Turns out, there’s something kind of pathetic about a burning scooter, its tiny frame forlornly blazing on the otherwise indifferent sidewalks of Washington, D.C. At least, that’s how I see it.

With thousands of the vehicles cropping up on the city’s streets over the past year, D.C. has been divided into the scooter people and the people who’d really like the scooter people to ride the hell out of town.

Perhaps, then, it was an act of vandalism, the last straw for someone who just wanted to walk to work without a scooter bro whizzing by. Or maybe the inanimate object was protesting the summer heat in the only way it knows how: a battery fire. (Issues with scooter battery fires are a known problem.)

But there’s many ways of processing this scene, which was shared by Teddy Amenabar, an audience editor at the Washington Post, and then the immediate joke du jour.

 

We’ll try to find out what happened here (it sure looks like a Skip brand), but in the meantime, we ask:

 

How do you interpret this sad, smoldering scooter?

An iconic symbol that belongs on the D.C. flag
Poetry befitting the year 2019
Modern art that belongs in the Hirshhorn
It Metro
The universe’s way of telling us it’s going to be scorching summer

Filed Under: scooters,