Dear Vincent,
I have made a terrible mistake sharing an office with an urban designer.
He is deeply unwell.
He sniffs an absurd amount of toner ink and insists that buildings must “whisper their purpose to the soil.”
I asked him what this meant.
He stared at me for a full minute, whispered something to a potted plant, and walked away.
Tensions escalated yesterday when I referred to sidewalks as ‘sidewalks’ and he shrieked, “They are permeable pedestrian corridors!”
In a fit of rage, he ripped my professional license off the wall and replaced it with a framed sketch of a bus stop floating in the ocean.
In a rare moment of unity, we agreed to take our work outside, into nature.
He claimed it would help us “co-design with the elements.” I agreed, mostly because my office now smells like toner and self-righteousness.
For a brief, fleeting moment, everything seemed fine.
He sketched an eco-conscious, zero-carbon village, and I worked on a functional building with four walls and a roof. It was almost peaceful.
Then the wind picked up.
It ripped our blueprints out of our hands and sent them swirling into the sky.
The urban designer immediately dropped to his knees and yelled, “The plans are free now!” before running after them, headbutting a city official in the process.
Meanwhile, the wind also lifted the hat off an investor’s head.
He lunged for it, tripped over a compost bin, and landed face-first in a model of a public plaza.
The urban designer took this as a spiritual sign that we should remove all cars from the project.
At that precise moment, a journalist appeared, took one look at the disaster, and declared it “a bold, avant-garde rejection of capitalist urbanism.”
A flash mob formed, applauded, and demanded a TED Talk.
The result, Vincent, is that I am now being sued for negligence, reckless landscaping, and the unauthorized removal of a parking lane.
Yours, Theo
