IT IS THE CARS. All of our communal space has been gutted to make more room for cars, which do the exact opposite of community building, as they abstract the human away from the world and you're left with an extremely dangerous, noisy, and angry public space.
It was worse than that -- the football thing happened when I had old-school braces, and my lips were literally smashed onto the railroad tracks, so much so that I had to walk to the drinking fountain and pry/peel my lips off the braces, with an accompanying rush of blood. Good times!
I'm a grown-ass adult now, and I haven't had issues like this since my late teens.
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