Montgomery, TX

An empty luxury hotel next to a fake lake. To get there, drive north from George Bush Intercontinental Airport for an hour and a half past endless rows of strip malls and office parks. The landscape runs past like the background in a computer game where the programmers have recycled the same few graphics over and over: pawn shop, Taco Bell, I-Hop, furniture store, office park, Walmart, pawnshop, Taco Bell, I-Hop, furniture store, office park, Walmart, pawnshop . . . . It goes on forever. I wonder if it would look any different here if conquering aliens ordered Texans on pain of death to make the landscape as ugly as possible. I wonder if maybe this already happened and for some reason I never heard about it.

It doesn't seem any more fanciful then the alternative hypothesis: that people made the world look like this by choice.