The Empire Valley Series is based on observations of urban sprawl and poor urban planning; in the city where I grew up. The often-contradictory observations from childhood of places and locations create a puzzle with pieces that don’t fit together. My memories of the city as you drive through it along the freeway is mountains of used tires, appliance junk yards, warehouses, and car scrap yards. It looks like a veritable war zone, especially when the tire dump was burning for three years straight, the fire to deep in the mound to be extinguished. I am relating to this environment with notions from childhood of ideal adult occupations, also often-contradictory. In hindsight all these “manly” careers like being a soldier, construction worker, astronaut, lumberjack, farmer, and electric line worker are related to my environment. Several subjective elements inspired by a teenage fever dream come into play such as the distress of memory, fancifulness, and intuitive connections between personal experiences and universal expressions of experience.