Driving around Phoenix today, I stopped at the Chinese Cultural Center to check on shopping, restaurants, and how the area is doing in general. The buildings, with their Chinese-style designs, make for a great contrast in our city of cookie-cutter genericness. As usual, the site is not busy, but this makes for a nice, quiet walk around the perimeter of the facility next to the ponds and blooming spring growth.

Update: The above was my original post as it was shared on March 29, 2005, but in 2023, we’ve developed time travel, and now I’m back in the past writing with hindsight. Not only did the future hold the potential for fatter bandwidth, but quantum teleportation across the time divide surprised us all. Regarding news from the period I’m currently living in, there’s talk about Mark Zuckerberg from TheFacebook.com and Elon Musk at PayPal (if you are reading this in 2005) getting into a UFC-style ring to fight one another; what you might be surprised about is that they are two of the richest people on earth in 2023.

By 2022 all of the Chinese influence on the Chinese Cultural Center would be stripped away. Fountains, gates, ponds, trees, and ornamentation were removed by the new owners of the property to ensure Phoenix was maintaining its boring facade of generic bullshit. Of course, I should point out that the restaurants and grocery store at the center of the complex never performed very well in a city not known for its cultural curiosity.

Someday, Phoenix will look just like the Pueblo Grande ruins at the museum formerly named after them. I say formerly because, as of 2023, the archeological site has been renamed S’edav Va’aki Museum. S’edav Va’aki means “central mound” in the O’odham language and is more appropriate for what the site represents.

All of Phoenix, Arizona, is a simulation of what it has been like over time, meaning life other than lizards has been wiped off the desert while endless series of cinderblock walls separated by asphalt streets along with some sterile recreations of what homes looked like will be all that remains as the city had to be depopulated due to running out of water. Even the golf courses are gone. To be honest, 2023 sucks.

At least the ancestral peoples of the Southwest left us art; we left destruction, though we can now time-travel to accelerate the demise of humanity as we try to force the hand of God to offer us the Second Coming.

The lines on the Cylindrical Vessel were deciphered in 2019 by Kary Mullis, the 1993 winner of a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Prior to his death later that year, Mullis discovered that the lines were easily read like a kind of vinyl record and told the story of how white people pretending to be gods were going to lay waste to everything they touched while the bowl on the right offers the formula for time travel. You win some, you lose some.

Before the fall of the Phoenix area, an omen in the form of Lee Ving from the punk band Fear appeared on the streets of our city. It is said he carried the tools of destruction in that backpack. Whatever it was, the waters of the Colorado River and the aquifers below the state were all dry. Maybe my trip into the past should have been to place a banana peel in his path, thus possibly thwarting his fiendish plan.