Last year I bought my vegetables here, but today it’s just an empty carcass. The building was a living being, sheltering people and businesses; but now it’s a lifeless corpse, an empty hulk, beset by scavengers.
The smell of decay: moist, musty, and a little chalky, that’s the first thing you notice. Then, of course, there’s the noise. Destruction is never quiet. The roar of diesel, the squeak, squeak of the caterpillar tracks. You need to cover your ears.
But above the din, the most viscerally disturbing sound is when the monster takes a bite. You can see the massive steel jaws silently open, then close on some piece of concrete jutting out. It sounds like bones being crushed. Then, like a hungry predator, it’s the jaws turn and rip the building’s meat from its carcass, leaving a ragged bite mark. As the jaws pull away, the concrete in its maw crumbles, leaving only the steel rebars, like sinews, dangling. These are then are spit out in the corner, like undigestible leavings for minor predators.
The monster is hungry, has an insatiable appetite. The building, bite after bite, suffers as the relentless the monster dismembers and discards its structure. But the building doesn’t fight back, even though it was strong, and could have lasted another 100 years, it has accepted its fate. It’s stoic, it knows it’s dead.
The monster’s driver seems to be a trance as he works the levers and controls, exhorting the behemoth to take a bite, and then another. You wonder how he got his job; this modern-day executioner, without the hood to hide his identity. Was he a young video game junkie? Did he hone his skills with Super Mario, trying to save Princess Peach? Or was he more a Pokémon geek, training his monsters to fight in the arena.
Of course, the monster is never alone. There are always acolytes in attendance under supervision of the white-hard-hatted, high priest. Some acolytes are there to repair a broken hydraulic or to grease a sticky joint, others to spray the mutilated carcass, and still, others to hold back the curious and the gawkers.
Looking at this scene convinces me that nothing is as it seems, everything is perspective. You see, I’m an engineering student, and normally I would look at this scene and see safe things, unemotional things, abstract things like structure, torque, stresses and shear loads. But today my thoughts are different, very disturbing. It must be because I was partying last night, it went on well past sunrise, and now looking at this scene here proves to me, that I should never mix beer, weed and magic mushrooms ever again.