Place
Tucson, Arizona
I hated this place growing up. I hated the desert and had no idea why anybody would ever move there. I hated it and I really felt that it hated me. Everything about the desert has a mood - and it's generally very angry.
I chose this photo in particular because it is the one I have as the background of my homepage.
It is a spot at the Desert Museum where my grandfather was remarried after my grandmother's death.
After my family moved to Tucson, my father's family followed. Arizona is a land of refugees- rarely is anyone you meet from there. Everyone has come there for some reason - and twenty years ago when my parents and the parents of all my friends moved there it wasn't for jobs or money. It was for the desert. Something about it - they all say - made them fall in love and want to go back.
As I said, I hated it growing up. But now - I always find myself wanting to go back. Of course. It is a part of who I am - its anger, its secrets, its intensity all became a part of me growing up.
I am homesick.
But I'm no freshman - as Ulmer discussed most freshman are homesick. I'm a perpetual freshman, flighty - distracted...,
"Something in the present environment triggers a memory (punctum), information from the past intrudes into the present, leading to a hammered thumb. This double consciousness, this 'transference' that maps the present b means of the past, this short-circuit switching is just the relationship to decision making that is functional in electracy. An electrate state of mind includes a tolerance for nonutilitarian, inefficient, irrelevant events and experience." (Ulmer, 76)