Over the long weekend, we cabined.

Everyone ought to cabin every now and again. To cabin is to gaze up at a charcoal black canvas of sky peppered with tiny pinpricks of light, to be utterly surrounded by mossy trees, to be awakened in the middle of the night by a large unknown animal skittering across the front porch and then to lie there for an hour hoping the animal wasn't really a demented serial killer and this wasn't going to end up like one of those folk horror tales where the guy with the hook for a hand slowly scratches through the top of the car and then the UNWITTING MORONS IN THE CAR DIE.

Yeah. Just like that, except with a cabin in place of a car, and maybe the murderer has a machete for a leg, and the unwitting morons are us.

See? See why everyone needs to cabin?

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Welp, here I am. Firmly ensconced in my thirties.

30 always seemed a bit tenuous, like I could just duck back inside my late twenties if I really felt like it. Dip in a toe; test the waters. But 31 is a solid bid. 30 is slipping your spare change in the slot machines as you cut through the casino floor, but 31 is sidling up to the blackjack table and slapping down a $100 bill. Deal me into my thirties, baby.

Only you probably shouldn't call your blackjack dealer "baby." Not sure they'd appreciate that.

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During the last week of October, I had an opportunity to roam southern Arizona by myself for three days. This post is about the second day. The first can be read here.

***

I'm awakened at 7:30 a.m. by the sound of someone power-washing the sidewalk below my hotel room window. A city is its own alarm clock.

I get dressed and head out for a run through the historic district. I'm eager to finally see downtown Tucson in the light of day, but it would seem for the locals plodding to work that I'm the thing to be seen. I feel eyes on me everywhere I go. Heads turn in curiosity as I pass by. At first I try to ignore the stares, then start meeting them. Has no one in Tucson ever seen a person running?

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You know what sucks? Waking up in the middle of the night from a dream in which Santa Claus is making you cry.

MOVING ON, THEN.

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I've been spending a lot of time alone lately. This is something I am accustomed to, and comfortable with, having been raised an only child. What I am not quite accustomed to anymore, however, is the way in which having no one to be accountable to totally screws me over.

Look, I come from a fastidious family. At least on my mother's side. The one anecdote that explains everything is that when my grandmother was a child, she used to make her little friends wash their hands before they could touch her dolls. And this was in the 1930s. I'm not entirely positive they even knew what germs were, back then. Or hands, for that matter.

That was a weird joke. How wouldn't they have known what hands were? What is she even talking about?

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During the last week of October, I had an opportunity to roam southern Arizona by myself for three days. This post is about the first day.

***

The rental car lady walks briskly over to the last row of the lot, me trailing behind with my rolling suitcase. "You have a choice between that white Chevy HHR or this red Kia Soul," she says, gesturing to the left and right of us.

"Uh," I stutter. "Um."

"A lot of people like the Kia because of the hamster commercials," she leads.

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