bury my heart in sabino canyon
These days, they just keep getting faster. I'm sitting here typing today's entry and it's like, I was just doing this. Hard to avoid thoughts of mortality sometimes.
Today the Times presents a travel guide to Tucson. It's nice that they're trying to play it up, but the sad truth is that the city itself has precious little to offer—if you go, it's because you love the surrounding desert. When my family first moved there in 1981, it was about half its present size and beautiful; but since then it has undergone the painful metamophosis into a second Phoenix. There's smog, there's traffic, there's an infinite loop of Wal-Marts and Arby's along any main street, and every year there are more Californians. (I am fine with Californians, generally. I lived among them for four years. But everyone else west of the Rockies hates them because they go tearing around with their SUVs and boom boxes and ignorance of local traffic laws.) The Times does play up the Gem and Mineral show, which is pretty cool if you're into that sort of thing, and I guess the same goes for the rodeo. Not that I've ever been. Every February we got a four-day rodeo weekend and went to Disneyland. Anyway, my point is that my hometown has all but disappeared, which I guess happens to everyone past a certain age. But how I miss the land.
This article about China is not all that illuminating, but it does contain one of those great pitch-black Soviet jokes:
Once there was an emperor who was very evil and very fierce. He said two plus two equals six. All the people were afraid of him and agreed that two plus two equals six.
When the emperor died the next emperor was less evil and less fierce. He said two plus two equals five. All the people asked themselves, "How could we have been so stupid as to believe that two plus two equals six?"
A young mathematician thought for a long time. He concluded two plus two equals four. He wrote a book to prove his theory. He decided to take it to the publisher, but on the way, two strangers approached him. "Comrade," they asked, "what are you doing? Do you really want to go back to the days when two and two were six?"
