God damn! Is that logical or what?

Oh, Chicago's grid system, how I miss you so.

Though you may have weird dead-ends in spots and slash streets that run on diagonals (Archer, Southwest Hwy., Lincoln, etc.) for the most part, you run north and south and east and west, without fail.

Such a beautiful design... simple, elegant, less cluttered than Daniel Burnham had wished, but delightful to navigate nonetheless. Back in the day, with four young men in their early 20s, we did a lot of running around and chasing girls.

To do this, we'd need to actually leave the apartment, sometimes at different hours or from work or other obligations. "How do I get there?" one of us would ask. "Oh, the apartment is at Clark and Waveland," the other would say. "Gotcha," the first guy would say.

When it got really difficult with streets we didn't know too well or other neighborhoods, all (ALL!) we'd need to know were the cross streets. "It's 2000 west, right off of Addison," they'd say. Then we would go, party and return home alone. Ah, good times.

This morning, I had a meeting near the University of Minnesota and regardless of what any of these lutefisk-eating fucks tells you, the city of Minneapolis is not on a grid. I left an hour early for a 15-minute trip just in case and were it not for my nerdy side, I'd have been embarrassingly late.

Honestly, I had forgotten my near-blinding rage at the mouth breathers who designed this town (it's not like they had to build around anything, right? Or would need to if they wanted to build more stuff tomorrow morning) until I read The Blog That I Hate.

The Blog That I Hate is done by a self-important chowderhead friend of the Girl. I'm paraphrasing here, but he spoke of teaching someone the super-difficult grid system... Honestly, I can train a chimp to follow a simple grid-based street system, there's no trick to it. The problem is the Minneapolis "grid" is about four blocks square downtown and was probably designed by accident, like a potato chip that looks like a spaceship or a basset hound that looks like Richard Nixon. The grid idea could probably be continued easily if there were more bridges over the surrounding rivers, but the engineers are too polite to disturb the local wildlife... or the rivers. The rest of it? Not a grid. Not even close.

The thing is that if anyone can't navigate in this town, I can completely understand that. It's like being out east, only there's no rhyme or historical reason for the snakepits that regularly snarl with hundreds of out of towners as they try to flee. I think they were put in at the urging of the local hotel industry.

However, those who can't handle a true grid or Minneapolis' mini-grid should be quietly driven into a truck trailer, Knight Rider style, shot in the head and pushed out the back on a long stretch of desert somewhere in the southwest where Mother Nature, coyotes and the homeless will take care of disposing of the bodies and their wallets.

Friends and family of these people won't be a bit surprised and at least the deceased themselves will go out on top, with their heads hanging out the window, making siren sounds as bugs smack into their court-ordered helmets. (Why yes, that is a nice helmet. Yes, those do look like Viking horns... Saaaaaay, have you seen the inside of the super-awesome ice cream and puppy truck yet?)

(Photo from Google Images/mapsofworld.com)