Suburbia

I am so goddamn tired of these drunk ass rednecks on the other side of my backyard privacy fence with their mosquito torches I don't know what to do. If I can hear your entire conversation through my yard and your yard, and if it's bothering my loud ass, then you are definitely being too fucking loud. I hope the people who live next door to them are as equally, if not more, annoyed than I am. I figure if I stand on the railing of my deck, and launch a couple of beer bottles over there, I could nail one of them. It might take me a couple of warm up throws, but I've got a pretty good arm. I know this because in another life, I would ride around in the back of pickup trucks and launch beer bottles at road signs and stuff. And then, in yet another life, when the RMA used tokens and kept the gates up on the toll booths late at night, I used to play a dangerous little game of seeing how fast I could speed through a toll and still hit the basket with the token. My personal best was about 37 miles per hour. Yeah, bitches. I guess all that combined makes me a redneck, too, though I'm not quite to the level of redneck that these neighbors are.

My neighborhood is a little more blue collar than white collar, and I like that. My last neighborhood was a little more white collar than blue collar, and I didn't like that. Those neighbors were upwardly mobile, always talking about this was their 2500 square foot "starter" house, and they would only be there for x amount of time before they moved over to such-and-such neighborhood. It was all about keeping up. I hated that about that neighborhood, and I hated that if you didn't play that game, then something wasn't right with you. I got to a point when I actually thought about becoming downwardly mobile, because I don't want to chase money and things. Yeah, I want to have clean clothes and a roof over my head and food to eat, but I don't want to be that person who sits around and talks about spending $200 on a pair of jeans, or how much this cost or how much that cost. I'll discuss my daycare costs, because I feel a solemn duty to warn other people thinking about having children, but that's about all I'll discuss financially. I figure if all someone has to discuss is money and what they have, then that's not someone I really want to associate myself with, because to me, you've sold out and you've become a boastful asshole. I guess my downward mobility occurred when I bought my house in this neighborhood. But it's cool, because the houses are smaller and little bit less kept up, and no one here has an irrigation system, but no one here sits around and talks about how much money they just spent at the fancy outdoor mall last weekend. I haven't even met any of my neighbors, other than those jackasses through the backyard privacy fence.

I worry about raising my kids in suburbia. I worry about materialism, and shallowness, and just a general and overall lack of character that most people I seem to meet in suburbia seem to have, those people who I really think get their weekly injection of character at church every week, which really isn't character, it's someone else telling you how to behave, or you shall burn in hell! Not the same thing. But at the same time, I couldn't live in the country, and that's because I hated it growing up. What I specifically hated about it was that we had to drive for at least 20 minutes to get to anywhere, we had to go to the dump, there was no cable service on my road, spotty TV reception (when that shit still floated through the air), and I was far enough out that I couldn't catch a ride with anyone except one girl whose dad looked like he might have been in ZZTop, but I actually think he might have been a retired biker. I plotted my escape for ten years, and came up with my standards for living. I need, and not in any particular order, cable TV, trash service, because going to the dump is fucking nasty and disgusting, and to be able to get to a grocery store in less than ten minutes. I also refused to live in any house with a wood stove, because I will never lift another stick of wood to burn in the my entire life. I might cut some trees down, but I'll be damned if I will ever haul wood to burn in my own house again.

I don't think those are outrageous standards, and now that I have children, I really wouldn't want them attending some rural-ass single A school anyway. I am a product of a rural-ass single A school, and if the education had been worth a damn, I might be a different person now. I'm good with who I am, but I always wonder, what if I actually had an education like the ones my children will get? Hell, what if I had parents like my children have? Anyway, I am stuck in suburbia, because moving out further is not an educational option, it's not a commuting option, and moving in closer is not an option because then I'd have the public schools of the city. No freaking way. Ever. And there's no off the street parking, and we all know I can't parallel park. My parallel parking is me pulling up to a spot that you could probably fit a tour bus into, and making about 47 rotations of back and forth cranking the wheel as hard to the right and left as I can. It's horrible. And embarrassing. Thank god for that show Parking Wars, because at least now I know what end of my car is supposed to be next to my meter.

But I worry about my children, and who they will grow up to be. I don't want to raise shallow, self-absorbed, materialistic shitheads. I mean, I know all teenagers go through that, but I don't want them to be like that when they're actually grown up. I want them to be happy with who they are, be happy with what they've got, be satisfied to not make so much money per year, because money can't make you happy. If it makes you happy, I feel sorry for you. I don't want to raise children who will never be able to look at anyone else with empathy and concern, who will only be able to take, take, take. That's hard to do in suburbia, because there's this constant battle of so-and-so has this, and why can't I have it? Well, because a seven year old doesn't need a fucking laptop is why you can't have it. Because a seven year old who has a laptop and a TV and a DVD player and an x-box in their room, well, that's a seven year who has parents that probably can't be bothered with actual parenting and spending time with their children. But that's a hard concept to explain to my children, because they only see what they don't have, and Mommy doesn't know how to tell them that they don't have that shit because it's more interesting to me to see my children grow and learn and try to see the world through their eyes, than to pack them off to their rooms because it's more fun for me to sit in front of the TV and drink.

I don't even know how I got on this topic, because my intention was to write about the card game of divorce that The Ex and I have been playing. I feel like it's more of a chess match, but I don't know how to play chess, and therefore, can't make the right analogies. Maybe I'll do that next.