This time of year
Old man weather
has erectile dysfunction

Text taken from Wikipedia, the pictures sans the map, are mine:

LaPorte County was chosen by the U.S. War Department as the site for a major munitions plant during World War II. It was called the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant (KOP).

There were several reasons LaPorte was chosen as a site for this munitions plant: First, La Porte was considered far enough away from either continental coast to prevent possible invasion or bombing; second, four railroads bordered the site (the Baltimore & Ohio, Nickel Plate, Wabash, and Grand Trunk); third, there were thousands of potential employees within commuting distance (including Chicago); fourth, there was enough land available; and fifth, the area provided an adequate water supply.

Approximately 13,454 acres of prime farmland were purchased for the plant. 250 families (approximately 800-1000 people) living in the area were forced to relocate within 30 days of federal acquisition. The government paid the families $113.00 per acre for their land, a price the War Department’s attorney called “more than fair".

Construction on the ordnance plant began November 11, 1940. The first shell was completed in August the following year. The Manhattan-island-sized complex–- comprising 20 completely fenced-in square miles-- was eventually completed on February 27, 1942, with “its own electric light plant, where sufficient energy is generated to serve a city the size of Terre Haute; a water plant, telephone system, a sewage disposal plant of the most modern type, a fire department, seventy-eight miles of [new] railroad tracks and ten Diesel locomotives, ninety-eight miles of highways ... [and] a modern twenty-six bed hospital.”

Water Filtration Plant

Storage Bunkers

Guard Shack

The Kingsbury Ordinance Plant produced millions of shells throughout the war, ranging in caliber from 20 to 105 millimeter.

The plant employed a peak number of 20,785 workers in May 1942.

When World War II ended in August 1945, the plant began the process of closing down. Beginning in 1951, shell production was resumed

In 1959, the United States government closed KOP and sold it. Part of the land is now the Kingsbury State Fish & Wildlife Area, and other areas are occupied by various industrial plants.

This information was obtained from the following sources:

Indianapolis News (copies of articles in Kingsbury Ordnance Plant folder, in Vertical File)
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I also found a great picture taker of other abandoned places near me:
http://www.futurespeak.net/myopic/photo.html

I like you
But I am not in like with you
Okay so maybe I am
Maybe I am so in like with you
Like: When white hot orbs fall from the sky tumbling to my feet to
tickle my toes
Like: When Dipuc's arrow is stuck in places you can't find on bodies worth exploring
Like: When you fall and I pick you up

What was it like to be the first bald person?

I don't see any evolutionary advantage this would play, unless looking older would make you less of prey for other predators. Or the shiny glint coming off of ones head would blind would-be attackers.

Would you have to explain to your friends in frightening detail that your hair 'just fell out'? Of course if you made it to the point where your hair could fall out in ancient times, that probably was a sign that you knew something about someone or the Earth in general. Maybe, like plumpness in women, baldness was a sign of godliness. The massive intellectual capacity coming from ones brain, that wisdom, fried all the hair from the head.

Or maybe those first humans just merely shrugged and kept going to the brothel around the corner. With the neon lights. In the desert. In a place that rhymes with "cage us", sitting over there at the lounge. His white hair, what's left of it, bemoans his purple suit. 

Just keep breathin', baby
Because it ain't affectin' me
Those cell phone viruses
Ain't nothing but a dream
As my speaker spits em out
Technological duds
I run free

Don't be gray
flaccid and flightless
hesitant and compromising

Don't be gray
somber and sifted
believing in the stasis of things
and not seeing a design
Born to adjectives too stale and stuck in other decades

C'mon

Divide this country directly in half
better yet divide people directly in half
Cleave them

in

two

Sit around campfires
Lamenting on days when a neighbor was a neighbor
And an eye was for an eye
tooth was for a tooth
Whip out the guitar
Ready the 'Kumbaya'

Someone's got the highlighter
Someone's got the paint
Someone's got the lighter fluid
You sit with the extinguisher
the corrective tape
Being your champion, baby
Is a masochistic exercise

Slice me open and count the rings
Sunshine rainbows
Sluiced meat
Balsa wood

My histogram contains spikes
Speedometer and the Appalachians 
Blue striped bed sheets, smiles and farmers tans
Spiral staircases

These caves that undulate outward
Musty smells and the soft feel of the earth
Slice me open
Marvel at my past

If you wanted it to
Life could dwindle down to certainty
Stress comes from not knowing what is out there
And trying to accomplish the task at hand
It is why humans type stereos
while handwriting obituaries
It makes the intolerable, tolerable

Stress is what kills people
It just takes time
And cells that are finally tired enough
To stop replicating
Or pissed off enough
To replicate with reckless abandon

I am dying an undignified death

We kill the things we love
A wiseman once said
So I have stopped loving anything
This numb black hole I dip my toes into