Welcome To Phoenix In The Year 2030 - Darkly Funny Satire

[hatrack]

"On this last Friday in August the radio says the current temperature is 110 and will hit 123. Cooler spots today outside the heat island will include 117 at Gila Bend Estates and 113 in New River Ranch, two gated communities rumored to have undocumented outdoor fountains.

EDIT

Outside, she sprays Max and Katy with SPF 100 sunblock and everyone climbs into the family's 15-year-old SUV. Liz notices the gas gauge is barely at a quarter of a tank. Quickly she tries to calculate how much gas she will need to reach school, the Valley Metro lot, her second job that evening, and home. She'll likely have to wait in line at the gas station. At $12 a gallon, she'll have to go to an automatic teller machine for the $300 fill-up. Discount stations are cash only. Liz pulls out, her yellow smog lights poking weakly through the dense early-morning air and falls in line for the slow crawl to the freeway. "For sale" signs lean at odd angles in many of the bare dirt yards. Every block has a couple of homes wrapped in yellow "no trespassing" tape for foreclosure. The Garcias moved to Eloy 13 years ago for an affordable home and the last scraps of rural landscape left between Phoenix and Tucson. Light rail was talked about but never happened. Metro buses don't come down this far. The crumbling I-10 is still the only way north for the 25-mile run to Phoenix.

Their plan was to live in this house two or three years and move to a bigger place. David drove a forklift at a Wal-Mart distribution site until the Great Sale of 2018 when Wal-Mart was taken over by the Chinese conglomerate, Mao-mart. The center closed and David found work with Mao-mart's trucking division driving big shipping containers from the Long Beach dockyards to stores around the Southwest. He sleeps at home every eighth night, the other seven in his truck.

Liz reaches the I-10 ramp in half an hour and joins the slow crawl north. Even when traffic is light, between 12:45 and 1:20 p.m. weekdays, the speed limit is just 40 mph, another gas-saving concession. Along the center median in the bike lane, a few brave cyclists sucking on respirators pedal past the lines of cars and trucks.


http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/1219house-bad19.html