...I saw a city steadily sinking... ceaselessly stumbling on

Another city I went to was perhaps the most depressing place I've ever been. I was sent there by a former alderman, who wanted me to help them rebuild. It had been steadily sinking since its founding. You see, the founders built it on a swamp. They knew it would keep sinking, but they built it there anyway out of defiance. They were clever though, and the ingenious architects built machines to hoist the buildings from the swamp before they sunk too far.

Later generations had forgotten these machines, and built stilted structure on stilted structure, hoping to stop the sinking. Often, buildings will sink unevenly, and the stilts (or the structure itself) will break, and the wood will be reused for new structures which meet the same end. The citizens live with the same defiant attitude as their founders, but they no longer take the measures taken by their founders. Instead, they say that the machines never existed, and were simply a metaphor, and that these broken structures are what the founders intended.
They don't realize that instead of becoming the captors of the swamp, they have become the captives of the swamp,


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The title is from "Nice and Blue Part 2" by Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou.