Repost from Nigel's Spore Thread: Making You Feel At Home.

[Doktor Howl]

Tucson is a living reminder that all things must pass.  If you look at Tucson with the right kind of eyes, you see the ruins of the coliseum, the Parthenon, and maybe the shattered legs of Percy Shelley's Ozymandius.  Tucson is a broken town, a ruin still inhabited by the ghosts of the present.

Everything here is either temporary, or something meant to be temporary, that has been patched and propped up long past its intended lifespan.  The very office I sit in used to be an assay lab, and the rusted fittings of copper pipe still exist, as does the fume hood ducting above my ceiling risers.

The feeling generated is one of isolation, in some nightmarish sense.  It is if I am the last man on Earth, sitting in this office and pretending that The End hadn't come...Indeed, it is a sort of insane preview of the world at some point in the future, when all the machines grind to a halt, when the neon signs flicker for the last time before going out forever.

Our homes and tenements all feel like mausoleums, from which we shamble forth every day, to do our appointed tasks that earn us the right to rest for another night.  We are the Babylon of America, standing here with our skull-like grin, to show you that even thou, America, art dust. 

I see you pretending otherwise, with your rotting trappings of empire.  Your carrier fleets, your legions, your feeble attempts to protest The End with your petty displays of power.  I see your recursive culture, brightly lit though it may be, descending slowly into its terminal phase.  I see you buying sports cars in your 60s, your Botox, your trophy pretty young things.

I see all of this, all of this and more, and I tell you that Tucson isn't fooled.  The sands pour from the top of the glass to the bottom, and none can stay the hands of time.  You will grow old, you will die...Just as your tawdry empire will one day pass.  This is Tucson, after all, and we know the face of degeneration.

When you are done with your parties, your fetes and feasts, when you are done with all the noise and commotion with which you attempt to drown out Tucson's song, we will be waiting for you.  Your place is prepared.

And when you get here, we will roll down Congress with the radio playing, through the ruins.  We will listen to dead rock n rollers, we will drink whiskey, we will gaze upon the grinning skull of The Future, and we will call it right & good.

Take your time, though, for we have plenty of time in Tucson.  We have all the time in the world.  We have nothing but time.

Okay for now,
Dok

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Fucking fantastic. Beautiful and horrible.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I always got the feeling that Tuscon was one of those places that people thought was a City Of Gold way back when. And they got out there, and got stuck. Turned to prostitution and failed mining and chronic alcoholism and never sent for the family, never made it out.

Died in the desert.

[Freeky]

I always got the feeling that Tuscon was one of those places that people thought was a City Of Gold way back when. And they got out there, and got stuck. Turned to prostitution and failed mining and chronic alcoholism and never sent for the family, never made it out.

Died in the desert.

Mining is one of the things that if you are in the right place, you CAN'T fail at. 

Prostitution is the other.*


*If you don't consider becoming a husk and/or dying at the hands of some psycho while trying to make a buck failure.

[Epimetheus]

 

And when you get here, we will roll down Congress with the radio playing, through the ruins.  We will listen to dead rock n rollers, we will drink whiskey, we will gaze upon the grinning skull of The Future, and we will call it right & good.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I always got the feeling that Tuscon was one of those places that people thought was a City Of Gold way back when. And they got out there, and got stuck. Turned to prostitution and failed mining and chronic alcoholism and never sent for the family, never made it out.

Died in the desert.

That was more or less the feeling I got when I was in Tucson.