Cities from above are terrifying. Sprawling webs, disgusting filaments of grey and white above once-scenic landscape.
Mountains leveled and rivers polluted.
Grasslands turned to square and separate plots of agriculture.
Roads wind around like ribbons, connections from death to death.
Cities from below are worse. Soot and smog and trash and refuse.
The stench of crack-addled vagrants who you both feel horrible sympathy for and also horrible dislike towards for attempting to rob you.
The staggering amount of decadence, of epicureanism running rampant.
The local wildlife carrying more diseases than a bio-weapon.
But you can blame no one here, not the disgruntled and rude Starbucks employees for any matter. It is impossible to enter the city without dying a little bit on the inside, organs turned to soot. It is almost unintelligible to think of the denizens of these prisons as anything but victims of circumstance. You think, "surely, they would leave if they could", but know somewhere that's not the case.
Vienna is dead.
I have been there. It is a dead city.
I do not mean it does not grow.
I do not mean it is abandoned.
But it is dead.
Perhaps once, musical and wonderful. Birthplace of Mozart, cradle of the classical and the baroque.
No; now it is stained with the same grey industry we know and love.
I entered the copper-topped city with a glint in my eye, expecting to hear-and-see-and-smell-and-taste-and-feel greatness and wonder throughout.
The walls of the thoroughfare looked like some thousand spray-artists had been executed by firing squad against them last week, technicolor gore plastering the storefronts and facades.
The sky lost its countryside shade of azure, turning overcast. Rain, probably very acidic, was the only sustenance for the rats today.
And all around there were messages, as if left by the dead. Some hung from windows, others painted on billboards, others sprayed onto the side of a bridge. They made me sick, I could not explain why. Others enjoyed the place, and could not comprehend my feeling. Neither could I.
"Your mind lies."
"Dominance through Submission."
"Why does it have to be so damn hard?"
Cities are horrible. Cities represent the worst of mankind. All so compressed together. Disquiet, mutilated and suicidal, blunt like a baseball bat. Who would choose to live here, in Vienna? In this hell? Where the Cathedrals install anti-homeless infrastructure, and the banks erect monuments to mankind as god. Where the songs have all died, and the smiles are glued on for the tourists.
I am not going back
to that unidentifiable corpse
until I die.
Requiem for the City of Music
page revision: 5, last edited: 23 Jul 2023 15:13