False Spring in the Great Lakes Glop

It's a false spring, but I'll take it. Today I enjoy such small pleasures as walking on my driveway without much risk of slipping, hearing the drip of water from the downspouts, and going outside without the heaviest of heavy coats. The night was winter clear, which is about the best you can get in the Great Lakes glop (megapolis), though the Moon is getting pretty large, and beginning to wash things out of the sky even if the suburban lights do not.

"Megapolis" (and "megaregion") are too clinical. Especially when you see them depicted on a map. I prefer "glop" to describe an agglomeration of urban areas, but that's just an idiosyncratic choice. Years ago I read an '80s dystopian science fiction novel that involved a post-United States North America (plague, I think), some android-human lovin', a worldwide Internet sort of thing that the characters could plug their brains directly into, pop music based on 20th-century ambulance sirens, pirates who harvested organs for transplant from people they murdered, and whatnot.

The vast, essentially lawless urban areas that had been metro New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were referred to as glops. That's a detail that stuck with me, even though the name of the book and author have not.