suburban america and the alien

A bike path along the Pacific Ocean, Santa Monica, Ca.

Well, I'm back in California after 3 weeks of Midwestern Suburban America over the holidays with family.

In many ways there are the obvious differences between life in the Midwest and on the West Coast. But many of the similarities of Suburban American life, for better or worse, are still shared. If you think about it, Los Angeles really is a "great big freeway", as Burt Bacharach's song, Do You Know The Way To San Jose, pretty much lays it out.

If you lived in, say, Decatur, IL or San Rafael just north of San Francisco, it's no different from L.A. You still largely rely on your car for work, errands, and recreation. The drive-in restaurant may have been [arguably] invented by an Englishman, but the very concept of it and its practice exploded in America during the span of the 20th century, a phenomenon no other culture in the world ever truly took part in. The history of the drive-in (whether restaurant, theater, or road trip) is the history of the culture of cars in American life.

Since I live just 15 minutes away by train from downtown L.A. I have some of the benefits of city life intermingling with the comforts of suburban life, although my home is also in what is technically a city. I kind of love that.

But as with living in the suburbs, things here for the most part aren't 24 hours, 7 days a week, like it is in New York City or Chicago or Houston. The light rail train stops operating just before midnight. A cab ride from Union Station downtown to the corner from my building costs about $25 (including tip). I can't be entirely spontaneous here the way I used to be when I lived in my little studio flat by the lake in Chicago. Spontaneity granted me some of the most memorable moments in my life. You really do need to plan things ahead of time when you live in the suburbs, and you plan them around your car, which is virtually impossible if you don't have a car.

It's a trade-off. Suburban living gives immense comfort, at the expense of spontaneity. City life offers incredible spontaneity at the expense of spaciousness and quietude. Having lived in both places and experiencing their pros and cons, it's interesting that I've settled into a compromise between both at this phase in my life.

But I still plan on spending the rest of my life in the city. I love the culture, the spontaneity, the collision, the infusion, and the inclusion of diversity, the menu dripping with an obscene amount of choices and variety in all of life's appointments.

suburban bliss

Fran Lebowitz once commented on how the suburban American living room is the most comfortable place in the world. Wish I could find the quote. It was very witty and ironical as only Lebowtiz could put it (wit is so rare today; most people who think they're witty aren't. It's just cheap snark or a pedestrian one liner).

And so I'm here, at my sister's, southwest of Chicago, not in the living room but in the family room, typing this out on my iPhone. The HDTV, one of several in the house, is playing Ghost Adventures, recorded by my sister on the DVR (she's into all that supernatural stuff), and my mom is puttering around doing chores. The cats are upstairs.

We're here from California for the holidays. Every time we come I can't help but remember Lebowtiz's comment. My sister and brother-in-law turned their suburban pre-fab into a multi-roomed cubbyhole of various creature comforts with the current technological offerings, including wireless broadband Internet and central heating. You know, the usual.

Even Mom (bless her ethnic heart) can't figure out how to use the rice cooker or turn on the electric stove. Naturally she has no idea how to work the TV remote, with its two dozen or so buttons. It's all good.

If anything the typical suburban American home rewards laziness and complacency with convenience and instant gratification 24/7, complete with 110 satellite channels in high definition. And three cats and karaoke machine.

Being me, I'm not entirely used to all these spoils. But until my niece arrives tomorrow for her Christmas break from uni and brings the XBox 360 with her, I'll make do with high def ghost hunting shows and central heating.

Wonder if Fran Lebowitz would wanna game with me.

...as we are

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

- Anais Nin

If you knew me more intimately would you intimate yourself to me more? Are you better able to transmit your thoughts and dreams and desires and experiences to me when I'm an abstraction, as physical proximity might disturb such transmissions? Am I more valuable to you from a distance?

This is the contradiction of the internet. It's a Janus face. One side allows communication from different points in the world, bringing us closer and affording opportunities to connect that would otherwise be impossible. The other side is cruel. It exaggerates the geographical interstices, the chasm of hundreds or thousands of miles separating us, which only brings disparity. We can transmit to each other our secrets but it only reminds us how far apart we are that only electronic words can reach us - no facial expressions, no hugs, no touch, no breath, no sensation of warm skin, no aromas from our bodies, no voice, no sound of hearts thumping.

When we deny ourselves outings, experiences, people, various sensations - the heat from the sun, the coolness of the moon, the prickle of spicy peppers on our tongue, the vivacity of spoken gossip from a friend, the bracing sting of the first sip of an icy cold martini, the wind on our face as we drive along the coast - the only things we have to fall back on are thoughts, mind games, inventions - surrogates that further deny us truth, the truth of experiencing.

Our minds begin to fill in the blanks left by such denials of direct experiences. We start to create feelings and thoughts to replace what we hadn't acquired in the first place....in person. I wonder if this is because we were made to be experiential beings and without experiences we scramble to at least have something, anything, to grasp onto, even if they are false and invented and projected. Is it really better than nothing?

photo: Boden Sea, Uttwil, 1993. ©Hiroshi Sugimoto

So, such is my life at the moment. If I wanted to I could turn off this laptop and go out for a walk. I hadn't done much anything this year. I'm broke. I can't work because there are no jobs. I can't travel anywhere. All I can do is wait for things to get better so I can make my move. I'm like a monk in a tower; I have views but they're of things far away, people I can't meet in person, places unreachable to me.

I'm out of the market for romance. My life isn't set up for it, there's no accommodation, especially in this town. Even friendships are tricky to maintain. I have a couple of local friends but it's expensive to go to out with them. Online friendships are even harder. The more we reveal ourselves to each other the harder it gets because we'd rather reveal ourselves to each other in person.

I can never understand people who swear by love affairs online, that they love having a boyfriend/girlfriend who lives in Sydney or Tokyo or Prague and they instant message each other everyday. What the hell kind of love is that? It feels so.....detached. That's not love, that's torture. LOL! It's a relationship you can switch off and walk away from whenever you have disagreements. Like an appliance. How convenient. But you can't take it to bed and make love to it, dine out with it at the bistro, enjoy a lovely conversation with it over cocktails, or lay your head on it and listen to its heartbeat.

I have no one in my life. I accept that. It seems like it would hurt knowing that it's a byproduct of other technicalities I suffer through presently. But strangely enough it doesn't hurt. Maybe it's because I've grown numb, I don't know. What I do know is that my acceptance of it helps; it lessens the pain of loneliness. What would really hurt is if I didn't accept it but at the same time knew that there's nothing I could do about it, either, for as long as it lasts.

Another thing that lessens the pain is knowing that it probably won't be this way forever. Things have ebbed and flowed in my life before. Why should this be any different?

I am the dynamism of my experiences.