Highspeed Collision on Peachtree Street

Warning, living in ATL may be hazardous to your health.

One afternoon I was walking down Peachtree Street. And up ahead of me was a man, clearly homeless, occasionally stopping to dig through open-top trashcans.

I watched as he pulled out a half-empty (or half-full) bottle of beer from the trashcan, taking a nice big slurp of The yellow liquid.

I can only imagine how it tasted - sitting in the hot Atlanta sun all day - fermenting in garbage. As I write this I wonder… what kind of person previously drank from that bottle? What kind of diseases does this mystery person have?

And then I think to myself. What’s the likelihood that the yellow liquid in that bottle wasn’t beer at all? But actually the dehydrated urine of another homeless guy?

A moment later, as the homeless man stood in the middle of the sidewalk, spitting the beer back unto the ground, a high-powered electric rent-a-scooter rushed right past me at an incredible speed, colliding with the bum and knocking him on his ass.

The combination of these events made me finally realize the truth. That this city is a procedurally generated absurdist sketch comedy show, made up of hundreds of thousands of pre-programed cartoon characters.

I can’t walk two blocks without some freak stopping me, giving their entire backstory, and then asking me to complete a side quest. Where the fuck did I move to? The setting of a Bethesda RPG?! Every time you go to a grocery store, or a gym, or anywhere in Atlanta, there’s a 30% that someone in the store is going to get nose-to-nose with an employee, screaming, threatening to fight the general manager. I dub these random encounters as “Atlanta Moments.”

I wonder how much longer it’ll be until I start creating my own Atlanta Moments?