As much as I enjoy taking everyone through a long meandering journey about my years surviving in the modern american desert — where you all blast but, statistically, are moving to in droves unless you’ve got the guts to spend your twilight era in fucking International-To-The-Point-Of-Relentlessly-Corrupt-And-UnAmerican Florida¹ — because, honestly, no one gives me any attention or has interest in the things I want to talk about, I’m time-short here². I’m an old man and I’m doing it while I’m still young enough to enjoy it!

If you follow overnight comment threads around here, in between Brick’s AI-Generated Photo Gallery each night, I’ve let you all know Cory got the pool finished. Hung out too long to get it wrapped up but I’m glad it’s over.  Wife seems to not want to rip it out and start over so maybe I’m worth more than the life insurance payout still.

The better news is that I got the header-imaged hole dug in my front yard. I don’t have much for progress photos because I was doing all the work. Well, me and the five year olds on the street. I swear that the most excruciating part of this project was having to do in the front yard in great weather where all my neighbors are just standing around and discussing how just digging to find the pipe can’t be the easiest way to find like a 60 year old concrete pipe.

Let me step back a bit.

Arizona is in the Sonoran desert. And I live in Phoenix, which is in the northern region (below in red) defined as the Lower Colorado Valley. However, the Arizona Upland Region (in green) is, economically/politically and, generally functionally, my usage system.

And so this house my wife picked has a grass lawn that dies in the every summer as hell. And even in spring when everything is nice, all I have is thicket-type shit because anything less durable is eradicated in the summer. Below is the worst spot — the back corner of my big yard that gets like 26 hours of sun a day in August…

— alright I gotta go.

¹ I appreciate that kids cannot move into the neighborhoods where they grew up — maybe ever — as easily as their parent had. It’s not The Californians, it’s The Population Pressures. Yeah Right got his Portugal. Brick has his Shutter Island. I got my small town escape plan for when these pressures run me out. Hey man, if I was escaping {aka refugee-ing} King George at the age of 14 and crossing the Atlantic in a Brand New Old Wooden Ship, I wouldn’t see myself as carelessly pushing off some natives and ruining their ecosystem, forcing them to make DISRUPTIVE CHANGES to every asset of their culture and, flat, taking over their world; I would see myself as taking care of my family. So it’s a great {aka tangibly far away in the greatest of circumstances} problem we have and, I think, will be a very defining element of Gen Z (is that these next high schoolers?). But I like that they seem to want to work. 

² I think Time-Short should be a new player nickname. On record, I don’t know a lot of newer players because their real names are either Thomas or Mogadishu³. If I could get more characters to be identifiable to the non-FF fan, that’d be swell. Also, if any guy could just stay on the field for like two consecutive months in the same helmet, that’d be swell. 

³ Mogadishu is a reference to Black Hawk Down, which I would define as the first America vs Islamic-Terror movie. I know about Rambo III but, first, it was critically-groaned (which I don’t care about) and was a box office failure (which I do think is relevant). Second, Rambo was really just helping the Mujahedeen against the Soviets; it was a late-stage cold war film (1988). I also think Black Hawk Down is just a reality war-thriller from Jerry Bruckheimer that won an Oscar for Sound so we ignore the clear honest critique that the film is just a fictional boom-bang Ridley Scott brothers-in-arms rally cry. And I think it says a lot about my particular generation band that this 77% on Rotten Tomatoes bullshit is probably the most long-form education they have had on the greater infinite War on Terror job order contract.