Endless rows of houses
Planned and zoned on August 11, 2024.
Driving down Schmerber Street, I wondered why so many streets are just endless rows of houses or commercial buildings. Why aren’t there streets lined with giant mushrooms… or bronze statues of Catlips the Clown? I wondered. Why did it always have to be these boring man-made buildings?
I wondered, are the cities of Saugus, Secaucus, or even Segaugagaugus like this, too? Endless rows of houses and other buildings, one street after another, an unending grid that stretches from horizon to horizon. Or… is it only my homely little hometown that’s bursting at the seams with residences and businesses? It really doesn’t make sense. But… does it have to?
Where are streets lined with sidewalks that go nowhere? Or ones that end in bridges to nowhere? Somewhere in the world, someone must have built a street that looked like a giant Möbius strip covered in black velvet. Or made of naugahyde. Or even made of manticratic sassigassity.
It’s not that my town doesn’t have some of the more interesting features a town could have. There’s the cementery on Grimpley Street, a store that makes headstones and mausoleums—solely out of imported Chinese concrete. There’s the factory on Zubenelgenubi Street that manufactures Maus-Oleum™, a wood polish (great for caskets!) made out of imported Sicilian rats. And there’s the sementary on Squayzie Avenue—out behind the brothel and clinic—rumored to be the world’s biggest cemetery for used condoms.
They built a Drunken Donuts on Uranium-238 Drive. They built a Dunkin’ Dönitz on Hegelian Avenue. They even built a Dinkins Donuts on Middendorfer Street. And some clever soul saw fit to build the town’s nuthouse on Macadamia Street.
But why didn’t someone build an entire street dedicated to the noble pig?—the world’s #1 provider of ham, pork, bacon, and assorted luncheon meats. (The #2 provider is the ignoble raccoon.) The state of Massachusetts has Dead Ham and Walt Ham—two towns entirely dedicated to ham! Why can’t we have even a single street honoring pork or bacon (or assorted luncheon meats)?
Ruminating over this, cow-like (not pig-like), now all I wanted to do was crawl back into that storm drain and simmer for a while. Or sink back back into the mud from whence I came and stew for a while. Maybe even soup myself up a bit. And then emerge, reborn, albeit mud-clad, but like a raccoon crawling furtively out under cover of darkness to dig through your trash, devour anything remotely resembling food, and make a general mess of things. But then I remembered I don’t have opposable thumbs anymore, so I that plan was right out.
So what to do? Schmerber Street had suffered that lollygagging accident back in ’21, but that didn’t really change the landscape much at all. (It did start a number of amusing scandals and disturbing conspiracy theories, however!) Nothing short of a massive natural gas explosion would clear this street of all those buildings, I realized.
Then, I went to work on a plan.