Picture this: you are a weary traveler trying to make an arduous journey through hills, plains and trees. You are running low on food and water. You are beset on all sides by crumbling conditions, as the small, narrow path towards your destination is shrinking. There is no comfort in your travels, as every single foot you travel is rough and difficult. In front of you, there is an endless caravan of equally weary travelers, a single-file line of toil and misery beyond end. Behind you, another line of desperate men and women, reaching out toward your back. It is the death of all things. There is no inbetween: there is either burning sun above your head or snow beneath your feet.
I would not fault you for thinking I am describing Mao Zedong’s Long March or Hannibal Barca’s trek through the Alps, but I am in fact talking about Sixth Street.
Lawrence’s roads are a silent scream with no mouth. The roads that are open are often bumpy and pothole-plagued. The roads that aren’t open, well, that is most of them. The streets are a network that forms a painting: a dismal impressionist painting of melancholy and horror. But paintings end.
There is no end to Lawrence’s road construction. Lawrencian infrastructure is a kafkaesque machine, a dismal blender that breaks the souls of men. Boys turn onto Sixth Street, dreaming of Burger Stand. Only men leave, their dreams twisted into a 30 mph zone of nightmare.
In these twisted ruins, there is naught but a monument to the supreme arrogance of the human race. There is no hope, for we have strangled all trace by our own hand. Our lives lay bare before the shattered hubris of the City of Lawrence’s Municipal Services & Operations Department, and as Friedrich Nietzsche would’ve said if he were born in Lawrence, “the roads are dead, and we have killed them.”
