Random Notes (Suburban Surrealist vol. 2)

To put it mildly i am a horrible suburbanite, i can admit it, there are many things about living in the suburbs that i just don't give  two fucking shits about, and the fact is there is nothing i can do to change that, it's not a question of personal growth or self help or fucking magic tricks it's just the way this noodle is wired, we must embrace and savor our failings just as much if not more so than our victories, somehow i think the world would be might bit more pleasant it if wasn't all this damn blood-lust to be the winner, what's the fucking winner get anyway? because let's face it, as soon as they put that crown on your head some kid somewhere is scheming to knock it off, hopefully while leaving your head still intact but history has shown sometimes that's not the most pressing thing on the mind of the would be new king...

So where do i begin a list of things i'm shit at? first and foremost it's probably my utter lack of urgency when it comes to getting my car washed, what the fuck did you think i was gonna say? this is first world shit here man, you know while i'm wasting shit tons of water to keep my vehicle looking shiny and new Matt Damon is telling me how the rest of the world can barely find enough clean water to drink and cook with, meanwhile there are at least a half dozen automated car washes within a three mile radius of my front door, i know a guy who has the unlimited wash card and his black Denali Behemoth fucking sparkles when the sun hits it, damn thing is so clean and waxed you can see it clearly at night, in fact i didn't know there was such a thing as an unlimited wash card until i asked how he kept his Behemoth so shiny, said he runs it through every time he drives by one of the places, i shook my head in knowing agreement though i knew nada, i figured i'd keep my whole observation about how much of a waste it was to myself, if my mid-sized family SUV gets washed it's because it rained, i do attempt to clean it out and realize how scrutinized and gossipped about it i'd be if i actually ever had another adult in the car but luckily i never do, to me it's just a means of transportation, i'd much prefer a train or a bicycle, Henry Ford said fuck all that...

(Side note- today as Nick D. and i walked up the hill from his futsal session i was stopped by a man mentioning how fast the time goes when you have kids and how his youngest had finished his first year of college and the kid wrote his mother a letter saying how much he missed his mom, then out of the blue he quoted Mark Twain, the one about how when he (Twain) was 14 he could barely stand to have his father around he was so ignorant and when he got to be 21 he was astonished at how much his old man had learned... being a fan of Sam i mentioned how Mr. Twain made a lot of prurient observations, which led him to bringing up Vonnegut, which led me to into a quick sermon on the virtues of humanism and how absurd and insane both those guys would have thought the present day was, he laughed and agreed, his dog demanding his attention and Nick Disaster demanding more of mine we went our separate ways, he was a thoughtfully and expensively dressed man who had the dog jump in the Audi and had headed to the park, i was wearing a Black Flag t-shirt, stained of course, and a pair of Hang Ten shorts i found for $12 bucks at Costco and some shitty old blue Vans, somehow i thought Jeff Spicoli would approve, and yet here we were discussing authors... now if that isn't nice i don't know what is...)

Of course to compound my first world problems i often have men in green golf shirts knocking on my door and telling me they have chemicals that would turn my lovely field of daisies and other assorted non-grasslike vegetation into a lush field of green so comfortable i'd abandon my bed and sleep on it instead, i usually tell them i'm going to try and make my whole front yard a bamboo garden cuz bamboo is great at eating up carbon dioxide, then i politely say no thanks and close the door, i don't need them blatantly pointing out my shortcomings in lawn maintenance and landscaping, now the cat who drives that shiny black Denali Behemoth, you should see his fucking lawn,  i don't mind grafting in the yard but i don't somehow believe it validates my standing as a suburban 'Merican male and i am squarely in the minority on that front...

(Side Note #2- now when i get these fucking lame brain ideas like growing bamboo they tend to stick in my craw, one day i was talking to one of my best friends as we moved my old furniture to the Breadwinner's best friends house because A) i'm sick of filling landfills with perfectly good shit and B) her friend could use the furniture and tight finances prevented her from buying any at the moment, we were discussing the bee population and the worries and wonders of the scientific community which related back to the daisy fields that were our respective lawns and how we were doing Mama Nature a solid by not spraying chemicals all over the lawn and killing the very things that sustained the bees, i'm a fucking hippie in punk rock clothing, it was then i started discussing my bamboo dreams and how it was a shame i couldn't grow it around here, my friend said hold up and drove to this place where he showed me a giant bamboo patch and smiled, shit grows good around here he said, you could do it, which now has me ruminating even more on planting bamboo behind my place and letting it run wild along with that other favorite plant of mine, not in the consumable way but in the let the hemp/ditchweed run wild too, maybe i have too much free time, i think i have just enough...)

Oddly i can't put these shortcomings down on sloth or laziness though i'd very much like to, in the last five years since getting my walking papers from the Big World Bank Machine i've taught myself how to do all kinds of shit i'd never done before, fucking patching my roof and building roomfuls of Swedish furniture, built a retaining wall, looked up ways to substitute for ingredients i don't have on hand when i'm baking cookies for shit sake, but yet my car is not shiny, my lawn looks like a vacant lot, i have no career ambitions or career for that matter, hell i don't even have a paying job, i mean fucking hell i couldn't have planned it better, yes i don't have a job to fall back on when stuck in a room with responsible adult types and forced to converse but shiiiit, it's at those times i like to make obscure references to literature and philosophy, not in a high minded way mind you but in a contemplative and colloquial manner, it cracks me up, the pursuit of money and status and career, it's a fascinating thing to study out here in the lily white, i don't claim to understand it but it makes for interesting nights as i pull tubes in the garage, and maybe all the crickets and bugs are driving me batty, maybe the lack of ground lights allows me to star gaze and realize the uselessness of it all, this sub-conscious cultivation of suburban eccentricity, there is no way but up? or is it down? i don't know... and more to the point i don't care...