A hundred camels in the courtyard

One of the things I like about Tucson is the haze of surreal insanity that hangs over the place like a cloud of multicolored smoke. I put it down to a combination of the sun, the landscape (I am often reminded, while driving in the desert, that George Herriman set Krazy Kat in Arizona. Even though Krazy, Ignatz, and Offisa Pup played out their eternal triangle in Coconino county, and I'm in Pima county, it still looks pretty much the same as a Herriman Sunday page. Except without the Chinese pagodas...), and the widespread use of drugs and alcholhol 'round these parts. It puts me in mind of Paul Bowles descriptions of Tangiers in the excellent book referenced in the title line of this post.

Last night, there was a doozy of a scene that I'm sorry I missed--though Lisa and I were in the truck at the time, and heard the sirens--what sounded like hundreds of cop cars, seemingly going on for hours. Turns out it was this.

If you can't get to the linked page, here's the short version: 14-year old kid steals earthmover. Drives it from one end of town to the other, right through downtown, and out into the desert. A dozen cop cars chase him the whole way. Kid weaves the bulldozer all over the road, thus preventing the cops from making a jump from their cars to said bulldozer. Out in the desert, kid finally gets aggravated at cops blasting their sirens and harshing his mellow. Kid turns bulldozer around, and heads for the fuzz with blood in his eye. Cop panics, plugs the kid in the shoulder. Chase over, kid is in hospital in critical condition, power knocked out of a big old hunk of the city, due to kid running into a bunch of stuff.

Yeah, the end is kind of a drag, but the mental picture of that kid joyriding in a bulldozer with the entire police force in pursuit gives me great pleasure. Sort of akin to the feeling I get when I think about a wolf in a library, or a marmoset with a glock pistol.