It feels as if I’m starting to settle here, Tucson, I’ve been here off and on for a while now. My nature and my history, more my history, make it hard for me to feel comfortable with a place or perhaps comfortable with my self. Though I’m also good at making dystopias livable, even if it takes a while, having lived in a few shitholes in my life. I find qualities of a place that make it bearable and develop habits around those qualities and sooner or later I find, myself comfortable. Still, I might be living in a shithole but at least I’m comfortable or is this life?  That being said I currently find myself wanting to settle permanently in the first shithole I remember living, because I love it so much and I know what to expect from the familiar.

Not that Tucson is a shithole, it definitely has is qualities that contribute to shit holiness. We drive a lot here. Doing a bit of wiki research pointedly looking at expansion rates of Tucson from 1890 to 1940 Tucson’s population doubled every decade. There are a few reasons for that, what I want to look at is why I have to drive so much; which is more connected to sprawl than population, which connects to sprawl. This is frustrating, I’m creeping towards where I would like to go; travelling down a six lane street with awkward untimed lights and barely enough traffic to fill one lane.

Tucson’s first known occupation dates backs to 2100 B.C. a farming village of unknown to us indigenous people on the Santa Cruz River, Hohokam Indians 600-1450 A.D., Jesuits around 1692. Hugo O’conor an Irish officer of Spain moved in, in 1792, and built a fort to protect Jesuits from The Apaches, Mexico took over after independence of Spain in 1821. The Mexicans ceded Tucson briefly in 1846 when Philip St. George Cooke and his Mormon Brigade stop in Tucson after fighting Apaches east of town on their way to California. George brings us back from my divergence but doesn’t quite get me where I want to be, the road to California, Cooke’s Wagon Road. The Gold Rush of 1849 begins the establishment of Tucson as a major parking lot on the Butterfield Overland Route from St Louis to San Diego.