Trip to the States

[Pete Buechler]

More features of the Boston area:

Mom and Pop stores with high prices and rude attitudes because the liberals 
keep the chain stores away to protect them. Full serve gas stations because 
many towns banned self-serve for "safety" reasons (noticed all the wounded 
people lying around the Phoenix gas stations?).

Until a few years ago, the speaker of the house was brother to one of the 
biggest mobsters in the city. The state police got their funding cut whenever 
they tried to investigate the mob. The feds finally broke it up (some).

Expressway and mass transit infrastructure was completed in the 1950s with 
very little updated since. Looking at the bridges over 128 I don't think they 
even bother to paint. Potholes everywhere - and the back roads were laid out 
on old horse and buggy trails, now 18 wheelers are swerving around on them.

I-95 cancelled to save some dump neighborhood that everybody abandoned, 
leaving a huge town with just three expressways into it. Big dig is a big 
expense, it will help but will not solve the basic problem of insufficient 
expressways.

It's called Taxachusetts for good reason.

You're paying a shitload for an apartment but others in the same building are 
paying $80/month on some kind of welfare program. You get up and go to work, 
they get up and go to the pool. Made me wonder why I bothered to get an 
education and go to work.

Freezing cold and ICY all winter, melts into mud in the spring, then when it 
is finally summer the mosquitoes have bred in the mud puddles and are out 
chomping on you. A brief but beautiful fall followed by more winter.