State: Arizona
It is a defining dryness, and would thusly be termed "definitive" I think. It is of a particular hotness that lends itself perfectly to the classic automotive breakdown, and it is the blessed rest stop shelter from the heat and frustration coupled with desert vistas and the everpresent and almighty Dairy Queen, she of the milk shake stomach ache, her of the bad cheese burger and tasteless french fries, the most depressing of all service personnel oh she of the desert stillness and dryness. Every order its the same slump and frown, she pushes the buttons with her fingernails and calls out the orders with a voice that has no voice. The desert rose up from the ground out of nothing and created itself, and with it came the road which is laid atop it and is lined through it and with the road came the need for a place to stop, and with the place to stop came a need for a small smattering of houses culled together to form the looseness of a "town," of which this girl behind the counter is a member. Blessed be the town for no reason, oh that of passing and a stately statelessness. These towns always seem so useless, though. Grown out of a need to serve the traveller, so ethereal and so transitive. People just wander through and the only ones that stop are those that need to (they never want to, the halt in momentum is too brutal) but the stop, the rest-stop, always there in wait and open with its dusted souvenirs and musty personnel waiting to not help the traveler with anything and only serving purpose as a sort of disorienting apparition of the pre-Renaissance sort. Arizona, the poor state created by the interchange, created by the roads and rendered useless by their impermanence. Statelessness in a state - dryness of the dirt.
In Arizona, the first A calls Air as it rises up the R to zip down the jagged Z and turn sharply into the deep bellowing OOOhhh. The word terminates happily in an exhausted lump of sound, the wonderful "uh" that we know from our worst days and happiest of nights: Airizohnuhh, it trails off in that direction which soon becomes all directions. It is one road, yes, but in some ways one road links with this one and that one over there and in this way one road is every road at the same time just scattered instead of linear.
