There Is An Arizona, And Other Love Lyrics

There is no Arizona
No painted desert, no Sedona
If there was a Grand Canyon
She could fill it up with the lies he's told her
But they don't exist, those dreams he sold her
She'll wake up and find
There is no Arizona


Yes there is!


I saw my son Jeffrey's social studies project, a float essentially made out of a shoe box decorated with various pictures and facts about the state of Arizona, done last night and he took it to school today. And every time I heard about it Jamie O'Neal's 2002 country music song "There Is No Arizona" came to my mind. Though the song itself is about a man stringing along a woman with promises he apparently doesn't intend to keep, the project isn't and I'm certainly not.


It will be interesting to see how he's done when it comes back.


This week Sarah and Jeffrey are both doing standardized testing at Longfellow and from what I hear it's something they want to get over and done with! I can't say I blame them; I remember standardized testing and at least two years I'd swear (or affirm, Constitutionally speaking) that we took the same one! I remember it because of a Franklin Roosevelt cartoon reprinted as part of a comprehension exercise ... I didn't get it until many years later. Still, I had among the highest scores on those tests.


It does apply in real life, but you have to give it time to ferment.


And from what I read in Barbara Hughes Fowler's translation of Love Lyrics of Ancient Egypt (ISBN 0807821594) expressing one's love and passion for others hasn't changed much over three thousand years. Although as the book jacket describes "these vibrant love poems, purported to be by boys and girls perhaps as young as thirteen or fourteen years of age, [they] are remarkable for their innocent sensousness", it's hard to not read some of ourselves in them, whether we're in love or not.


I'd excerpt some here, but think Song of Solomon for appropriateness.


Pirate utopias, infinite crises, these are some of our newfound friends that we will meet as we descend ... I meant to use this as a title because it's time to cover what I've been reading. Bruce Sterling's novel Pirate Utopia (ISBN 9781616962364) is a simple yet direct cyberpunk story set in an alternate history 1920 where after World War I everything in Europe was up for grabs (including sanity, I've read a lot about it lately) and every belief was open to interpretation, to the future.


Whereas comic books to me lately seem to look back on the past.


DC Comics' Infinite Crisis series (anthologized ISBN 9781401210601) finds characters who disappeared at the end of the mid-1980s Crisis On Infinite Earths seeking to restore a better world and being willing to do it at any cost. And the Big Three of DC heroes -- Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman -- are fighting among themselves while villains are being gathered to advantage of chaos, which by and large they tend to do.


Except for the Joker. (Big mistake. BIG. HUGE. MISTAKE.)


Book three of Descender (ISBN 9781632158789) gives you almost nothing but the past. Considering the series was originally set ten years after the United Galactic Council's devastating war with giant robotic Harvesters and the fallout led to all robots being targeted for extermination, knowing how all the main characters came to be where they are makes "Singularities" I would suppose lead up to a final confrontation. Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen who write the series will be surprising with that.


And me? I'm just full of surprises!

David