Does this spark joy, or existential dread?

My mom’s stuff is America’s stuff

July 30, 2026

Phoenix, Arizona is a bunch of little cities smelted together by the desert heat. I don’t know if I was in Glendale, or Surprise, or Mesa, but it was a hot mess. By hot, I mean it got up to 118 degrees and by mess, I mean it was an endless sprawl of strip malls. Strip malls and storage facilities. Phoenix, Arizona, where your shit goes to die.

I was there this week, with my 35-year-old nephew, to go through my late mother’s storage unit. My mom, who passed in February, was under the mistaken impression she was going to start a business with her brother in Phoenix, so, eleven years ago, she moved all her stuff from Georgia to Arizona, stayed for a month and then moved back to Georgia, leaving the archive of her life in a Phoenix shed. Over the years, I’ve probably paid the monthly fee more than she did because there were some artifacts of my life I didn’t want to lose, primarily the Super 8 films of my childhood. That ended this week.