Give Me Only Tiny News

I didn't exactly move to Phoenix from a big city. Population: 100,000. During the school year, 140,000. For now I'll skip over the part about how easy it was, back there, to get around in a car compared to facing the warp-speed zigging and zagging highway demons here.

Right now I'm stunned over the local TV newscasts. I watched the 10 p.m. news for the first time a couple nights ago. I was accustomed to big town news, not big city horror. I know that creepy people-are-awful stuff goes on everywhere. But it all feels turned up a notch here. For instance, back in the town of the Big Giant University, there are occasional animal abuse stories, usually several dogs or cats being left behind in a trailer after Jeb and Irene take off for the hills to escape their past due utility bills. Here, the story is more pointed:

According to Arizona Humane Society spokeswoman Kim Noetzel, two 15-year-old boys watched as Beadle coated the puppy in cooking oil and then fed it to the snake.

A 40-year-old man fed a puppy to a red-tailed boa. An oiled puppy.

And the happy stories just kept coming.

5 violent attacks in 5 days in Mesa.

A fight between the parents and the wife of a man who is soon to be "unplugged" medically after a car crash. He was, according to his wife, yelling at her and beating on the inside of the windshield when he lost control of the vehicle. She was trying to jump out to save her own life when they crashed.

The "local" news in Phoenix doesn't feel local to me. Local is when your town is still arguing about the university mascot and whether or not to retire it. It is about wild turkeys showing up to linger on city streets. And the biggest news of the year back home: move-in day for the university students! At the end of August, I could count on the station back home to show 4 full minutes of footage of undergrads and their sweaty parents carrying speakers and playstations and endless armloads of hanging clothes into dorm entrances.

I admit it. I'm not a big city girl. I lived in a pretend big city for a few years. Indianapolis. It's more like a mutated farm town. Big and sprawly and inconvenient. It took half an hour to get anywhere and then I felt as though I still wasn't anywhere. I liked Indianapolis but it still felt too big, too urban, too exhausting. My hometown, population 8,000, soothes me like a pedicure. Soothes. Present tense. When I was growing up there I was blisteringly bored.

There was nothing soothing about being on a farm in the middle of Nowhere's Backyard, no neighbors, no paved roads, no kids. The mysterious "town kids" had the luxury of a Hook's drugstore within biking distance. They could just go there anytime they felt like it and buy things. Comic books and gum and bright plastic jumpropes the color of highway cones. They could go to Burger Chef. They could visit each other, play games, run loose like hoodlums. On the rare occasion that I rode my bike to a friend's house, I had to struggle through the 3-inch-deep gravel with the meager tires of my stingray bike. Then after I got there, I was too tired to ride home and my mom had to come get me in the pick-up. Good times, those.

Even back in the college town, I longed for the very quiet space of the farm where I was raised. No sound but crickets and the occasional horny bullfrog. I've never liked that cricket sound. My sister, on the other hand, has a CD that sounds like a swamp. She can't get enough crickets. For me they're noisy little unnecessary in-breds that need a good beating. Like most of my family.