So I spent the weekend in Arizona. I opted out of the long ride through the desert when I found America Worst had a nice $98 round trip fare if I returned on Tuesday. Suddenly the weekend became a no brainer.

It was a relaxed holiday, despite how the aches in my upper back and the congestion in my head might seem to indicate otherwise. We went waterskiing every evening (if anything would illustrate how out of shape I have become, it’s the repeated face planting I did just trying to plane a wakeboard), did a little climbing at the local gym (also a lesson in humility), and I took Todd's VFR out for a fun morning spin through the twisties to Bartlett Lake. Sure, I drank a little sangria but largely the weekend was spent relaxed and in the company of Todd and Lisa and his cat.

Todd has a generic suburban home in North Scottsdale – and that’s not a criticism. It’s certainly more of a home than I can afford in OC. It’s just the official state color is beige, and it seems developers in Arizona have decided that despite the umpteen million plan options you have when building your home, in reality, everyone just wants to live in the same house as everyone else. Suburban living, sterilized and homogenized for easy social digestion.

The best parts of life in Sonoran suburbia are the desert animals that have decided, maybe against their better instincts, to share their home with the hordes of beige people in the beige houses in the beige city. I suppose it makes sense. We move to the suburbs for a safe place to live and raise our kids. Why wouldn’t they? With the sole exception of the random kid with a bb gun, a fast moving SUV, or the occasional coyote, they are pretty safe to do as they please.

In Todd’s back yard at any given time you can see doves and quail and lizards and geckos and rabbits and chipmunks and hummingbirds and a vast assortment of sparrows and wrens that I couldn’t begin to identify. It’s wild kingdom, only in a family friendly, backyard format and endless entertainment for his cat Macy who spends hours just crouched by the sliding glass door, tail twitching idly behind her. Occasionally a lizard or gecko wanders a little to close to the door and sends Macy into a mad dash to the glass where she will continue to pace and purr in frustration for the next several minutes while the lizard goes on about his business of doing his little reptilian pushups on the wall and mocking house cats and out of shape rock climbers.

I will frequently spend a good half hour of every day sitting out on the patio or, while in the kiln of summer, sitting by the window, just enjoying the sight of it all. Sure, I can watch the fish jumping around from either of my balconies at home, I hear the seals barking in the morning, and with a short walk to the sand can watch the pelicans cruising gracefully, wingtips just inches from the water, but it’s the abundance of desert life that always fascinated me the most. I suppose primarily because life in a desert is so difficult to maintain.

My favorite part of Todd’s cul-de-sac of life is the bird’s nest that has been built in the potted cactus next to his front door and right beside the kitchen window. This spring two separate families of sparrows have built nests in the same fork of the same plant, a sparrow suburbia as it were, the first brood already raised and flown off or become food for some snake or owl or roadrunner, the second family still raising a noisy foursome of little yellow beaked toddlers now. As I was watching the nest yesterday, I watched as one of the chicks twisted its body around, hung it’s bald little butt over the side and promptly took a dump onto the rim of the nest. Now I wasn’t hoping to see the business end of a sparrow’s digestive system pushing regurgitated crickets and palo verde seeds out its featherless ass, but I was surprised to see how neatly the rim was lined with bird shit. This simple act suddenly seemed to me to be fundamental to a happy, healthy existence. It was something I had never considered before, but these bird babies knew to do instinctively.

Simply, don’t shit where you sleep.

Somewhere in our culture of chaos and consumerism and commitments and complexity, we seem to have forgotten this. Leave the stress and the bills and the job and the arguments on the floor next to your slippers. Don’t take the shit to bed with you.

Ah, maybe it’s a crappy metaphor, pun intended, but if I can find any inspiration in tract housing, believe me, I’m gonna run with it.