Phoenix makeover...

When Sun City first opened (back when), its advertisements promised to deliver "Your No. 1 New Life". Phoenix presents myriad possibilities for a total makeover .. to take on the skin of the perfect tan, the perfect housing complex, the perfect system of highways interjecting drivers into their nodules of choice.

I've always wondered of what might consist an entirely random existence. To this end, I would picture selecting a spot to which to move by sticking a pin on a map while blindfolded. That is because I moved to NYC straight after college without an afterthought, as if I had no choice in the matter. I suppose I had loved the city as a rebellious teenager (dragging a friend down at the age of 15, I made her walk the same 4 blocks around Grand Central Station to avoid getting lost) but it had never occurred to me that I could live anywhere else.

Leaving NY and flying into Arizona is always however something of a surprise ... one leaves the verdant forests and hills to encounter increasingly giant maroon, orange and green oblong fields and crop circles, startling and colorful abstractions rivalling the best of the abstract expressionists. Eventually the tones change — from the deep browns of Texas to the reds of New Mexico to the arid whites and yellows of a landscape one cannot imagine sustaining life. It is there that the plane descends.

How this epiphany is compounded when flying into Phoenix, where springing up out of an inhospitable desert are a million tract homes with green lawns and glistening blue pools, all. Okay, I exaggerate but it is an impression .. of pure anomie, a kind of stateless being, a piece of plankton floating on a glistening sea. One thinks of each little square as a new blank slate, on which to impose all manner of wish and desire. Re-make. Thus someone writes in the college alumnae magazine his news that, like so many couples before who moved to Phoenix in pursuit of the perfect life, he found himself divorced. In the case of Phoenix, randomness implies a life shaped not by coincidence and pattern that reflect your own experience. Randomness consists of a series of choices, but they are other people's choices -- the choices of Angelina and Brad or Martha and Oprah or even the choices of other online shoppers.