Typical creepy America

Today I applied at another office recommended by Mr. Behnisch. I spent probably too long compiling a book of my best photographs from Mexico. My intention was to print it off on Lulu as a softcover, and I may still do it, but I'm balking at the $40 price tag. It's nearly 200 pages of my best photos, so really its a pretty good deal, and I probably will go ahead and buy it- its just that I'm going to wait and see if any good coupons show up first.

That took a lot of time, actually. Organizing, digging up the photos, transferring them to the big computer from the little computer, cleaning, cropping each photo, doing some light touch ups with straightening and contrast.

I did get out and go for a bike ride. Probably went about seven or eight miles total today. Made a beeline for The Farm, just south of southern and 32nd street. The Farm is a collection of cutesy little buildings- a breakfast place, a lunch place, a dinner place, an organic produce farmers market, some kind of handcrafted goods or organic soap store, all arranged around a grove of pecan trees over grass. It was just a little too cute.

I'm on board with local produce (mom, it turns out, gets her produce from the Maya Farm there), I definitely appreciate places that encourage socialization and foster local identity and belonging, and I also have to support restaurants which have the majority of their seating outside as a demonstration that you don't need to be in a refrigerated icebox for a pleasant climate.

However, something about it was a little too deliberately picturesque, like the ready-made wedding alter/canopy/backdrop from vine covered old wood beams, and a few other random poles and weathered wood follies around the property which serve no other use except as backdrop. The prices for all the menu items was also high. All in all, the whole thing is a little Disney.

Coming back, I overshot the canal to ride as close to the fringe of the city as possible, where south Phoenix meets south mountain. It's a strange area. There are ancient, cheaply built old houses from the 1950's on massive ranch lots with goats, dogs, chickens and horses. Some of them are boarded up, abandoned. There are a few tiny subdivisions of 1960s desert bungalow housing in varying states of upkeep and quality of the original design. There are a few tiny white mission style churches out there too. The rest is either empty lots of native desert, or the asphalt desert of contemporary tract housing development infill. Add in the odd trailhead into the mountains and a few small canals, and it adds up to one of the more surreal regions of the city.

Cycling around, there are a lot of really vicious dogs in people's backyards. That, and the fencing, the high walls, the bunker mentality comes out strongly here, but really most places I go in the US, it feels like there's been a hardening against the outside. Strangers are unwelcome. Trespassers will be shot on sight. (Survivors will be shot again). I need a gun to defend what I believe is mine. I hate to say it, but the ascending cultural trait of Americans appears to be violent hostility.