Scathing visit to Phoenix, AZ

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July 10th 2008

Published: July 10th 2008

After the desert of California, we emerged from the desert to an illusion of non-desert that was in reality a desert superimposed over what had been less than a hundred years ago desert, in the normal and arid and sandy sense of the word. I'm going to write about my impressions of Phoenix, Arizona, and if you're a fan of the city you may not want to read. I'll start with a few general impressions, since these are the easiest, and then I will try to support them with specific impressions.
If there was a reason that I got stuck here for two weeks, it was to make sure that I had no remorse whatsoever about leaving the United States.
Phoenix is a city that exists with its only real resource being the constant sun. In a country with a normal amount of wealth, people avoid the desert as unpleasant and leave it be, quiet, barren, secretly full of life and often sacred. In a country that is obese with plundered capital, Phoenix exists as a malignant tumor on the pale and decaying underbelly of a monster that wants to destroy the world if only for sheer self loathing. I can't name the monster because words only confuse its identity, but those who have looked into its eyes know it. It's okay, it's in its death throes due to the inadvertant heroism of consciousness devoid agents of destiny like the Bush administration, we will be okay.
As I was saying, the origin of its existence as a city is the sun- it became an economy based on a steady flow of retirees in search of endless warmth and sun. In the past, people in my country lived in large houses with several generations living all in one house- grandparents, children, and grandchildren. The grandparents no longer worked and were able to teach the grandchildren the values and the beauty of the past and help the parents raise the children to be good and happy people, since the parents were often busy working to help provide for the whole family. Of course a generalization, but somewhere in the last one hundred years, it turned out that it was very profitable for families that once consisted of more than a dozen individuals to split up into multiple households. This amplified consumption which amplified profit.
Part of this development was that grandparents ought to live alone. With the huge amounts of disposable income individuals had at hand after world war two, why wouldn't retirees want to go live in eternal sun rather than stay with their children and grandchildren, who probably would just view them as a burden? And with the new endless supply of money, they could just fly to visit their families. Old age is unsightly, isn't it? Isn't it a better arrangement that the old go live somewhere else? Mutually beneficial, it seems like. If you ever wonder why the US has such incredibly high rates of gun murder, produces far more serial killers than any other country, as well as school shooters, etc., I'll bet this is key to understanding the phenomenon of our singular sickness. To skip ahead a few steps in logical tracing, it's what happens when a huge excess and imbalance of wealth amplifies selfishness.
So now I've gone on a tour of the philosophical origin of Phoenix. But can a city's origin affect its nature? The city sprawls for nearly as far as you can see in every direction, almost completely one story construction- many strip malls, housing developments, condos, and other hallmarks of the new America. You can't walk far without seeing empty lots, though. If the city was a being, you would think that it was determined to swallow up as large a piece of land as possible, spreading out all its resources as much as it possibly could. The downtown is almost always more or less deserted, as is most of the rest of the city, unless you count automobiles as inhabitants. The only people you see walking are usually black, mexican, or white drug addicts.
The University in Tempe is an exception- I saw people chatting in the streets on their way to mosque near here. There are a lot of students around the campus area. The campus food service seems to be in large part provided by the same corporations that populate mall food courts. I also visited a store called 'Hippie Gypsy' which is a small franchise selling hippy paraphernalia like clothing with 60's cultural icons and marijuana smoking devices, as well as other items associated with the counterculture that have now been absorbed. The people I saw and met here seemed happy and generally intelligent, though I'm not sure how aware they were of dilapidated houses just a few miles away that exhibited a level of poverty that would have been noteworthy even in Mexico. The campus in general seemed to ooze money and felt very isolated from the rest of the sprawl.
On a positive note, the public transport system was excellent, with bus service affordable and efficient all over the city. There were not very many white people on any of the buses, and I heard an anectdote about it not being uncommon for Mexican parents scolding their children for speaking spanish out of a desire to assimilate. The Mexican population is great in the city. There is very good and very cheap Mexican food available all over the city. I went to one place where the cook didn't speak English at all in the south end of the city. While I was eating I saw two white policeman arresting a Mexican man rather roughly but I don't know why.
While I was in Phoenix tragedy struck. A wire in my motorcycle that had somehow lost its insulation grounded on the frame of my motorcycle, shorting and burning both my stator and CDI, about 450 dollars worth of replacement parts. I tasted the first bitterness of motorcycle travel. We were staying at hostel, the cheapest place in town at 20 dollars a bed, with a flaming gay jingoistic libertarian New Yorker as a host. At first the place seemed nice, and they let us work on my bike there, but soon it became clear that something was not quite right. There was one very ugly scene where the manager blew up in violent rage at me when I suggested that the New York Times was controlled indirectly by the US government. I just think the disappearance of all their progressive commentators and the ownership of the newspaper is an interesting coincidence.
To escape the tension and paying a lot of money while we waited for parts, we went to camp at nearby lake Bartlett. This is an artificial lake created by a dam. If you are following my creation of the image of the spirit of Phoenix you will see how congruous the lake is with the city. Climb a hill nearby and you will see that a river valley has been filled with water, destroying all the vegetation of the hillsides. I wanted to walk around the lake. I walked up one shore, maybe seven miles. The entire shore was coated with garbage- mostly empty cans of Bud Lite, Budweiser, Miller, Miller Lite, Busch, Busch Ice, etc. There were also many abandoned shoes and other miscellaneous trash, like plastic palm fronds from fake palm trees. The whole shore was lined by a sickly looking foam that I now associate with polution.
Otherwise we camped in a nice spot and ate campbells soup directly out of the can. We heated it up on my stove. It was a peaceful spot, but in the daytime speedboats, ATV's and jet skis sped back and forth along the lake, and at night our neighbors generators and music ran late and loud. In order to get to our campspot we had to ride through the town of Carefree, an upscale retirement community with strictly enforced noise ordinances and a strangely high number of 60,000 dollar or more cars able to be spotted. I asked a gas station attendant about it, and he replied in an American working class dialect about all of the Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborginis, and other cars he had scene. I asked him if he lived in carefree, and he laughed bitterly and said that he and everyone who worked there lived in a nearby town and that the rents and property values were very high in Carefree.
It occured to me how many people there were around there whose recreation ie. all of their pleasure in life, revolved around gasoline related activities- speedboating, ATVs, cars, RVs, dirtbikes, jet skis, motorcycles, and such. I realized that the inevitable increase in gas prices(aside from reading about it, I had personally witnessed that gas prices were artificially low for a long time in the US) was going to hurt these people badly, and that they would probably condone any moral savagery to prevent expensive gas revealing their dependence on it and inability to engage in recreational activity without petroleum. I am sure they will adapt though, but change always hurts.
I was also a little surprised by the number of lawns in Phoenix. A lot of people have great desert suburban cactus gardens, but a lot also have lawns which must require a lot of water. Another anectdote I was told described the water conservation board building having a large lawn with constantly running sprinklers in front of it.
I liked Phoenix while I was there, though I was a little skeptical about it. Only in retrospect do I realize that it was kind of perverse. One night I went out to a weirdly hip bar and got drunk with some Dutch girls from the hostel. They had been working as nutritionists on a nearby Indian reservation and said that the health, alcohol abuse, and misery on the reservation was really depressing. I noticed that getting drunk I didn't feel as bad about things anymore. I didn't really care about all of the things I was observing. I was just vaguely focused on hitting on the girls- this annoying social consciousness I am subjecting the reader to was gone. I wonder if that is why alcohol is legal, because it does that? It certainly seems like it is helpful in making me at least not agonize about the horrible state of my home country.
I got drunk several times while at the hostel. One of the times I had a little to drink and a few cigarettes. I woke up around four am feeling a little weird. I was seeing a lot of colors and rippling on the ceiling above my bed. I tried to focus on the colors, to augment them. Soon I saw them as an avenue to more and more complex patterns, until it seemed as if I was surfing in a tunnel of millions of points of light and colors that formed alien images and some of them seemed to have a life and will of their own. I was barely aware of my body at this point. Then, as if from nowhere, the thought occured to me that I had a heart defect and I was going to die.
I felt as if icy invisible fingers gripped around my heart and tried to squeeze it and make it stop, while another hand grabbed what I felt was my life force and tried to rip it out of my mouth. I cried out loud from fear and recoiled with all my being. It felt like I escaped the hands, but I saw three foot tongues licking out of the ceiling, as if some malevolent being was trying to break through and get me. By focusing very hard on details like the feeling of the sheets, the air in my lungs, and other very physical things I distanced myself from it. If my thoughts became more abstract I felt like I was getting closer to it. I was terrified and couldn't sleep the rest of the night. For the next couple months I felt like something was watching me and waiting for an opportunity. Every night for the next two months I woke up, wide awake, at the same time of night, around 4 am, with a sensation of fear.
Whatever this experience was, presumably my own psychological instability, it was very scary and I hope that you can understand that something this crazy happening to me might have colored my view of the city towards the negative. This may have been entirely my fault, and I am working on dealing with things like this. In any case, suffice to say I had a bad time in Phoenix, pushing my bike through five miles of slums after it broke down, having mechanics try to rip me off, touring motorcycle dealerships and seeing incredible disparities in wealth.
One of the other details that stands out in my mind is reading through a plastic surgery magazine and seeing the almost all white clients of the surgeon looking deranged and miserable in both the before and after photos. The people I saw downtown in suits looked a lot like the people in the plastic surgery magazine. All white.
Phoenix has an excellent public library with really interesting interior and exterior architecture. There are a lot of computers and the library seems to be used by a lot of members of the community. High school kids fill it sometimes and are laughing. They have a lot of really good periodicals, like the Economist, Harpers, and other lefty liberal stuff that I like. They also have motorcycle and tattoo magazines which I also like. I also enjoy the home design, interior decorating, gardening, and travel magazines that I like to look at. I read a lot of them while waiting to use the computers to figure out stuff about the motorcycle.
Well, there I've done my best to provide a condensed version of what a visit to Phoenix looked like through my eyes.

Scathing visit to Phoenix, AZ

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