
A quick side trip on the way home to catch the sun as it sets over the yards, in Autumn.
Perched on the edge of suburban sanity, staring down the grotesque sheetmetal monolith that some city planning degenerate had erected as a monument to urban decay. The graffiti tags were screaming at me in a language only the truly deranged could comprehend. The railway signals loomed like mechanical sentinels, their red eyes watching, always watching. Two glass eyes staring down with bureaucratic indifference at the twisted metal barriers containing the human cattle. Who designed these monstrous fences? Probably the same twisted minds behind airport security and DMV lines.
Behind this hellscape of industrial waste and forgotten infrastructure rose the hideous glass towers of capitalism – monuments to greed that pierced the pristine blue sky like syringes into the arm of God. The contrast was enough to make a sober man hallucinate. Good thing I wasn't sober. The light was pure magic hour madness, that peculiar time when everything looks better than it has any right to. The old brick houses cowered in the shadows, relics of a bygone era when people actually knew their neighbors before they were all priced out by trust fund babies and foreign investors.
This was Australia's dark heart exposed – progress and decay locked in a savage embrace while the power lines cut across the sky like the neural pathways of some collective urban nightmare. You could almost hear the electric buzz of money changing hands, of deals being made in those steel and glass monstrosities downtown.
The whole scene was too much. Too real. Too raw. I needed to look away, but couldn't. This was Melbourne with its mask off, caught between what it was and what it was becoming, and brother, it was one hell of a ride.
Now a series unto itself
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