Out of all the places I’ve lived and visited, I need to share this with you: Tucson is, by far, the most boring goddamn shithole on the face of the Earth. The high point of your week here is finding a new, clean nylon sock, and then you have to sit there and try to dredge up some memory from a past life, some half-forgotten thrill, just to have a reason to pop the weasel.
The Natives are a special breed—blue-collar, sprinkled with a kind of sun-baked Darwinian sludge. A population of souls too dumb or too tired to move, all of them convinced they’ve “made it” because they’re the king of a scrap heap in a sea of low-hanging fruit.
If it wasn’t for the fentanyl zombies staggering around, you wouldn’t even notice the architecture, which is a mercy. The newest buildings look like they were designed in the late ‘80s by a federal committee with a hangover. You drive down these third-world streets, the asphalt cracked and buckled like an alligator’s back, past sad, little houses that haven’t seen a drop of love or a coat of paint since they first popped up in the ‘70s.
Everything gives you these Tijuana flashbacks, but without the life, without the danger, without the goddamn fun. Just stray dogs wandering across the street, no green grass, no trees, only chain-link fences holding back pitbulls that look as bored and pissed off as everyone else. Everything is sun weathered.
Which brings me to the women.
Christ, the women. I have needs, I’m a man, but I have never had to lower myself, to dredge the absolute bottom of the barrel, like I have since landing in this armpit of a state. It’s a sad collection of the Dollar Store’s “Employee of the Year.” Skin like sun-bleached leather, no protection from a world that’s been beating on them since birth. Chain-smoking a pack of cheap cigarettes, squeezed into some sad polyester outfit outside a government-assisted trailer.
It’s just a sad, slow pool of warm, decomposing shit, and everyone in it is just working their way through the motions of life. Bedding these women isn’t a challenge; it’s an archaeological dig, a search for King Tut’s tomb, only to find it’s been looted a thousand times before. The conversations are always plural, never singular. It’s a small, dirty pond, and we’re all just swimming in the same shit, comparing notes on who we’ve been with.
And with all that in mind, add in the fact that it’s 111 degrees, there’s a distinct lack of blondes and red heads, and most of the available women seem to work at old folks’ homes tending to teh near dead.
There is just a total, soul-crushing boredom in my life right now as I wait till the end of the year to escape this armpit.
My biggest fear? The one that keeps me up at night? It’s that one of these low-hanging fruits, one of these desperate, damaged creatures, actually captures my attention. That she cons me into staying here.
The Mexican food is great, but… and it’s that “but” that would make any person with half a functioning brain take the next cheap bus out of town.
I’ve got a rule: you judge a town by the cars. If they’re all dinged up, dented, and dying, you don’t want to live there. So far, that’s been all of Tucson. The infrastructure is falling apart, there’s no police presence to speak of, and the homeless have taken over the city’s sad attempts at beautification.
They build these beautiful bike paths that wrap around the city, and now they’re just highways for addicts, the underpasses their new condos. They’re not homeless; they’re just druggies looking for a cigarette butt. You almost want to just spray the whole damn thing down with some kind of pesticide.
There are no real grocery stores, just a high-end of franchises and a thousand Circle K’s, always a sign of a low-income hell. Every place is guarded by cameras, robot voices, or some chubby old man with a handgun on his hip. There’s trash and weeds growing out of every goddamn orifice of this city.
You see these beautiful pockets here and there, sure. But they’re the minority. And you look around and wonder, what the hell happened here? There’s no self-investment, no self-awareness. No one looks at each other and says, “My God, we could do better.” Everyone I’ve met here was either trying to escape something and failed, or they left and were forced to come back, suffering from some kind of reverse PTSD, thinking, “My God, I used to live here.”
The University is the only clean spot, a bubble where the pretty people go, protected by their own police force to keep the real Tucson out. How convenient.
I’m not too sure why I got located here, but I know one thing for damn sure: it’s a motivating factor for why I have to leave. If I spent the rest of my life here, I’d be extremely disappointed in myself. It makes you wonder why anyone is here. Were they born without the ambition to leave, or did this place just cook it clean out of them?
I’ll say it again: Tucson is a goddamn armpit.
But here’s the thing I’ve realized, the final, twisted truth of it. It knows it’s an armpit. It has its own identity. It’s like a fat man who finally comes to the realization that he’s a fat man. He stops sucking in his gut, stops pretending he’s just “big-boned.” He accepts it. He carries himself like a fat man. And in that acceptance, in that brutal honesty, there’s a strange kind of integrity. Tucson knows it’s a shithole, and it has stopped apologizing for it. Some people here call that a “vibe.” I call it a glimmer of truth in a world full of pretty, smiling lies.
And then you compare it to Phoenix. Christ.
Phoenix has no identity at all. It’s just a giant, flat slab of hot asphalt, a sprawling collection of strip malls populated by refugees from Chicago and Michigan, sprinkled with a few lost Canadians. There’s no “there” there. It’s a transient holding pen, a collector of souls who flee the second the real summer heat arrives. It’s a phony.
Tucson? Tucson is a fat, sweaty, honest bastard who doesn’t give a damn what you think of him.
And you know what? I’ll take the honest shithole over the smiling, empty lie every goddamn time.
