On Going to the South West

I wrote quite a bit, and Lesley took many images (that sounds wrong, she shot many images? Used to be so easy, Lesley took lots of photos, but they are not photos, no film was exposed) during the trip. I am going to break my posts up and publish them over the next couple days to reduce my spell checker's load. :) Later I will link to the images, I have to upload them somewhere first.

Today, Friday October 24, Lesley and I drove to Buffalo to fly to Phoenix. Yes we could have flown from Pearson in Toronto, but that would have cost an awful lot more. When we got to Buffalo I stopped in a bike store to price out some parts, with the drop in the value of the Canadian dollar it just is not worth it to buy things abroad, for the time being.

It is ironic, the structure of the Canadian economy, at a macro level, the relative health of our Federal budget, by rights the loony should not be in the cess pit against the green back. When you contrast say Kitchener Waterloo with Buffalo (two municipalities of comparable size) it is agonizingly clear, the health of Western New York's economy, would be in medical terms... Forget medical terms, it is a disaster, that is all there is to it, Buffalo, Rochester are both in terrible shape.

Well we got to the airport where things are overpriced, but at least there is a shuttle from the long term parking lot to the gate. A bus driver, there were several waiting and ready to roll, took just the two of (can you say "holy waste of diesel fuel batman"?) to the airport terminal. When he asked where we were going I joked that we were going to Arizona where I would put up some Obama bumper stickers. Well by the time got the joke he was already explaining that besides the fact the he hated both candidates, as a dual citizen of Ireland and the US depending on the outcome of the election he would either wait and see or pack things in right away. I didn't have the heart to tell him that by Irish standards Obama is a fascist. (I figure the driver was conservative based on the fact that he is in America now after eight years of the Bush Administration's shenanigans.)

At the dilapidated airport I thought about my encounter with a guy who believes in John McCain, there were lots of soldiers around, security screen was slow and ineffective (as well as dehumanizing). Budget projections for the coming fiscal year feature a debt a hundred times the most pessimistic numbers for Canada, ($10 billion in Canada and $1 trillion in the US). I got to thinking, maybe a little collapse would be good for America and the World. Such a collapse might be the only way to shut the right wing nutjobs up, as an unflattering reduction in the stature of their nation might inject some humility into the national psyche. That loss of stature would probably upset me more than them, but it is time for the United States to roll back, roll back her military, her bloated budget, her unhealthy love of credit, her imperial might, which so few American know or understand, yet is so hated everywhere outside the United States.

We arrived at the Barry M. Goldwater terminal of the Sky Harbor Airport to a wave of heat, Phoenix gets really hot. Here is a random thought, according to Bill Bryson in the book Mother Tongue, Goldwater is a medieval term for piss.