sub·urb

ˈsəbərb/

noun

1. an outlying district of a city, especially a residential one.

Fact – the scariest of all suburbs have all the streets named for trees.  

The suburb which I now occupied had only tree named streets.  And there were only two housing plans used. The one story suburban ranch style and the two story suburban ranch style, which was the single story plan with an extra bit on top.  Every house had the same look, layout, and only modestly different neutral paint pallets. The look was altogether monotonous and homogenized. Being just like their neighbor seemed to make the people who lived on the tree streets very content. 

Once the suburb had been marshland and forest home to a diverse range or migrating fowl that used it for nesting space in the summer months but luckily the area had been bulldozed flat, filled in with sand,  and every single tree removed. There were no trees on the tree named streets.  

Birch, Juniper, Alder — all the little roads that looped around Cul De Sacs were devoid of trees with the exception of the occasional hastily planted decorative shrub which, as the pamphlet of the Homeowners Association pointed out, “with attention all can become small landscape trees!”   And yeah, I thought they were full of shit at the time, sure I did, but how the fuck would I know about “micro-landscaping” I was new to the neighborhood. I was new to suburbia. I thought the houses looked dreary, uninspired and terrible even if they were all pristine and new builds. It wasn’t the sort of place you expect to find an artist.   There was no creative meat on that bone.

Let me back up a bit an explain why I’m here.  I’m a middle aged failure or artist – I prefer artist but I know how people see me.  I’m not going to waste your time making excuses or explaining my long history of unemployment and instability.  Can I afford the suburbs? Hell no. I’m used to the ever dodgy government subsidized urban living where craftily avoiding the worst of things while figuring out how to survive were ample topic of conversation with eclectic neighbors who had racked up long and interesting personal back stories.   Who although sometimes were untrustworthy or unstable or even scary – they were really unique and I would come to love them and know them or nod at them and accept them. I guess I belonged there. Some people would get into trouble in “the bad part of town” but I know for a fact I blended right in.  I used to anyway.

My father owns 6 homes as investment properties, and four he rents out, one he is working on flipping.  The house I’m in he bought at auction when it was less than a year old. He figures if he can wait five years to sell he’ll double his money in the ever gentrifying neighborhood, but the HOA will not allow houses to sit empty without hefty monetary penalties.  It worked out as mutually beneficial for me to move in. But I’ve been here for ten years or so now. No idea if I’ll ever leave – I don’t know if anyone ever leaves.

I first noticed upon my first week of living here that at  7am everyone in the neighborhood is gone, but I’m unemployed so when I finally wake up and get my coffee it’s a ghost town.  I had to wait until the weekend to get introduced to some of the many “quirks” of the neighborhood.   

It is Saturday, terrible wintery February and at 10 am I’m amazed to hear lawn mowers, weed eaters and a lot of racket — forget sleeping in and spending a relaxing bit of time surfing Youtube.   I crack the venetian blinds. A steady icy cold drizzle is falling but clearly it has rained all night. The ground is puddled. I can hear at least three mowers going. The temperature is in the low 40’s my weather app tells me snow is possible as the temp drops.  The grass is thick, straggly, soggy and brown. I am mesmerized by the sound of mowers – what are they mowing I wonder? Why? They always mowed on Saturday. All year long. In any weather. Until that very day, I didn’t realize it was possible to mow wet grass or in the rain or in the cold.  I chalked it up to my inexperience with mowing in general.

By the afternoon all mowing has ceased but it’s raining harder and spitting snow.  I needed to make a run to the store for a couple of bottles of wine, coffee and corn chips.  My neighbor is outside in his driveway, in the rain, howling wind driving bits of snow with the rain now as it gets colder, but he is washing his car.  As I would find out, he washes that car every Saturday at the same time regardless of the weather and while wearing the same sport team hooded sweatshirt.   He would keep that routine in the same house, on the same Saturdays for decades and then die quietly. I don’t know his name. So while I rushed to my old vehicle to avoid getting soaked he washed his vehicle, hose in hand, head bare to the elements like nothing at all was out of the ordinary.  He did not so much as glance my way.

On Tuesday a cop who lived three doors down stopped by my house.  I could read through the lines of his clipped small talk — no one in the neighborhood liked my car.  It was also a gift from my father, “you have got to get reliable transportation! I’m not going to keep giving you rides”, a 1990’s model Ford Escort  Wagon, grimy red, with no automatic anything and a busted tail light. Everyone in the neighborhood had a vehicle no less than three years old. That was when I had to make room in my garage for my car, no longer able to have it exposed in the driveway. 

Which brings me to garages.  I still haven’t unpacked a lot of my stuff that ranged from childhood stuffed animals I could never let go of,  copies of Nintendo Power magazine, every Lego I had ever owned to my art supplies and some old computer parts. It now piled to the ceiling on each side of my car, without enough boxes there were a fair number of plastic laundry baskets kept for storage purposes.  I was okay with this.  

Everyone else in the neighborhood however spent Sunday afternoons cleaning their garages.  The carefully maintained garages had, what seemed to me, space age shelving and organization.  They even had put fun sport posters on the wall of that nearby big sport team that I know nothing about.  

I often walk.

And after work on weeknights in the summer many neighbors walked their dogs.  I’ve never talked to a single person who passed me. I can’t recall them ever making eye contact.  A dark brown lab, a black lab or a white lab. That’s all I’ve seen. At first it drove me crazy – same dogs? Different dogs?  One time a man had one of each, a chocolate, a black and a white. It drove me crazy…. Why? The dogs were all the same age, height, gender and weight.  How did a person go about that? How hard had it been for him to hunt down litters of various colored Labradors to adopt at just the precise moment? Was it a matter of indecision about color preference?  Did him owning all 3 complete the set? Give him clout and status within the neighborhood possibly? The dogs, all very well behaved, always pass me without a second glance. A shame because I really like dogs and wouldn’t have minded ruffling some ears and scratching some chins. 

I also noted that in each driveway was a truck, which belonged to a man and a car which belonged to a woman. 

I never saw a woman going out to her car to get a forgotten cell phone with messy hair and wearing pajama pants.  No one walking to the mailbox hungover with sunglasses on, besides myself. The fine ladies of the tree named suburb lanes were always dressed like manikins from the Mall with expertly done up makeup.  No one was overweight, like myself, and no one was terribly underweight. All the women seemed to be about 5 foot 4 inches tall and petite of build. Hair color was usually brown but sometimes I did see a blond.  Never black. Never red. Skin color ranged from super pale to burnished bronze. Many of the people seemed to be of ethnic origin but completely impossible to tell what ethnicity that might be. They were impossibly boring and I couldn’t imagine having a conversation with one but I tried valiantly a few awkward times before giving it up for good.

There never were children playing in the street.

No BMX style bikes were crashed out front on the lawn while the boys made a Koolaid pit stop before carrying on with their adventures.  Their voices carrying over the distance. Nothing that made childhood fun and exciting was ever to be had on the tree named streets.

One day my book of Buddhism fell down and open to a page explaining how perfection was like death.  Nothing ever changed in my perfect neighborhood of brand new uniform housing that was becoming my world.  Nothing grew. Nothing struggled and nothing blossomed. No kids laughed and grew into fine young people. The guy washing his car never let loose and turned on some rock music while he washed.  There was no need for growth, you had made it, end of the line.  

As an artist in nature everything is a fractal and asymmetrical.  When people think of perfection they think of a well balanced order, like those clean garages.  Balance everywhere, but nature isn’t like that. It’s full of the unexpected, the rowdy, the disordered but ordered chaos that breathes life with every passing breeze.  It is revitalizing and inspiring. It’s worth the multitude of people – many of whom hate art – still putting up a picture or two on their walls of nature scenes and taking poor photos for their Instagram account of the local waterfall or ‘towns biggest tree’.   That disorder, the messy unexpected, the tangled vines of lives and backstories of trails that the tourists are too scared to take — that is the stuff of happiness.

I lived in a dead space, a void.  Time didn’t even seem to encroach.

A neighbor did have children visit in the summer, he would carefully go out and put together the swing set, allow them to swing, then dismantle it and put it back in a box.  I never heard the children and they were never in the street.

Although I had moved from an impoverished apartment to the epitome of the American Dream, I had an uneasy feeling I was living in hell.  That my soul was being sucked dry and I was surrounded by the dead.

Day one after the move I woke up gluten intolerant with a craving for kale chips.  I would return from shopping with canvas bags inexplicably full of organic produce.  I did not recall switching to canvas bags for my shopping or buying a new Subaru Forester.  

That spring I decided to plant a large flower garden.  It was going gangbusters and beautiful with poppies and sunflowers and wildflowers.  The garden grew and grew and was gorgeous which was making me nervous. My neighbors had noticed.  Part of the garden could be seen from the street. Oddly enough this made me very anxious. Then one day a man showed up and before I knew it had sprayed the entire thing with herbicide.  I was choked up, angry beyond words, big tears in my eyes. “Oh” he said blankly, “I must have the wrong house.” He got back into his truck and drove away. Somehow though, you know, I knew that was coming.  

Soon after that a large truck showed up and dumped landscaping mulch over the dead area burying it deep in wood chips.  There would be no color in the backyard.  

No matter how many times I hung up wind chimes they fell down.  The string would break, I would replace it with a zip-tie which was plastic and that would be shorn through – no matter what was tried it simply didn’t work.  

I hung up a hummingbird feeder but the bird that showed up was black / brown and sounded like an angry wasp and was the most unpleasant of bird species and not listed in my small bird identification guide – must not be a complete guide I figured.  

Then as I would walk lazily around the neighborhood in the evening I would notice a house I had not noticed before.  Same boring floor plan of the neutral painted ranch style, same truck and car in the driveway — but different somehow.  Had that house been there before? The neighborhood was expanding. More people getting trapped in the amber of perfection.

One day a two story on the street over went up for sale and by then I had walked the blocks for years and I had never seen the house before in my life.  

By year six in the neighborhood I had developed a severe bit of alcoholism.  Why me? I kept asking the universe… why me? Why was I chosen for this neighborhood?  I don’t belong here. I hated the off-blue of the house and the off-brown of the neighbors house or was it just beige?  Who could really say anymore? And by then my need for perfectionism was driving me crazy. My food was never perfect enough.  I needed to wash different loads of clothes with different types of soap. I had four kinds of bird seed. I had the sneakers for walking and the different ones for step aerobics.  I had a night clothes and day clothes – no longer my 24 hour sweatpants from Goodwill.

A year back the Labradores had all vanished and now there were nothing but French Bulldogs.  

There was not enough color in the whole of the world for the tree named streets.  And I realized it was cursed.

They should not have bulldozed the marshland.  They should not have evicted the herons and the elk or disturbed the spirits of the place.   The repetition and blandness of the place was the drone of the EKG of a heart that would never beat again.  All color, laughter and creativity was sucked into the void and regurgitated as a blankness that had no vibration.  And being a creative being every day I felt a little more that ugly shade of bland brown, a little more like my brain wouldn’t work, and a little more desperate for life.  

With terror I realized I was no longer painting, it was as if I had forgotten.  No inspiration came. No colorful landscapes of impressionistic inspired wow erupted from my brush and mind.  I had nothing, it was if it had been sucked slowly away from me, stolen by an unseen cursed landscape. What started out as an idea to fill my walls with color, humor and brightness of life brought me to the brink – a terrible realization that this place – this terrible suburb of hell fed on the bright.  Fed on the vibrant life of the quirky artist. I was a meal. I was fuel for something terrible and destructive. But it whispered its sweet song, which is hard to explain but as a background though and it would say, “you’re improving, you’re more perfect everyday, just try a little harder…” it was too much, with a gasp I realized I was in a dire trap.  

I began running every evening. 

It was sort of an escapism.  I ran without makeup. I ran without proper brand name shoes.  I ran without my hair sorted out into a stylish up-do. I ran for miles each night trying to escape. I ran with improper form.  I ran with a heel drop and high millimeter shoe drop — although by this time I was in so deep, yeah it bothered me with each step.   I ran past the Terriers and didn’t stop to ask, “what happened to the bulldogs? Are we not doing that anymore?”  

I stayed up until 2 am and I would throw color onto the canvas, inspiration and subject be damned – COLOR, color that could not be stopped, that is what I hoped to accomplish.  

Seeing my behavior and personal appearance suffering my father asked me if I was okay, why I kept myself so isolated.  I laughed bitterly downing my 5th cup of coffee. He asked me why I wasn’t using my espresso machine and having a latte.  

What?  I don’t have an espresso machine.

But I did, right there on my counter.  Sitting, unused but plugged in. Waiting for me, waiting on me.  In my living room I realized that the only picture hanging up was a blank beach scene.  Just sand and some blue sky without even a bother to paint in the ocean. It was a painting of really nothing at all.  Then I started looking and realized there was no subject matter in anything I had painted in over 24 months.  

And as I sorted the last of my stuff, the few items I had not donated to charity into my new garage shelving system and straightened the seasonally appropriate wreath with the matching welcome mat in front of my door — I was seized with one of those rare moments of self awareness.  It’s got me, I realized. It has won.  

And that thought was soon replaced with a sad idea that maybe I should label and organize my garage boxes even better and that I would work on that next Sunday.  

——-

The End