rant · moment 9 of 18
Driving Through Mastic Beach, Long Island
from No More Life In A Cage · #101
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
6 minTim and Ray describe scouting locations in economically depressed Mastic Beach, Long Island, describing boarded-up houses next to well-kept ones, the lack of public transportation, and how hard it would be to escape poverty there.
- 35:41Tim and crew drove to Mastic Beach on Long Island looking for locations for a project.
- 35:56Mastic Beach is economically depressed—not like an inner city with activity, just areas with not much going on.
- 36:42The town is filled with drug addicts, boarded-up houses, and mostly white people in visible decay.
- 36:54A tattooed young mother with a baby in a power wheel looked like she wanted to stab Tim when he called it adorable.
- 37:22Mastic Beach has decent houses scattered among boarded-up properties, creating a post-apocalyptic patchwork.
- 38:12Tim says he couldn't live there even in a nice house because something feels fundamentally wrong about the place.
- 38:57The stretch from William Floyd Parkway to Montauk Highway through Mastic is just darkness getting progressively worse with a burnt rubber smell.
- 39:24Despite stories about gangs, they saw mostly migrants and newcomers looking for work, no gang activity in broad daylight.
- 39:44Mastic feels more depressing because you're constantly looking at people with no way out.
- 40:26Pulling yourself out of poverty in Mastic is nearly impossible—you'd have to walk three to four miles just to reach a bus, and the system requires multiple transfers that don't always run.
- 41:05When snow comes and buses don't show up, escaping poverty becomes even harder; the structural barriers are genuinely brutal in this country.