The Great Desert.

Trip Start Mar 10, 2007

Trip End Ongoing

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Where I stayed

bus

(Tucson hotels)

Flag of United States Tucson, Arizona
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Eventually the trees of California gave way to a countryside that was flat and arid. Beautiful mountain ranges feathered the horizon. Old cars rusted black among the brush, brick houses crumbling under corrugated iron roofs housing nothing but rattlesnakes and ghosts of cowboys from the frontier days. We passed long forgotten gas stations rusting from decades in the unrelenting sun. Rest stops that varied from one western theme to the next; adobe, tee pees, forts.
Traveling through the vast expanse that is West Arizona; out where tall birds wade in a lake named after Indians. out where the deer and the antelope play. Out where the star light had no enemies and the badland winds had no friends. Out where the boogie stopped and the woogie began.
Late afternoon we roll into Tucson, Arizona. Under the blast of a vibrant blue sky and dazzling sun, the pueblo of Tucson hummed with hipster activity. Coffee shops, used record stores stand plastered with garage band fliers and notices of art shows...
...a three foot fag with a blond pompadour stands in the entrance to a hair salon smiling moronically, wringing small stubby hands, "How do?"...
Drunken Indians shuffle through Ronstadt Station waving away attacks of phantom cowboys under the red flicker of the Hotel Congress, hub of homosexual hipness...homeless teens play hackey sack out side the Mayors Office as El Primo peers through closed blinds with silent insect lust...Tall cactus and angular rock formations set the back drop for a Road Runner cartoon.
Shift of gears, squeal of brakes, we roll into El Paso, Texas. Here the dream is suffocating, more real than real, the past actually, incredibly, invading the present. It's like you can reach out and have your youth all over again so solid, nostalgia taking solid form and face... but the fraud is immediately apparent. And the horror, the fear of stasis and decay closes around your heart. Down to the end of the road town of El Paso. Black Stetsons and the gray malaria faces color of dirty paper... El Paso. Black winds of hate blew through dead colorless trees. On a bleak day, rolled into town and stomach ached from doubt and hunger.