Friday, June 24, 2005
Arizona
5,130,632 people can't be wrong. Can they?
Yes they can, especially if they happen to be the 5,130,632 people who, for reasons incomprehensible to anyone else, live in the state of Arizona.
The fact that anyone would want to live in a state that's 99.7 percent desert, inconveniently large and full of obstacles like the Grand Canyon, blisteringly hot, and full of unpleasant people boggles the mind, but they do, and more of them arrive every year.
Arizona is a bad place to be in general, but by far the worst part of it is the vast monstrosity that is the state capital, and where over half the state's population can be found. No one can really dispute that Phoenix is probably one of the most unpleasant cities in the United States. Phoenix is just one enormous sprawling suburb, altogether overfull with fountains, swimming pools, shopping malls, and hicks. The fountains and pools are responsible for wasting the vast majority of the Southwest's water supply while other cities suffer continuous drought (not to mention generating the humidity that makes Phoenix so foul in the summertime), the shopping malls are responsible for the awful traffic and ungodly sprawl, and the hicks are responsible for the rest of the city's bad points, which are too numerous to list here.
If any city (apart from Las Vegas) deserves to be nuked out of existence or simply swallowed up by the desert, it's Phoenix, the shining pinnacle of irresponsibility and poor urban planning. It's hard to believe anyone could possibly have thought that putting a city (I use the term loosely, since Phoenix is really more of a gigantic creeping blight) in the middle of the desert was a good idea, but the fact that the city still exists, that people would actually choose to live in such a place, is beyond comprehension.
Phoenix is obscene in every way possible, but the sad fact is that it's just a microcosm of the state of Arizona, which is every bit as obscene. Where else, after all, can you find major European landmarks in the middle of the fucking desert? What other state is so hick as to not observe daylight savings time? There's only one Arizona. Thank God for that.
The worst thing about Arizona, though, is the people. After all, someone had to decide not to follow DST and the London Bridge didn't install itself in Lake Havasu City. Arizona is like the secret burial ground where old and angry Republicans go to die, except it's not a secret and is actually full of Japanese tourists who travel thousands of miles to look at a big hole in the ground. The majority of the people in Arizona are total scum, except of course for the Canadians who live there in the winter (I can't blame them for wanting to be someplace warm, after all). But anyone who would voluntarily reside there year-round has to be a mental case.
If you've never been to Arizona, don't. There's nothing to see except your own shoes stuck in melting asphalt and a big ditch which is probably the world's most overrated tourist attraction (except for maybe Biosphere, the London Bridge, and the world's highest fountain, of course!) There's nothing worth doing, no one worth meeting. In short, the place is a pit. I don't know if hell exists or not, but if it does I can't imagine it looking too different from our beloved 48th state.
Yes they can, especially if they happen to be the 5,130,632 people who, for reasons incomprehensible to anyone else, live in the state of Arizona.
The fact that anyone would want to live in a state that's 99.7 percent desert, inconveniently large and full of obstacles like the Grand Canyon, blisteringly hot, and full of unpleasant people boggles the mind, but they do, and more of them arrive every year.
Arizona is a bad place to be in general, but by far the worst part of it is the vast monstrosity that is the state capital, and where over half the state's population can be found. No one can really dispute that Phoenix is probably one of the most unpleasant cities in the United States. Phoenix is just one enormous sprawling suburb, altogether overfull with fountains, swimming pools, shopping malls, and hicks. The fountains and pools are responsible for wasting the vast majority of the Southwest's water supply while other cities suffer continuous drought (not to mention generating the humidity that makes Phoenix so foul in the summertime), the shopping malls are responsible for the awful traffic and ungodly sprawl, and the hicks are responsible for the rest of the city's bad points, which are too numerous to list here.
If any city (apart from Las Vegas) deserves to be nuked out of existence or simply swallowed up by the desert, it's Phoenix, the shining pinnacle of irresponsibility and poor urban planning. It's hard to believe anyone could possibly have thought that putting a city (I use the term loosely, since Phoenix is really more of a gigantic creeping blight) in the middle of the desert was a good idea, but the fact that the city still exists, that people would actually choose to live in such a place, is beyond comprehension.
Phoenix is obscene in every way possible, but the sad fact is that it's just a microcosm of the state of Arizona, which is every bit as obscene. Where else, after all, can you find major European landmarks in the middle of the fucking desert? What other state is so hick as to not observe daylight savings time? There's only one Arizona. Thank God for that.
The worst thing about Arizona, though, is the people. After all, someone had to decide not to follow DST and the London Bridge didn't install itself in Lake Havasu City. Arizona is like the secret burial ground where old and angry Republicans go to die, except it's not a secret and is actually full of Japanese tourists who travel thousands of miles to look at a big hole in the ground. The majority of the people in Arizona are total scum, except of course for the Canadians who live there in the winter (I can't blame them for wanting to be someplace warm, after all). But anyone who would voluntarily reside there year-round has to be a mental case.
If you've never been to Arizona, don't. There's nothing to see except your own shoes stuck in melting asphalt and a big ditch which is probably the world's most overrated tourist attraction (except for maybe Biosphere, the London Bridge, and the world's highest fountain, of course!) There's nothing worth doing, no one worth meeting. In short, the place is a pit. I don't know if hell exists or not, but if it does I can't imagine it looking too different from our beloved 48th state.
# posted by Ben @ 8:23 PM 
