when the rapture comes…
I hope Colorado Springs will die in a fire. It’s a craphole of a city, and embodies everything that I hate.
It looks like a city, and feels like a city, but has none of the things that make living in a city worth it. What do I mean? Well, first off, it has city traffic. Every morning, between 7 and 9, and every afternoon, from 4 til about 6, you are stuck in stop-and-go traffic. It takes half an hour to go 5 miles. The problem is exacerbated by the construction occurring on I-25, but there is traffic on surface streets as well.
Now I know that some of my precious readers who live in real cities will probably scoff, and try to swing a big traffic dick in my direction, and you may be right, but let me finish, mmkay?
Next, there are no bike lanes anywhere. It’s one of the most bike-unfriendly places I’ve ever been. Hell, I’d even settle for a shoulder, but on many streets, you don’t even get that. One thing that cities in the west don’t lack for is space to build. Why didn’t they just make the streets a bit wider and add a bike lane?
The amount of sprawl is ridiculous. We estimated a different strip mall with a box store about every linear mile. National chain upon national chain was heaped on top of each other. This leads to my point that people put up with subpar living conditions in cities (like traffic, higher cost of living, etc.) for the benefit of having greater access to culture.
Culture is something that Colorado Springs does not have. Not unless you consider “commericalized America” to be a culture. We asked the hotel concierge for restaurant recommendations. Our only requirement was “something local and not a chain”. The response was, after about 30 seconds of silence and furrowed brow, “um… there aren’t any”.
I guess that’s what you get when the town is dominated by white, evangelical Christians, whose idea of a kickin’ time is to eat at TGI Friday’s and then go home at 9 pm to go to bed because everything else is closed anyway.
Speaking of which, we went to the Focus on the Family visitor’s center. The number of people there was frightening. I just hope that they are not a proportional representation of a slice of the American population, but rather, that they all actually live in the Springs, so that when the Revolution comes, we only need to lob one nuke and save ourselves a lot of time manually weeding them out of the rest of society.
In fairness, things were a bit better downtown, but what I’m bitching about above still is within the city limits. And nearby Manitou Springs is such a weird little enclave that it helps to cancel out some of the boring conformity, but not nearly enough.
Oh, one more thing. With the exception of a few (but not all) people in the service industry, just about everyone we met was a complete dick. Colorado Springs sucks.







