Thursday, June 29, 2023
It’s Thursday afternoon. I’m sitting outside, on an otherwise-deserted stone patio, under an umbrella, drinking my second lager of the afternoon. Motorized tourist traffic pulses through the 25mph zone at a steady 30 or 40mph, with an occasional outlier in a Tesla or a lifted truck or a very clean late model Jeep pushing it closer to 50 just to drive home the impression that its occupants feel very important and would not really mind killing a pedestrian all that much.
Some guy just went past hauling a no-shit speedboat all decked out in giant chrome exhaust pipes, which confuses me on a couple of levels. Where are you going? What are you possibly going to do with that thing when you get there? I’m sure there’s a place for it somewhere around here, albeit one that hinges on a great deal of engineering and the expressed whims of a wealthy population who should never have moved so far from naturally occurring bodies of navigable water. It’s just a striking discongruity in this arid expanse of grass, small cactus, prairie dogs, tiny rivers, looming mountains.
It’s been warm for a week now, but there are storms in the forecast and the hills are still an unlikely green. Elsewhere in the States, a record-shattering heat wave is going into weeks of duration, at least.