Parting Shots

A few final, random thoughts on Arizona:

• Three days here, and I reiterate my scruffy but well scrubbed comment about the boys here. The only time I saw a tattoo was on a fat woman at Wal-Mart. (I know, I know. Lock me up, but I needed a watch battery and didn't have time to waste.) It really reminded me how I want to launch my campaign for a tattoo-free America by 2012. If I want to read in bed, I'll pick up Proust, not look at the ink on my man's ass.
• Why, oh why, would old people want to retire to a place where it's over 90 degrees 90% of the year. I do love the high desert of Flagstaff, Prescott, etc. but Phoenix and Tucson are what I call hell. When I retire, I feel that I have earned my right to live someplace (likely Victoria) where it rarely gets above 60 degrees.
• On top of that I would like to make it illegal for anyone over 55 to wear shorts in public. Most definitely myself included in that.
  
• I am notoriously not attracted to blonds except for those that are a sub-category of those noted in bullet point number 1 and who seem to be in abundance in Arizona -- the aforementioned scruffy and scrubbed, light growth of beard, thinning to premature balding, lightly furry but not those hideous cotton candy forearms, lean but lightly defined, sweetly edgy and slight assertive. Perfection and grow like cacti on the highway here.
• What's up with the "You came at a nice time of year. The weather's gonna be perfect today." It's 95 fucking degrees in Phoenix today! Sorry, there's no amount of air conditioning that can compensate for that.
  
• Say what I may about those libertarian Republicans here, I commend them for providing free internet access at Sky Harbor allowing me to post this piece before I board my plane.
  

TUCSON

As if it weren't confusing enough that you take I-10 East to El Paso in order to go south to Tucson, all the exits through central Tucson where blocked for road construction with only one tiny sign saying you are supposed to use the access road as the freeway through the central part of the city. Being short on time for an appointment, I was screaming like a girl with rabies but did make it on time, albeit frazzled and cursing that I'd ordered a venti coffee 30 minutes earlier..
Doorway art. Don't ask.
Downtown has a lot of this and stumpy "highrise", sort of a large El Paso or tiny San Diego.


Ah, the start of a wonderful friendship. Any scowling barbs will be immediately deleted!!!!
A lot of this between Tucson and Phoenix. More than once I thought I was going from San Diego to Orange County and then remembered where I was.
I was pushing it to make it to the airport, so just managed to snap this campus shot just as a pack of scruffy-scrubbies scampered ou of my view.