Arizona = HELL

The thermometer doesn't lie, bitches.

So I’m on the road again, posting Blu hoo from the passenger seat of a rented Volkswagen Jetta, which isn’t a bad car at all other than the fact that the entire interior is black plastic, which absorbs heat the way a Tena Twist ® takes on lady-pee. And if you look at the photo above, you can see PROOF that the temperature outside the Jetta today was 110 fucking hell-degrees. That means that if my calculations are right based on the relative size of the skin grafts I’m going to need on the backs of my thighs, the INSIDE of the four-wheeled-furnace was mother-fucking HOTTTTTTTTTTTTT!

I am just baffled that there are so many people in Arizona. Armadillos and tarantulas and scorpions and rattle snakes and other evil things that would naturally populate hell, I can understand. But what in God’s name possesses humans to want to live in this inferno? There are just miles and miles and miles of desolate terrain that look mostly like either elephant skin caked in clay or my heels in the summer months. I cannot conceive of the notion that someone looked out over the parched landscape of bakedom and thought, Now, THIS would be a terrific place to settle and raise a family!

It says a lot about a place when every, single Arizonian who found out that we are from Indiana looked at us gravely and asked, “Oh, my God. How are you handling the heat?” NOT. That’s how. I feel bad that mostly everybody looks like one of those witch heads we used to make out of shriveled apples at Halloween when we were kids. I kept wanting to stick cloves in everyone.

And all of the plants just look angry. I mean, there are 10-foot cacti with needles the size of, like, butcher knives, which means that they are almost as big as the one needle that asshole doctor stuck in my knee last year.

This plant will kill you in the night and like it.

There was a kid’s birthday party going on in a neighborhood we passed. All the torpid children were dragging uninflated balloons on strings because what’s the point of blowing them up when the trees in the yard have built-in weapons? I totally made that shit up, but it isn’t hard to imagine. I also imagine this exchange happens frequently:            

“Mommy, can I go outside and climb the tree in our backyard?”

“Sure, Billy! Don’t forget to take your phone so that you can call 911 when the bleeding gets too heavy.”

No wonder all the children look sad. They are probably going to die if they go out to play.

Even the hotel pool wasn’t much relief from the scorchage. It was so tepid that either no one knows how to make cool water in Arizona, or there was a whole lotta peeing going on in there. From the taste of the water that went all up in my nose and down my throat when I stepped off a sudden, un-marked drop into the deep part, I’m going to have to go with that second choice. The only upside is that my sinuses are now sterile.  

So even though I love my dear friend whose wedding occasioned my journey to sunny, Arizona (which is Navajo for “Fuck you, white people for forcing us to live on this God-forsaken reservation; We curse you to drink your own pee and die.”), I probably won’t go back any time soon. You know what they say: “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the Arizona.”