there is something nightmarish about the suburbs, i can’t quite put my finger on it, something resolute about forgetting, about assimilating, that is both subtle and harsh and constant. like the pressure on the body as it leaves the atmosphere: either you learn to live with it or you die.
it’s hard to describe lest you slam it, and that isn’t quite right either. an insistence on ignorance, or perhaps it’s a certain kind of blindness, a near-sightedness that is pervasive: property taxes, school taxes, the color of your neighbor’s skin. you are forced to consider these things as if they were fragments of history to be weighed, anchored and judged by. it’s not a lack of attention, but rather the attention to a set of details that are a flash in the pan, that matter so little in the grander scheme of things.
not to say that urbanity doesn’t have it’s own problems. but the crush of space, the living atop of one another gives rise to a different decorum, a different way of being. in the city, space is not an issue, your areas of living are more narrowly defined, your choices seem to be more rich. in any direction you turn, you find something, there is no mapping ahead, no need for a trivial kind of civility that’s predicated on class. although there are considerations of class, perhaps even more highly stratified, but because of the variety and density, it becomes a more tightly packed mosaic, a picture with more depth, greater breadth.
in the suburbs all routes are predefined, all destinations decided upon before even leaving your house. and your home becomes this kind of fortress, a kind of prison, where you keep the world at bay, keep the mongrels outside, and you are kept safe.
the problem of course is, as for the prisoner, the longer you stay, the less likely you are able to survive out there.