Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I went back into the great arcs. The curvaceous Mojave world. But Vegas soon interrupted my road again, and it was different than before, with row after row of unfinished and abandoned houses, whistling dry wind, leftover from the big boom years ... Flung burbs had fallen on hard times, into a sort of beige hole. Apparently there had been some sort of crash. Kind of like the one I remembered from a few years earlier. And the one a few years before that. Funny how money graphs that once climbed steadily like the Great Plain shot wildly up and down like the mountain west. There was even a glass floor in a bar atop a ghost tower on the Strip to show how far down the drop can be.

It was eerily quiet in the beige burbs, but I was sure at night you'd find terrible teenage rituals and wild dogs amid the sand drifts, abandoned machines and mail slots jammed with foreclosures ... But we'd been through much worse before. The Beige Hole was nothing compared to the Rust Belt and its hellfire crucibles, blackened Gothic remains, shot-out checkerboard panes, stark dark outlines of line houses against steel skies, where diesel winds blow and wild dogs roam filthy deserts of grime ... where out in the badlands along old 23 the old mills turn into mineral-streaked mounds and leach surprising color in late afternoon sun if you watch long enough. The beige Vegas deserts had nothing on Ohio.

" there was even a glass floor in a bar atop a ghost tower on the Strip to show how far down the drop can be."

great sentence

And enjoyed the whole piece......!.....

Wrote this during the aftermath of the last big economic crash. Then I realized the Rust Belt was probably worse.