Hi! It’s Labor Day

I have to keep updating or else Amazon will delist me on the Kindle whatever store.

So…I figured I’d post a rebuttal to Lonnie Martin’s latest blog entry wherein he talks about getting lost in Prague and says that American cities — and, specifically, Washington, DC — are well planned out. This is in hopes he’ll write a rebuttal to me dissing the Transformers comics.

He even describes the DC system — numbered streets go this-a-fucking-way, and lettered streets go that-a-fucking-way, while streets named after a state are where you’ll get shot. Ha-ha, no. Sorry, West Virginia Avenue, not all state-named streets are like that. Actually, L Street SE is considered the “most dangerous street in DC.” But, in these days of out of control gentrification, I think L St SE is just trying to look important so developers will swoop in and buy up all the rowhouses and exterminate the blacks. Wait! I mean… Oh, wait…no. I do mean exterminate the blacks. Sorry, it sounded bad when I typed it, but then I realized it was true.

So…sorry…the rebuttal. Did you notice that “Southeast” up there? Yeah. DC and the quadrants — SE, NE, NW, and, allegedly, there’s a SW. I…I’ve heard stories.

So let’s take one example of this fine grid, separated by quadrants, with X-streets going North by Northwest and Y-streets going to Infinity and Beyond. Today (I’m writing this on Friday for a Monday post because motherfucking Amazon has rules) I was walking back from $1 Beer Day at Hamilton’s on 2nd St NW. I hook up with 1st St NW and start walking back to work, where I seriously plan to climb onto my boss’s desk and shit on the desk blotter where he’s pasted all the pictures of his kids.

Oh! But 1st St NW ends! My office is on 1st St NE!

What are you thinking right now, Middle America? Are you thinking, gee willikers, if it’s a nice simple quadrant system with nice, simple, directional-oriented numbered and lettered streets, then 1st ST NW should magically become 1st St NE when you hit the quadrant?

You’re fucking wrong, Middle America! You’re wrong!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrjwaqZfjIY][/youtube]

To get from the end of 1st St NW to the start of 1st St NE, you need to walk .9 miles west, cross over Massachusetts Avenue, and then there you are. Simple. Foolproof. Assuming you were born right on 1st St and never left it for 50 years and spent several years being buttfucked by Pierre Charles L’Enfant himself, our notorious Frog city planner who was fired and rehired several times, replaced by drug-crazed interns when he wasn’t around, and created a masterplan for DC roughly in the same way one would create a masterplan for a colony of ants who were obsessively attacking a lollipop while you dropped lit matches into their midst.

And 1st Street is the most sane and rational example of DC’s habit to suddenly end streets somewhere, then start them up — with the house numbering system intact, mind you — half a mile or more away.

A DC native goes in circles. And god forbid some fuck asks for directions. My directions are by landmarks only. Look to the sky, my friend, and you’ll see the crane that’s gentrifying the 1st block of M St. So you know you want to be 12 blocks from there. You want to count the 12 blocks — using Base Six, of course — and then you’ll be where you want to be!

The logic to the DC street system is closer to Tom Lehrer than…well…logic.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA&list=PLV-zxRDK9wij3tZunfElUG0SF-sZcOb2P&index=5][/youtube]