Other than a good cry over the Pigheaded ending to Augusten Burroughs second Memoir, Dry, the highlight of my day came in the form of an email apology from Beauty’s Pizza. There has been so much Massachusetts bullshit going down this week, and no answers. No accountability.
On Monday Central Square was shut down. Manholes exploded, decapitating telephone poles, cutting eletrical lines, terrorizing human beings… There was a fire underground. The two main blocks were completely blacked out for much of the night. I rode my bike down past the police tape. Officers guarded the sewers, flash lights trained to the manholes. Children were turned around at checkpoints and told to go home. Meanwhile, underground, William Langewiesche and a team of experts probed the origins, and were shocked. The heat was the problem. That and the jungle-rot…
Eliot and I rode past a blacked out Walgreens. Blacked out Starbucks. Homeless people had deserted the area. No stores, no handouts. Banks lost data. People got intensely sick because they couldn’t get prescriptions, or coffee, for about two hours there. The air was thick with jungle rot. As I was saying, I rode past the police tape. A #1 city bus pulled through the police tape after I did. There we were… riding side by side with a city bus through the hell of manhole devastation… Central Square empty like some deserted Hopi-Indian city in the Southwest. It was bizarre, but they had to let the bus through. The bus had stops to make.
Then came Tuesday and hell froze over. On the ground the temperature dropped fifty or sixty degrees in five or six minutes. Children once again took it on the chin, and several probably got summer flu. That ain’t fun. It was exactly like the movie The Day After Tomorrow, when Manhattan is frozen over by a huge glacier in like seven seconds. I pulled on my giant black winter coat and wrapped myself in blankets. Homeless people clustered around manholes in hope that they could warm their hands over the underground fire… but it had been extinguished. This was no eternal flame.
Eric, from Beauty’s Pizza put it best: “It’s been a wild week! On Monday half of Central Square was closed off after an underground fire, and yesterday the temperature dropped drastically in what seemed like minutes. Forces outside Beauty’s control aside, I want to let you know that we hope all is well with you…”