CMD on Nostr: I went to visit Dallas (in Texas) a few months back. My friend who is trapped there ...

I went to visit Dallas (in Texas) a few months back. My friend who is trapped there complained about it, and I would like to relay their complaints and add my own to them.

This post took some time to think through. The experience I had there was exceptionally odd, and it took some effort to figure out how to put this into words.

The entire city's culture appears to revolve around two things: keeping up appearances and strip malls.

The first means that the people who live there are really materialistic, to the point of ruining themselves pretty often. It's really bad and it causes cultural problems that make it extremely difficult to find good friends. I did not see this, but it is the thing my friend complained of the most.

The second - which I had pointed out to my friend, and which he had not noticed himself, but was immediately forced to accept - is that almost everything to do in that metroplex is contained in a strip mall of some kind. People frequent their favorite strip malls, and it's kinda freaky how much people just hang out in the same strip mall all the time. The fact that it ever happens is odd to me, and the fact that every strip mall appeared to have at least one guy who just liked everything in that one strip mall is baffling.

I asked my friend if he knew anything about the history of the town. He said that he did not - which was alarming, as he had been living there for 10 years. I asked a barista, and a waiter the same questions - neither knew. I found this very odd. Everywhere else I had been, people would at least know some basic fact about the town's history: "This is a town about cameras, there's a camera museum over there." "This is where we built planes." "This was the capital once." "This used to be a mining town." "This is the place where this type of pizza was invented." "The town is propped up by the university." With the occasional exception - usually where the town appeared to basically be a truck stop - I could usually ask a few baristas/waiters and get one response to the tune of "this town exists for this reason." In some places, I would not even have to ask: it would just come up if I struck up a conversation. Baristas and waiters are not typically history buffs - it is just true that a plurality of people in a town should know at least one thing about the town.

It is a highly superficial place, with a worrying lack of culture. I was genuinely shocked to see a place that had been sterilized so much, and I will not be returning to it. It was one of the more strange experiences I have ever had, to see an entire major city's culture be so empty - but my friend agreed with my conclusions quite rapidly, and he had been living there for some years.

I did not expect to encounter such an awful place in the South - let alone Texas, the supposed flagship of Southern culture - and yet I am forced to acknowledge it.