Tucson

Tucson is nicer in November than August; having visited with Spoon in the height of sunmmer, I can testify to that. At our Hotel, the Inn Suites, there is a beagle convention and I am stuck behind several enormously fat guests who are checking out internet beagle sites. No visible roaches here this time (unlike our August stay) perhaps the beagles have eaten them all up. It's Andy's first show with Annie Hayden, he is great and has a lovely Rickenbacker bass. As we leave the hotel a little beagle-jump is being set up and we are rather glad to be gone.

There is a traintrack immediately behind the venue, and as the trains pass they let off their long, lonely siren, the building shakes to its foundations and the musicians either stop or incorporate this 1000 ton piece of cliched americana into their set. These trains are enormous, it's hard not to think of them as strange, long suffering beasts haunting silent stretches of desert, the uninhabited zones of a throwaway society.

Back into the desert, fascinated with this stretch of wilderness and what someone, somewhere called its 'limitless secrets', the most alien landscape I have ever seen, even just from the freeway. Standing among the cactii, feeling the dry heat beating around you, it's easy to see things differently, the world is different here and you have to make adjustments.