this stuff?”

Tucson has weird or intriguing things hidden all over the place that you'd miss if you didn't take the time to look for them, meaning you're not looking for anything specific as far as you're concerned until the moment you see it, and then you think, “Ah, there it is.” It's an old shoebox of a town, seemingly plain and uninteresting at first glance—no glitzy skyline or anything like that—and then you open it up and see what's inside--a bunch of crazy stuff, objects that take you by surprise and make you consider whether you've ever encountered anything like them.

In 2009, my wife and I attended the All Souls Procession, an event that takes place every November in Tucson (and that I'll talk about in greater detail in a later post). At the end of the festivities, we wandered over to the Solar Culture Gallery on Toole Avenue. I think it was the first time we'd ever been inside. The space displays artwork on a rotating schedule from a number of Tucson artists, and regularly adds new work. As we moved through the building, we stepped into a side room just off the main space, and saw these:

 

The sculptures shown are the work of Steven Eye. What I like about them is that they have a stylistic connection to the work of H.R. Giger, with organic human shapes blended into seemingly mechanical, artificial structures. His work is less surreal or disturbing than Giger's, though, making it more accessible and in some ways more beautiful. The emphasis is on symmetry and perfection; aesthetically pleasing human faces serve as the focal point of head dresses, helmets, and body suits that simultaneously evoke ancient Egypt, Mayan and Aztec culture, and alien worlds. It's easy to picture these designs appearing in a science fiction film with a mystical slant, a new adaptation of the Dune novels or something in the same spirit.

Those photos don't even represent the majority of his work in the gallery. Much of the space itself is adorned with decorative sculptures and designs integrated as long-term installations. They're the natural result of a powerful imagination grounded in solid talent, and when I came across them it made me glad to know that objects so off-beat, admirable, and strange inhabit the same town I do.

Less bizarre but every bit as striking is Toby the Griffin on Scott Avenue. In the words of the website Creative Machines, “Griffins originally perched on the corners of the Carnegie Library overlooking Scott Avenue in Tucson. They were removed in the renovation of 1938 but one escaped. You can see his footprints where he jumped to the sidewalk and walked away.”

There are in fact footprints stamped into the sidewalk near the sculpture, adding to the coolness of the piece. It's the work of Joe O'Connell, and is just the kind of public art I like, fanciful and fun and done with a sense of whimsy. I'm glad the city agreed to it. It even has lights in its chest that come on at night. Every city should have one of these or something just as fantasy-related and inspired. Every city should have fifty.

Another thing every city should consider having is giant animals built into the infrastructure, animals that serve as walkways, tunnels, fountains, roads, whatever can be reasonably fit into the daily life without getting in the way. Tucson's done it with the Snake Bridge, a structure designed by Simon Donovan that spans Broadway Boulevard just east of downtown. It functions as part of a walking/bike path, and at the tail end there's a motion-sensitive speaker that plays a rattle for anyone exiting or entering on that side of the bridge. Just like the griffin, it's a whimsical and unusual thing to come across in a city, and I dig it. 

Oddly, some people have complained about it over the years, saying it makes the city look like a miniature golf course. I don't understand what they're talking about. Honestly, you'd rather live in a city with the same dull buildings and bridges you find everywhere else? I prefer a town that tries to set itself apart and adds something to the aesthetic experience of living there. It's fun, dammit, it's amusing, you can get boring architecture anywhere, so why have it here? This town probably needs a Snake Bridge, and a griffin, and trippy outer space Egyptians. That's why they're here and not in a different, less deserving city.

The fact that some people don't approve of a Snake Bridge might be a moot point now anyway, because the thing needs painting and repair that the city can't afford. The sad part is that such news can only mean Tucson will get less of this kind of thing, not more. I'd like to see them turn the whole place into a giant southwestern Dr. Seuss toy box, with insane statues and buildings and parks at every turn. It would mesh perfectly with the oddball character that makes Tucson so compelling, and likely spur an uptick in tourism. Cities like New Orleans and San Francisco became famous for their weirdness, so why not Tucson? Might as well capitalize on it.

Tucson Crime and General Weirdness

When I initially set out to write this blog, I considered for a while what the focus would be. I finally settled on the idea that it would encompass the full range of things I've encountered in close to five years living here, along with any new impressions I gather now that I've moved back after a year on the road. I want to be fair here, I don't want to emphasize only the negative aspects of the city, nor am I interested in painting an unrealistically sunny portrait. If you leave out certain obvious things about the city—the crime, the poverty, the homelessness—then you're not really writing about Tucson. In a perverse way, it's those aspects that give the place some of its character. If you took away the twitchy, sun-blasted seediness that underscores much of the metro area and the outlying ramshackle suburbs, you'd really lose something, even though I know that to maintain that quality means to preserve the chronic poverty and desperation confronting you nearly everywhere you go within Tucson. Possibly one becomes so complacent about crime, addiction and hopelessness that after a while you come to think of it as “local color”.

I was riding the number 9 bus from Grant and Campbell one afternoon years ago when I overheard a conversation between three people in the back. I was only a few seats away, making it hard for me not to pick up every word. Not one of these people, two men and one woman, seemed to know each other. Yet in the space of a few minutes they launched into a discussion of the pros and cons of various local jails they had spent time in. “I just got out of the new prison. It's better than the old one.” “Anything's better than the county jail. That place sucks.” “Oh yeah, I've been in there a few times. Most of the guards are dicks.”

As I sat listening I thought to myself, What are the odds? Here are three people who've never met, who just happen to run into each other on a city bus, and they all have recent experience with incarceration.

I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised. Most people ride a city bus because they can't afford to drive, or have had trouble with the law that prevents them from holding a license. Statistically, it might be entirely probable that a small group of people riding the same bus have similar experiences with the courts. It got me thinking about the rate of crime in Tucson and how it compares to other cities in the U.S.

The numbers can seem either positive or negative, depending on how you look at them. The website Area Vibes writes that “[t]he Tucson crime index is 46% lower than the Arizona average and the Arizona crime index is 25% higher than the National average.” In other words, not as bad as the rest of the state on the average, but the state itself is about a quarter worse than the rest of the country. They go on to say that “[t]he Tucson violent crime rate is 53% higher than the Arizona average and the Arizona violent crime rate is 40% higher than the National average.” Pretty hard to put a good spin on that. Pheonix's violent crime rate is 29% higher than the Arizona average, according to the same site, and it's a bigger city.

Percentages aside, I tend to rely on personal anecdotal evidence when it comes to how I evaluate the level of crime in the city. I recognize that all cities have some crime, it's an inevitable part of living in a high concentration of human beings, but you can often get a sense of the criminal culture of a place after being there for just a short while, especially if you spend a lot of time on foot. San Francisco, in the supposedly mellow state of California, felt like a likely place to get into a violent confrontation with a stranger if you weren't careful where you stepped. Over the course of three days, I saw more people yelling, threatening, or snapping at passerby, whether on the street or on public transportation, than anywhere else I've been. Manhattan feels as safe as a theme park most of the time, but it's a de facto police state where you can't turn around without seeing NYPD, and though Spanish Harlem was a little shady—somebody set a car on fire for no discernible reason, and a guy offered us drugs out of nowhere—that was the worst we saw. Atlanta, GA, in my studied opinion, is kind of a shithole: I saw a guy get his cell phone stolen out of his hand on the street, which led to a block-long foot chase; and the area east of the Five Points neighborhood is to be avoided by tourists valuing their safety (the city has no moral qualms about sending tourists there to see the Martin Luther King Historical District, however, despite the obvious presence of drug dealers, infrastructural deterioration, and the strong possibility of being openly harassed, as we were).

One doesn't have to be in Tucson long to feel the persistent hum of a criminal culture inside the metro area. I'm not talking Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, more like a low-end commitment to petty larceny, drugs, and angry shouting. The first police helicopters I ever saw were here, coming out mostly at night, prowling the airspace with floodlights scanning the ground in a wide field of artificial daytime. When we lived in a tiny guest house off Alvernon Way seven years ago, we'd sometimes hear them circling the neighborhood in the middle of the night, flying so close to the ground it sounded like they were trying to land on the roof. One night as my wife walked home from work, a floodlight stopped on her for a moment before moving on, satisfied she wasn't the fugitive they were looking for. Down the road, at the intersection of Alvernon and Grant, the Circle K seemed to get robbed every other week, yellow tape circling the parking lot with two or more cop cars parked in front of the store.

                                                                                                        Google Images

I'll never forget the time I got panhandled by the same meth addict two days in a row, using the exact same elaborate story both times--stuck in town, friend was supposed to wire him money but never came through, collecting money for a bus ticket.  He seriously didn't remember me turning him down the day before, and that he'd told me the same thing.  Maybe it was presumptuous of me to think of him as a tweaker, but a mummy-like physique, bad teeth and worse complexion tend to be dead giveaways.  

I worked at a family-owned store in the same area next to a Fry's grocery store.  Over the course of a few years I saw a man tackled by two police officers right in front of the store's entrance, multiple people being nabbed by police in the parking lot for shoplifting, several loud arguments, a drunk homeless man with his pants around his ankles yelling at passerby (this also within a few feet of the store's entrance), I had one bicycle stolen and both wheels stolen off another, I almost had the seat stolen off the same bike (it looked like whoever had tried to take it gave up partway through), I caught a guy smoking meth or crack next to the dumpster when I was taking the garbage out at the end of the day, and one afternoon I watched as a man stood outside of a van and systematically, one at a time, shook soda cans, tossed them in a high arc, and let them hit the ground where they exploded in sunbursts of foam.  It was one of the most random things I've ever seen anyone do.  He did that for at least fifteen minutes straight and nobody even came over to see what he was doing or why.  Did he have more soda than he needed and decided that was the most entertaining way to get rid of it?  Was he testing out a new weapon?  Did he think he was at the county fair and might win a stuffed Spongebob?  I'm never going to know the answer to any of those questions--I'll just live the rest of my life with the image of soda foam splattering against blacktop, and consider that good enough.   

That was a pretty bad neighborhood, but our second apartment, a cheap but very livable one-bedroom in a complex with a decent pool, was nestled among quaint, attractive, slightly more upscale homes. Nevertheless, one night I heard two guys get into a fist fight in front of the complex, which seemed to consist of one guy getting punched and then bellowing “C'mon! Let's go! Let's go! You wanna do this? Let's go!” at his attacker for five minutes. I thought about calling the cops, but didn't want to get out of bed. Another night there were four pistol shots about a block away; that time I did call 911, and the woman on the other end had this tone in her voice that said “You're bothering me with this shit? Call me when you're dying.”

Weird things just kind of happened every so often. Sometime around two in the morning, we woke up to footsteps on the roof. Our apartment was on the second floor of a two-story building, and our bedroom was on the southeastern-most corner. Whoever had decided to climb up onto the roof in the dead of night (I'm just going to assume they were on the run from the cops, or bugfuck crazy) came up the opposite end, walked across the roof until they were right over our bedroom—over our bed, as a matter of fact—then climbed down to the street using the staggered brickwork on the corner of the building as hand-and-footholds. We weren't in any kind of danger, but still...weirdo on the roof at two in the morning.

And there was the crazy guy who came into the complex (in spite of the fact it was supposed to be locked to anyone except tenants) moaning “Help me! Help me!” over and over again. He looked healthy enough, dressed all in black, and was pretty young, not a day over twenty-five. He stopped at a door, leaned against it, then slid down to the ground. All the while he kept moaning “Help me!”. People peeked out their doors to see what was going on. Before long the apartment manager came out of his office to have a look. As soon as he came within a few feet of the young man, the man bolted up from the ground, staggered and spun around in confusion, and fled the complex. By now I could hear sirens closing in; I went out to the street to see what would happen next, and spotted the man booking from behind the building and down an alley, with a cop car following close behind. If he wasn't nuts, he must have been on some very interesting drugs. What else could make a guy go from a helpless, moaning heap to sprinting like an Olympian in the space of a couple of minutes?

In spite of all that, Tucson doesn't come across like a dangerous town. It's very seldom that I don't feel more or less safe here. There are lots of crazy people, but their madness seems to be focused mostly on themselves. If there are dangerous gangs, they must stick to their own neighborhoods, because I've never seen them. What you encounter most often is a pronounced eccentricity, a skewed approach to existence that the broad open skies and dry desert terrain seem to encourage. It can be a beautiful thing, really—I've never been anywhere that has such a unique collection of kooks, visionaries, artists, musicians, and freaks. Much more than any of its shadier elements, it's the remarkable creativity of many of Tucson's residents that I find most memorable every time we're away, and it's what I most often mention to people whenever they ask me about where I live.

As I've said before, it isn't my goal to make Tucson look bad, overrun with crime, inept, or a city to stay away from. I think more people ought to come here and check it out. It makes an intriguing tourist destination, a place of mesmerizing sunsets, great art and music, charming southwestern architecture, and one of the world's most verdant deserts. Owing to my personality, there are times when, in the act of describing the life I've had here, I focus too much on the negative out of morbid obsession and a love for the sensational. I apologize to any long-time residents who read this and think, “Jesus, why doesn't this guy just move, then?” Cities are like people, they have good and bad qualities, and as with any human relationship, you have to acknowledge all of a city's faults and highlights if you really ever hope to know it.

And in that same spirit of good will, look for these upcoming topics:

The All Souls Procession

The Loft Theatre

The Santa Cruz River Trail

Tucson Yard Care and the Desert of Doom

See, it's possible to have a pretty yard in southern Arizona without draining precious fluid out of the aquifer and damning the rest of us to a slow death from thirst. What a charming arrangement of indigenous cactus and gravel. You wouldn't think plants and rocks by themselves would be so aesthetically pleasing, but the proof is right there for all to see. That is the way you landscape when water is at a premium. It's like Frank Herbert's Dune, but with tasteful yards.

I don't know what this person is thinking. Grass lawns are so uncommon in Tucson they stick out like canker sores. I can't help but think this is kind of a “fuck you” to everyone who bothers to landscape responsibly. What does this prove, exactly? That you're an arrogant asshole? In western Washington state where I grew up, you get to have grass. Hell, try not having grass. It overwhelms everything like a green disease. But in southern Arizona? A grass lawn says you're ignorant, obstinate, and functionally irrational. Next they'll be trying to put artificial snow on the mountains to bring in more skiing.

Water waste is a big part of the culture of southern Arizona. Tucson has several golf courses, all of them suitably green and much too big. I don't grudge people the right to play golf if they want to, I just think they should do it somewhere else. Like, where grass grows more or less naturally, and doesn't require the constant use of extremely limited water resources. It's stupid and selfish, but I know all too well that calling people that won't stop them from doing it.

People want what they want, even if they can't really have it and it isn't any good for them. It's what many of us think the American Dream is: having anything and everything, with no upward limit. But you're not supposed to have everything you want. That's the way a spoiled child thinks. People spend far beyond their means and go into debt to buy consumer items they don't need and grow bored with. We've become so obsessed with consumption that we've now fetishized eating; there are a couple of popular TV networks devoted to it. Who hasn't watched the guy on Man Vs. Food shovel meat and cheese into his face until his kidneys shut down? When you think more about food than you do about your blood sugar, you have a problem.

Most of us are guilty of being wasteful. Do I shut off the water in the shower while I'm shampooing my hair? No. Well, sometimes, but mostly no. Do I occasionally use paper towels instead of cloth? Yes. But I'm trying to do better, as I think a lot of us are in many ways. The wastefulness I see in Tucson is, as many have become aware in recent years, endemic to modern civilization as a whole. But while alternative energy resources might help us cut back on the use of fossil fuels, there's nothing that can replace water in the human diet. Once it's gone from a region, it ain't comin' back. It doesn't rain much in the desert, and I don't see a lot of effort in southern Arizona to create reservoirs from captured rainwater. What we have is limited, and we have to be smarter about how we use it, and how to prevent a disaster when it does eventually run out for good.

                                                                                                        Google Images

Some Personal Tuscon History

In late 2006, my wife and I moved to Tucson, AZ from Washington State. She wasn't my wife at the time; after dating for about eight months, we decided to move out of state together and see what developed. She had plans of possibly attending the University of Arizona, but wasn't really sure if that would happen or not. What she knew was that she didn't want to keep living in Washington, the place where she was raised and had had enough of by the time she was sixteen. Off and on she'd lived in Missouri to attend Stephens College, Oxford, England to attend college there, and in San Francisco for a few years. Despite her efforts to get away, at some point she would always come back to Washington, and she always hated it.

I didn't hate it so much, but then, I'd never really been anywhere else. It's where I was born and raised, where I was more or less educated, and all I knew of America and the world. Like most provincial people, my perspective on life was grossly limited to the things I was used to and the people I'd known since I was young. There was home, and there was everywhere else. I considered everywhere else to be largely out of reach. That kind of provincialism and limited scope was precisely what my then-girlfriend despised about the part of Washington where we lived, and it amazes me to this day that she saw enough in me to want to hitch her life to mine.

It was a big move for me to uproot myself from the place I knew and start a new life with someone else in a city neither of us had ever been to and knew very little about. My parents thought I was crazy. The responses of friends and acquaintances ranged from cautiously supportive to outright resentful. The band I was in at the time especially seemed to take my leaving as a kind of betrayal, and I found I had to cut ties with those people if I was going to maintain my sanity over the course of the move.

Through August and September we moved into a guest house behind another house that was in the process of being renovated, on a side street off of Alvernon Way. I don't remember exactly how big it was, but it couldn't have been more than 425 square feet, if even that. The living room and bedroom were the same space, a tiny kitchen connected to that, and off the kitchen was the bathroom, all set in a straight line. It was small, but comfortable, and we made it work for a little over seven months before moving to a one-bedroom close to downtown. We had access to the washer and dryer in the otherwise empty house in front of us, a gas range, and a dry, hardscrabble yard. The security deposit was an unheard-of $150, and our rent was $450, electricity included. To put that in perspective, apartment managers in Washington typically want a deposit the size of the rent, plus the rent for the previous month and the month you're moving in. 

The low cost of living is one of the things that has, over time, kept us coming back to Tucson. After living on Hawai'i's Big Island for a year, we returned to Tucson. And now, after more than a year on the road traveling through the eastern United States (a trip you can read about on easterntrails.blogspot.com), we've come back a second time to begin the next phase of our lives. In total, we've lived here for the better part of five years, with a projection of another two years before we leave again.

The reason for the low cost of living is obvious once you've spent about a week in the Tucson metro area. The city is very poor compared to many other American cities, and it resides in the poorest county in Arizona. As a result, the rate of crime is high, a fact we discovered two weeks after moving here.

The laundry room in the empty house had a door that didn't lock. Normally, one wouldn't be inclined to think of that as a problem. We'd gotten into the habit of sometimes leaving our laundry in the dryer overnight with the intention of taking it out in the morning. One morning, I went out to the laundry room and noticed something unusual. The load looked a lot smaller than the one I had put in the night before. The towels were missing, and there were fewer socks and underwear than I remembered. It took me a minute to realize someone had stolen half our load. I was confused; who the hell steals laundry? TV's and stereos I can see, but underwear? When I told my wife, she was as surprised as I was, but eventually concluded that anyone who would go through the trouble of stealing socks and towels out of a stranger's dryer probably needed them more than we did.

It was a bad neighborhood. Not bad in the sense that there were roving gangs of armed thugs (though Tucson does have those, mainly on the south end), but bad in the sense that you couldn't go a day without being panhandled by a meth addict or alcoholic. In a residential area a couple of blocks off a main thoroughfare, that's pretty bad. Prostitutes are common enough in the business districts between Oracle Road and Alvernon Way that any woman walking alone stands a chance of being propositioned, particularly by men in big pickup trucks with the names of the construction companies they work for clearly emblazoned on the doors. It wasn't until years later that I found out the block inside Grant Road, Dodge, and Alvernon—our neighborhood―had some of the highest numbers of meth-related arrests, which would explain the rows of up to twenty cop cars I'd see sometimes parked up and down Flower Street.

And there was the night a stranger showed up in our yard sometime before midnight, pacing around and talking on a cell phone. From what we could make out, it sounded like he was talking to a 911 dispatcher. We went outside to question him, and it was immediately obvious he'd been drinking. As he explained it to us, he'd been hanging out with a female friend when her boyfriend showed up and started beating on him. “That guy's crazy. We weren't even doing anything. She told me she wasn't with him anymore, so I don't see what he's so mad about.” He said he was calling a cop in case the guy came looking for him. We told him that was fine, but he needed to do it somewhere other than our yard. As this was going on I recalled hearing, about fifteen minutes earlier, a lot of loud, angry shouting down the street. I assumed the man in our yard had been involved. A few moments later, a police officer showed up, after going back and forth a couple of times looking for the address, and started asking the man some questions. It was one of the few times I'd been glad to see a cop. We went back in the house, glad not to have to deal with a drunken idiot anymore.

It took a few weeks for me to realize Tucson has a good side that offsets the general seediness you encounter daily. In November of that year we attended our first Day of the Dead procession, dressed in a tuxedo and wedding dress with our faces painted in skull makeup, to march along with a motley crowd of skeletons, demons, giant clown puppets and ghosts along 4th Avenue and through downtown. We saw a movie at the Loft Theatre, the coolest movie theater I've ever set foot in, devoted to foreign and independent film, cult favorites and B-movie oddities. Tucson has restaurants of nearly every type; I ate Vietnamese for the first time here, at a well-known eatery called Miss Saigon (which I'm currently boycotting because they badly screwed up a spring roll order for our wedding reception, but don't let that stop you from eating there). Our favorite at the moment is Mother Hubbard's on Grant and Stone (also the location of a decent Asian import store called, creatively, the Grantstone), a diner that specializes in southwestern ingredients and makes the majority of its food from scratch. 

This is a blog about Tucson, the Tucson I've known over the last seven years and Tucson as I live in it today. Some posts will read like essays, others like journal entries. All will reflect impressions and opinions of the city I have adopted as my home. I'll try, though it won't be easy, to say as many good things as bad about this addled, off-center, borderline wild west town. After all, as the title of the blog says, Tucson only kind of sucks.