Road trips being road trips it was a chance to drive across the US and hang out together while we were doing it. Route 8 - which runs along but not across the Mexican border had several Border Patrol stops on it. We weren't hassled until the trip back when were deep in Arizona and past Yuma. I got asked if I was a US Citizen. I didn't have my green card with me as I didn't think we would need it as we weren't crossing international borders. He let us drive on as my wife is a US Citizen.

I always get nervous when crossing borders and being questioned by customs and border control. I am an odd entity, while I have Australian citizenship I am disenfranchised from Australian politics but I am not yet a US citizen. Currently we organize ourselves politically through the technology of nationalism but some us, such as me, don't neatly fit into that category and it can be difficult sometimes to negotiate our way through it. I am fortunate in being an upwardly mobile Anglic looking fellow, it is hard to stop and detain a white guy driving a Corvette with his very beautiful wife. But others that cross nationalistic boundaries in terms of citizenship are not so lucky.

There is a Chicago photographer - I cannot recall his name - that takes photographs of skyscrapers and then looks for minute signs of human activity in them. He mostly sees people in their late twenties and early thirties staring dumbly at the television as they unwind from a hard days work. Life isn't the exciting spectacle the artist's imagination fashions. Instead it is rather repetitive and humdrum.

When I was taking this photo I felt like that photographer. A lone human staring out at the Pacific Ocean from within the heavy and glaring geometric constructs of tourist architecture. One guy as the lone example of human activity in such a large structure. You pick your composition of course; the path along the beach headland in San Diego was teaming with people.