On Suburban Malaise, Whether You Like It (Not The Malaise, Obviously) Or Not; And Google Is Not Infallible!

Elk River, MN--We've finally hit suburbia. Looking back, it was only a matter of time, but now that we're finally within commuting distance of the Twin Cities, we've run up against the kind of life I'm thankful to have never had; Elk River is a town that isn't a town, and consequently I felt very lost and bewildered. The population is double that of Brainerd or Bemidji (for those of you who value a further analogy, it's about the size of Brunswick, ME) but it's spread out and dislocated and honestly there are so many problems and different ways to demonize this kind of thing that it doesn't even feel worth it because at this point these problems have been quite thoroughly catalogued and have been for fifty years, ever since Levittown. And so I'll spare you all this sort of generalized bile.

What I will do is run through a few very specific problems and solutions that I can find in probably my longest, and certainly most independent (i.e. I've never really been by myself out here), stay in suburbia (I'm tiring of the term “suburbia” but can't really think of any others that convey the same broad contempt, and so let's make a deal--and try a little linguistic/literary experiment--that for the rest of this post, any term that I employ that is similar to “suburbia” in general meaning will take on the connotative and, fine, denotative meanings of the word “suburbia” unless I make an explicit and per-use exception; e.g. “subdivisions”-----

OK guys I'm sorry about this but just one quick side note: I've discovered a pretty egregious flaw in Google's software, which OK isn't a huge flaw or maybe even a flaw necessarily (i.e. it might actually be more efficient, but my brief foray into comp sci lends me to believe it isn't). When you're typing a new post in Blogger, the quotation marks, rather than being programmed to face the correct way based on where the spaces and characters are a la Microsoft Word and basically every other typing program ever developed, simply alternate between left and right, which if the person typing never made a mistake would be a perfectly fine way of doing it but since humans are of course fallible especially when it comes to such a recently developed mode of coordination as typing, can be quite frustrating when you need to go back and edit. It's actually kind of ridiculous because while MS Word's algorithm isn't infallible either, it's usually pretty good, and this discovery is sort of comforting given the level of obsessive perfectionism and ease-of-use that Google tends to exemplify. Of course knowing Google there's probably a valid and extremely logical reason for such a simple quotation-mark-direction algorithm in what is otherwise a not-too-simple piece of software, but I just thought that certain nerds among my readers might enjoy this.

So back to what I was saying (Ed.: have you noticed that my comments have become more and more infrequent? Yeah. Consider for a moment the fact that he controls my comments and their frequency. He's been getting sloppy--let's not let this shit slide.) Dude. Do not mix those last two metaphors because I just got an image of sliding--(Ed.: Christ, dude!)

OK. I think maybe I'm just a little sensitive about standing out because Eve and I were talking about suburbia last night and she mentioned that because it's all so similar--the places, the people, pretty much everything except the names and even those are pretty frequently interchangeable--it (A) takes serious effort to be different and (B) is even harder to be different in a significant way (a few e.'s g. to be black or gay or poor). Being a straight, white, Williams-educated, upper-middle-class male, I would expect (/would be expected? That's a question I don't want to get into.) to feel quite comfortable in these kinds of places; I don't think the point need restating that I don't (Ed.: it doesn't. It really, really doesn't.).

But. And you know there's always a but. If we don't grant, and I really don't think there's any reason to, that I am a more sensitive/thoughtful/whatthefuckever person (whether by nature or upbringing or education or experience or anything, and I suppose we could at least grant that I am more agoraphobic than your average suburbanite) than, say, the people sitting around me in Caribou Coffee (the Starbucks of the North! Not that Seattle isn't like the same latitude as here but back to the point), then we have to ponder just what it is that these people enjoy about living here. Why is the trope “I have to get out of this small town” rather than “I have to get out of this stifling atmosphere”? I'm asking this as a serious question because it does not make sense to me. Because I guess one of the main issues I have is that there is nothing here, and by that I mean that there's nothing you couldn't get somewhere else. So what is keeping people here, rather than some other suburb? How do you choose when all the choices are the same? It's almost never because your family has been here for generations (these are not old towns), so what is it? Is it really just as simple as that the city is too dangerous or expensive but you have to work there? Is that really it?

It's reasonable to assume that pretty much everyone reading this blog has given at least a passing thought to these questions (and there are literally thousands of other important and fair questions re: suburbia that I have no space in blog nor mind to ask). It's also reasonable to assume that most of you have far better answers than I could develop, or at the very least have carried these questions further than I have. It's certain that there's plenty to read about these problems, fictional, academic, “cultural”, and I'm fully aware that there's not really anything I can contribute to the discussion except by virtue of being an outsider, a suburban virgin, and by having amassed a not-insignificant amount of experience in other kinds of places but never really having experienced the American Suburb in the leisurely way I'm doing today.