Dear Friends Who Still Live in Arizona
It’s not going to improve until the year 2534
Dear Friends, Frenemies, and Acquaintances in Tucson,
You know who are you and which category you fall into. Please inform me if you have recently changed categories.
Most of you are intelligent, literate, and ambulatory, and some of you have PhDs. I can’t prove it but I believe over half of you people read the newspaper.
But if you don’t get the news, here’s a summary:
Arizona is getting hotter and dryer every year, soon to resemble Hell.
The water sources, including Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are drying up to the extent that they are finding ancient murder victims in the sands.
The Great Salt Lake will soon become a toxic dust bowl after it dries up, all the local shrimp die, and the natural arsenic becomes airborne. Salt Lake City is growing by leaps and bounds, while the lake has shrunk so much they’ve renamed it the Mediocre Brine Puddle.
Why aren’t you packing? Help me understand because I am flummoxed, perplexed, exasperated, and puzzled — and other words with exes and zzzzs.
When Will You Idiots Learn?
All y’all have enough money to move. I know that because 34% of you leave every summer, from about June to about October.
Why do you live somewhere that requires fleeing four months out of every year?
You are almost all white and employed, mostly at the University of Arizona, so this isn’t a financial hardship. Then there is me: I’m here in a lovely patch of central Arkansas where the climate is much better and it’s affordable.
I’ve written letters home explaining this. Yes, I am aware no one reads letters anymore, which is why I’ve been forced to post online for everyone to see.
Not to get off on a tangent but yes, I know Arkansas is considered a cultural backwater.
But which do you want, culture or water?
Stop Living in Denial, You Fools
Look — this isn’t going to improve. Really, that’s a fact. Arizona in the southern parts is going to become unlivable in your lifetime since most of you are in your 30s.
The fires will get worse.
The lakes and rivers will run dry.
The denial will become even more outrageous.
Gun ownership will leap from 84% to 94%. (5% are babies too small and weak to carry, and 1% are people not allowed to buy guns).
Also, your hair will probably fall out and your kids will grow into teenagers who don’t care what you think. Do you really want to experience those adversities while living in Hell?
Get Your Candy Asses on a Bus, Train, or Camel
Moving isn’t difficult because we Americans do it all the time using the amazing, space-age gadgetry of moving trucks, Google, and long-distance real estate transactions. It’s no harder to move here to Arkansas than it is to move across town.
There are no laws that you can’t move, no passport requirements, and no entry fees. Yet.
Are you short on funds and/or congenitally provincial? Unlikely, because I know you — but even in these circumstances, you can pare down your belongings to those of a carnival worker and buy a Greyhound ticket for under $100 to relocate somewhere safer. Women running away from terrible husbands do it every day.
Not every natural disaster comes in the form of sudden events like earthquakes, hurricanes, and the election of Donald Trump. Some are slower moving, like Elvis’s slow demise. And we were in denial about that, too, and look where it got us.
We can’t even admit he’s dead.
Take Your Heads out of Your Collective Buttholes
I’m going to appeal to your intelligence now, which is why I grabbed your attention with the word “butthole.” Hold on a sec, let me slow my presumptuous roll: I already tried reason and you got all improv and turned into a brick wall.
Let’s review the math together.
No water + excessive heat + runaway climate change + massive fires + you are surrounded by idiots.
Let me re-remind you, it’s going to keep getting worse. I’m repeating that part because I am a card-carrying member of the Department of Redundancy Department.
I hate to break this to you but no technology exists to solve global warming and as the crisis accelerates the odds of an emerging technology plummet.
So far, I bet you are clinging to a few myths, such as:
— I’m not a farmer, I don’t need water — The government is working hard on solving the problem (ROFLOL) — Everyone who escaped Nazi Germany later regretted it — I have PhD. If I can live through that, I can survive a nuclear holocaust — Idiocracy was not a documentary
This TV Sketch Explains Arizona
In the last season of Arrested Development, Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) decides to move to Phoenix, after concluding he must turn over a new leaf to escape his deeply dysfunctional family.
He gets to Phoenix, Arizona, leaves the airport, grabs a cab, and suffers third-degree burns from opening the cab door.
He immediately books another flight and returns to Cali.
And Jason Bateman’s career takes off with the hit show Ozark, which I don’t think is set in Missouri by coincidence.
One Last Desperate Plea to Wake the F* Up
No one wants to leave their home and I get that. There’s a reason the term ‘refugee’ feels pejorative.
If you relocate now, people will view you as forward-thinking and NOT a refugee. And furthermore, you can reach back to the dry, dusty wasteland that is Arizona and pull others along!
Your insistence on living in Arizona makes me realize you are loyal, and I like that in a friend and sometimes, even in a frenemy. In fact, given some of my personality defects, I need loyalty like a used car salesman needs a wonky moral compass.
But I’m going to put aside my own preferences for a moment with this final plea for you to snap the F* out of it.
Do I need to recruit Samuel L. Jackson to lecture you on getting real? I hope I don’t because I don’t know his number, the name of his publicist, or if he concurs that global warming is real AF.
Who am I kidding? Samuel L. Jackson has his hand on the pulse of reality and he would not live in Arizona one second longer.
Don’t make me call him.
In Friendship,
Arkie
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