| S: I don’t think that they
actually exist. People who are— D: Oh wait, I take that back. Uhm, when I was in Arizona this summer, I was wandering around with my friend Matt at a crafts fair during a Fourth of July weekend extravaganza, in Prescott, Arizona— S: Prescott, Arizona? D: Prescott, Arizona. S: Any bookstores there? D: If there are, I didn’t visit them. My guess is that Prescott is not a center for cultural activity that goes beyond the commercialized junk that we all take for granted, you know, the McDonald’s, Barnes & Noble, same difference. S: Pretty likely that nobody there has ever read a decent hypertext novel. D: I’m sure there is some underground movement of some sort in Prescott. Most places support things like that, but Prescott is rapidly becoming a retirement community. So that the age median is way, way up, ahm— S: And that’s primarily because of the dry heat. D: Yeah. Something like that. S: People—when they get older, they like dry heat. D: Yeah. And it’s in the mountains, or near mountains, high elevation, so you don’t get the really dastardly nasty heat of a Phoenix, or something like that. S: Are there still a lot of conservative wackos out there? D: Ah, yeah. For instance, my friend Matt, who used to be a dedicated dope smoker, gave it up upon moving to Arizona, because fines, and prison time, promised for even the most minor violation of drug laws was so severe that he didn’t feel it was worth his job, his livelihood, ruining his family, and so forth. And he did mention that Arizona is somewhat of a trial, for those of liberal sensibilities, because there is a deep Neanderthal backbone in the politics that makes things pretty repulsive at times. And in fact, when I was in the Phoenix airport, I did read some, what purported to be, alternative mags, that every big city seems to have these days, you know, the Chicago weeklies— S: The Reader and New City. CityBeat and Everybody’s News here. D: All those types of thing. S: We gotta get covered by them. D: And they had—they had a couple of stories that exposed the dark red meat underbelly of Arizona conservatism. Their drumbeat for prisons, as opposed to education, that sort of thing, and so forth and so on. In any case, to get back to the original story, I was wandering, with Matt, my friend, in Prescott on the Fourth of July, and at one point, for some reason, I mentioned Cincinnati out loud, probably in the form of a complaint, since that seems to be the only way I can talk about Cincinnati, and a woman, mid-fifties, something like that, a potential Prescott retiree, or actually, I suppose she actually was a retiree, since she lived in Prescott, said, “Oh, are you from Cincinnati?” and we talked about it, and she identified, she asked me what neighborhood I lived in and she identified the neighborhood she lived in, which I actually recognized, ah— S: What neighborhood was it? D: I don’t remember. I’m not remembering the details. S: So the moral of the story is that people actually do leave Cincinnati, though. D: That’s right, that’s right. S: It’s been documented now. D: It has been documented, to the degree that you’ll accept the evidence of my eyes, ears, nose and throat. S: Usually, though, when they’re in their fifties, sixties, or seventies, to move to a conservative retirement community in Prescott. |
 Prescott, Arizona 4:17 490K RealAudio Clip |
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