Do *not* move here. (Phoenix, Chandler: apartments, condo, houses)
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Last spring, my wife got hired as a nanny for a professional sports player from Boston. We were languishing in two bedrooms upstairs in my parents' house in Maine at the time (what can I say? The job market for college graduates is horrendous right now), and we welcomed the escape. The job required that we move to Arizona, where the family relocated during the off season.
I've lived in a lot of places. I was a military brat groing up, and we packed up and left about every three and a half years on average. This included places like Illinois, Rhode Island, Maryland, Virginia, and so on. I went to school in Connecticut, and also spent three years living in Texas. I had seen a lot of the country heading into the move -- not all of it, for certain, but a good chunk. But I was unprepared. Even apprehensive as I became before we left, I was totally unprepared.
After a wonderful driving trip west, including gems like Denver, the Rockies, Moab (Utah) and Flagstaff, the drop through Copper Canyon into the Black Canyon City area and into the human wasteland beyond was... perhaps the most tragic thing I've ever seen in my life. I don't know what dark magic draws people to this place, but it set off alarms for us the moment we spotted our first saguaro, and those just blared louder and louder as we plowed headlong into the hopeless sprawl of Phoenix's outlying tentacles.
To be blunt, I hate this part of Arizona. I have never seen a more awful part of the United States, including pits like Newark, East St. Louis and Houston.
We’re currently in Chandler (about 20 miles SE of the center of Phoenix), and I'm concerned that the ugly terrain is causing permanent retinal damage. The mountains look like giant piles of untended dirt; the buildings and houses are an endless succession of tan and brown clones. Every little overpass and retention wall is done up in some kind of lizard or cactus design. It's like a little middle finger to the real desert that none of these people ever see -- 'hey, see this scroll work that looks kind of like a snake? Yeah, we, like, totally killed fifty of these to make way for the condo you're currently living in.' And while I am no warden of the Earth by any means, I see a major flaw in the hundreds of miles of open-air canals, boiling their precious contents away into the cloudless sky. The squandering of water here, in the midst of the North American Sahara, is one of the great practical jokes being played by these people on their fellows back east, who read about dire warnings of water restrictions and actually believe them to be true. Suckers. Nyuck nyuck nyuck.
And in many ways, the ‘book’ is even worse than the cover. The culture here sucks. I have never seen so many old people in my life; old people who have fled ‘real’ places like Chicago and Boise and Birmingham and New York (friggin’ Yankees, but, I digress, it’s a place with culture) to journey to this desolate wasteland so they can die as far away from their relatives as possible. Their empty faces haunt the Walmart parking lots and the unending number of Chili’s and Fudruckers. They believe that, by coming here in force, they will be reminded less of the impending swing of the black one's scythe. And it is for this reason that they hole up en masse in countless 'retirement communities,' as if the mere glimpse of a youthful face would shatter the illusion. They only leave the walls of their fortresses in large numbers, clogging up the lines in McDonalds or wrecklessly merging across four lanes of traffic on the freeway, apparently so they can remind the world that death has been cheated yet another day in claiming what is due.
Those who aren’t members of the 55+ crowd have somehow convinced themselves that this bleak, featureless desert is ‘wonderful’ because it lacks any semblance of what could be considered ‘weather’ (yah know, stuff that falls out of the sky, or tickles the tree branches so they move slightly?) or proper foliage (non-thinking lifeforms that grow out of the ground and sprout leaves or pine needles. WARNING: may be hazardous to the health of valley residents of 20 years or longer). What little moisture falls or wind blows is immediately decried by all as the coming of the end of the world. If a mere droplet touches the surface of their skin, they begin abandoning their cars on the highways and burning down their homes, hoping to satisfy Cir'thu'rir, the dark Norse weather god who punished them as children in Milwaukee, Dover or Eugene, and who threatens to unleash the fury of a thousand Arizona thunderheads* upon the valley.
And how they tolerate the summer (which I am dreading) is beyond me. It was 95 degrees in October when we moved here. Dry heat my rear end.
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I want to stop right here and just interject for a moment in saying that Flagstaff is lovely. The San Francisco Peaks; the architecture; the trees (I forgot what a proper tree looked like until we spent a weekend up there) -- Flagstaff is like a little slice of heaven. So, while my initial inclination would be to damn the whole state, I cannot do that, because Flagstaff is an island of civilization floating in a sea of liquified terrible.
But, sadly, Flagstaff might as well be on the moon given the current price of gas.
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I’m glad there is a horrible place where all these automatons masquerading as members of the human race can be stored away from everyone else (and, what’s more, since it’s horrible to look at, I don’t feel like the land is being wasted) but my great desire is to flee Phoenix as soon as is possible. That will be in November, when my wife’s contract with the player (which was extended) is up. That moment -- the 'release;' the great escape act -- cannot happen soon enough. Every time I open my door and step outside I expect ghosts to come flying out of my orifices, screaming about the doom of man, and urging me to grab my cats in one arm and wife in the other and drive for the horizon while I still can. I feel like some great and terrible calamity is waiting around every corner... but I have come to the realization that that calamity is Phoenix; that this place is the human equivalent of a supervolcano or a megathrust earthquake. It's like a living, breathing disaster.
Why do people feel compelled to move here in the first place? There's nothing redeeming about the joint -- the sprawl is horrendous; practically everyone here is transplant who doesn't give a damn about anything local (including sports teams [as a life-long Pats fan, I find the fly-by-night average Cardinals 'fan' to be a sad mixture of outrageous and hilarious], politics, culture -- you name it); the place is as visually compelling as a chunk of rock. And yet, best I can tell, the tideswell of bodies into this morass is unending. What's the deal, folks? Why did you come here? And, for those considering the move, for God's sake, pick a random point on the compass (as long as it's a direction pointing away from Phoenix) and head there! Things can only improve as you travel away from the human black hole!
*Approximately .01265 inches of rain by mere mortal reckoning.
Last edited by ShrikeArghast; 03-26-2012 at 03:39 AM..
Let me see if I understand your post. You were married and living in your parents house because you were both unemployed. Even though you both have college degrees, you thought it would be a good idea to relocate a couple thousand miles away to take a nanny job in Arizona. Now you decided to write a twelve paragraph essay questioning peoples intelligence? Too funny.
I think the sky already fell on you before you even conceived the idea of moving to Phoenix. The city just makes an easy scapegoat for you. God gave us all free will. If living there is such a trainwreck for you then find the door and do it as soon as possible. Your not stuck there, maybe a commitment or two and some weak threaded strings attached but nobody is forcing you to be there. The thing is your just going to take this negative experience to wherever you end up next. I'm sure you'll beg to differ as a defense mechanism, but honestly I've seen same insane rants and posts here, some that don't even make sense. However I've never seen such a scathing review of a geographic location on this site. It screams, LOOK WITHIN. Your displeasure with the area is not Phoenix's fault. Make the best of it regardless.
Let me see if I understand your post. You were married and living in your parents house because you were both unemployed. Even though you both have college degrees, you thought it was a good idea to relocate a couple thousand miles away to take a nanny job in Arizona. Now you are questioning peoples intelligence?
We were married and living with my parents because college degrees at highly ranked universities cost a lot of money. If you don't net a job relatively quickly that pays fairly well, things like apartments become impossible to pay for.
Also, nanny jobs caring for the children of millionaires pay extremely well. [mod cut-- no links from new members]
Just an FYI. Welcome to 2012.
So, yeah, I am questioning the intelligence of the people who come here for any reason other than to make serious amounts of money on a short-term basis. Or, I guess she should have quit her job because the hell hole that this place looked like from space via Google Earth actually turned out to be startlingly accurate?
Last edited by observer53; 03-26-2012 at 07:07 AM..
We were married and living with my parents because college degrees at highly ranked universities cost a lot of money. If you don't net a job relatively quickly that pays fairly well, things like apartments become impossible to pay for.
If you were smart enough to get into a "highly ranked" university then you are smart enough to find a job. Stop will the excuses. You are 30 years old, Man up!
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Too funny.
