My Town

I live near a large city in the Southeastern United States. I shall call this city "Lincoln."

Lincoln is a dump. At one point, it used to be pretty cool- majestic and architecturally beautiful skyscrapers lined the sky. Now it's a shell.

Like a lot of larger towns in the South, there's perhaps a six to eight block radius where it's fairly safe to walk during the day. People drive into the town to work, then quickly escape before nightfall falls over the city. Because then, if you wander down the streets, you might as well just kill yourself. Because you'll be dead anyway. Strange people wander the streets, wanting to fulfill their thirst for blood. Some of them will kill you and leave your wallet stuffed with cash on the sidewalk. They're simply insane.

Or, as I like to say, Insan-O. Because it sounds funnier.

The local news ran a piece tonight about how people were moving back into South Lincoln, because the perception of crime there was overblown. A local resident was quoted as saying, "Crime can happen anywhere. It happens in Lincoln, it happens in Washington, and it happens in Jefferson."

(By the way, if you can't figure out that Washington and Jefferson aren't the real names of nearby towns, you're probably not very smart.)

Anyway, it's all bullshit. Of course crime is worse in South Lincoln. The newscaster wouldn't even do the broadcast live on a street in South Lincoln, for fear of instant death. Nor would she let her child walk down the streets of South Lincoln alone, because (hopefully) she's not a complete moron.

A local real estate site has over thirty houses for sale in Lincoln for less than $15,000. Why is that, you might ask? It's not because there's so many of them. It's because instead of insulation, they fill the walls with the bodies of dead hookers and crackheads.

Jefferson, a quickly growing bedroom community to the North of Lincoln, has recently realized that if it builds a living room, it never has to come to Lincoln. So they started building mini-skyscrapers. Which means office space. Which means all the employers in Lincoln are leaving. In a hurry. So soon, even the six to eight block radius will be a ghost town.

My prediction- in the next 5 years, Lincoln will become a sinking pothole of crime and moral decay, with Mad Max type individuals roaming the streets looking for clean drinking water and cigarettes. The streets will be littered with rusting automobile carcasses, as all the gas stations were long ago burned to the ground in the Great Riot of '09. Parentless children, mutated by the nuke that the military hit the town with in a last ditch effort to save the city, will wander around with glowing eyes and no sense of shame. Really rich people from around the country will take tours in tanks through the carnage, for the pure thrill of it. A few will die every year. TimeLife will make a few bucks off of tribute books and calendars, and then everyone will forget about it.

Either that, or it'll just completely go to hell.

But the Mad Max thing is so much cooler.

In my next post, I'll write about the Mahwongs- I think, fair reader, you'll like it.