By the Allston Engineering Campus
Yeah, I get it. We’ve all had a pretty shitty year. We were all expecting maybe a little better for ourselves. Zoom University was renewed for a second season. Mather Lather was presumably canceled for the foreseeable future. And what was supposed to be a breathless tryst in the Widener stacks is now a ménage à un in your childhood beanbag chair.
But consider: whatever your woes, your 2020 can’t possibly be as fucking awful as mine. I mean, this was going to be my year. My Bildungsroman moment to make my acquaintance with the outside world. The chance to dazzle gentleman callers as a new debutante on the Boston skyline. The year 50,000 pounds of liquid concrete were to be poured into a 400x270 foot chasm.
I’ve been sitting on this balding patch of Allston land (with a steadily rising water table, mind you) for going on 4 years now. And I was explicitly promised that in 2020, all this cosmetic nonsense would cease, and I’d be open for business, teeming with sleep-deprived, bespectacled engineers who walked a country mile just for me. Apparently, a shuttle bus was in order. My vanity just wasn’t ready for this hit.
Now, I sit vacant and unfinished, without a soul within me and also without proper plumbing. My sunlit atria and mahogany balustrades glisten with patina, but without onlookers and appreciators, my neo-brutalist charms mean nothing at all. There’s only one thing that can keep me from simply being the world’s largest cheese grater and that is inhabitants.
So, ya, you think you’ve had it rough? I’m 500,000 square feet of hot shit, just sitting here waiting for people to adore me. After all, beauty is in the I-beams of the beholder.