Arizona dreamin'

First, kudos to you if you know what the title of this posting refers to. In fact, I haven't been dreamin' of Arizona so much as the whole desert Southwest. In Phoenix it's 79 degrees F today. In El Paso, 63. In San Diego, 62. Here in Ann Arbor, 9. With a wind chill of -2. Actually that's a lot better than last night's wind chill of -20.

As I try to wrap my Texas-born brain around the temperatures here, and when I'm not slathering myself in moisturizer to keep from drying out completely, I find myself wishing I were 2000 miles away. 2019, to be exact, would get me to Phoenix.

Right now I have a CD in my car that I'm playing on repeat, Kid Loco's A Grand Love Story, kind of a down-tempo, breezy, melody-over-bass affair. I've had this CD since the summer of '02, when I spent a month in Santa Fe, NM attending the Santa Fe Institute's Summer School. I played the hell out of this CD that summer. Afternoons not occupied in lectures, I'd head out for the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains that bordered St. John's College where we were staying. Headphones on with this CD playing, I'd walk for hours on the roads, trails, and whatever gravelly surfaces were within reach.

Up there you're over a mile closer to the sun than you are at sea level. It burns a white hot patch in the sky that offsets, in the daytime, the cobalt blue expanse above, and at dusk, the blood orange red horizon ahead. The air is hot during the day, but it's clean and dry, faintly scented like you were drying herbs in an oven and just opened the door. Mountains rise in the background, mostly rust-colored but surprisingly verdant in patches where the creosote bushes cluster by chance.

I think somehow the desert environment suits me best. In college the religious writings I was most drawn to were by the so-called Desert Fathers, ascetics in the fourth century CE who had given up everything to live in the deserts of Egypt, either alone or in small communities. Out there, they survived on next to nothing, the slimmest of physical margins, but experienced life intensely and the give-and-take of good and evil daily. They were severest to themselves, kindest to each other. And their writings reveal a clarity of thought that lately I find enviable.

With the Kid Loco CD on repeat, these are the things that go through my head. I'm driving through the slush or else the salt, and my car is dirty. My thoughts are muddy. I know that by putting this CD on repeat I'm just tricking myself. Into thinking warm thoughts. Into thinking with clarity. Someday I'm going back to the desert.

UPDATE (10:40 am, 02/09): Albuquerque, NM was just selected as the nation's fittest city by Men's Fitness magazine. Detroit was second from the bottom.