Graveyard shift

I work in a ghost town. In its heyday, this place had about 35,000 people working here; now there are less than 3,000. I don't know how many acres the plant covers, but I'd guess close to 40; only a handful of buildings are still in use. A lot have been knocked down, there are piles of rubble scattered around the yards, and stacks of metal covered with rust. Only one furnace is still functional; it's huge and beautiful in an industrial sort of way, but it looks very lonely sitting on the point by itself. The other furnaces are gone, along with the people who ran them.

The saddest bit is the parking lots; there obviously used to be an on-site bus system to take workers from the lots out to their jobs in the plant. But that's gone now; there's so much room and so few people that they can park wherever they need, and most parking lots have only three or four cars in them at any one time.

I'm not really pining for the old days; there are still plenty of smokestacks here belching smoke, and containers with chemicals, and they don't treat the waste water just to make it prettier before it goes back in the Bay. I look forward to the day when we can get all our power from solar cells and windmills. But still, when I drive around here, it's like driving through ruins.

On a lighter note, I helped kyriotate unpack his books. Man, I used to be smart. I miss those days.....