return to the suburbs
mall graveyards, wholesome parades, people addicted to participation. have you ever been suburb pilled?
September Fest in the northwest suburbs is a great time. Cathy Cassata, Miss Bloomingdale 1996, is here waving to us from a Mustang. The Lake Park Lancers football team dances on a flatbed, amped on soda pop. Even SBC Waste and Recycling showed up, blasting Creed’s “Can You Take Me Higher?” No one thinks it’s corny though. This is the suburbs. And music actually sounds different out here.
The food tastes better too. You have less guilt eating it. You can buy funnel fries and kettle corn that don’t have Erewhon prices. Amazon Fresh has a tent, and if I saw it in LA I’d probably say something snarky, but not now. I tell the Amazon people how much I love their products.
Oh and Al Murphy asked us to vote for him. I probably will because while I was riding my bike on the nearby North Central Dupage Regional Trail, the words Forest Preserve Commissioner on his green and white lawn sign looked really cool, especially on a beautiful late summer day going through Hawk’s Hollow. The trail is a ring within a ring in the suburbs, an alternate tour of these former cornfields that you wouldn’t get to see by driving a car.
Last year my wife, son and I moved to the midwestern suburbs from Los Angeles, California, that far away super city full of important busy people. It’s been a while. And I want to tell you that I have officially been suburb pilled. No, I haven’t become an asshole. It’s just that even though I get lost among a succession of American continental restaurant chains every time I go for a drive, and the nearest worker-owned music venue is an hour away, I’m thriving. It’s about all I can handle these days anyway. The big lawns, dead malls; a flat, unobstructed horizon that displays the sun and moon in iMax every day and night—buddy it’s beautiful stuff. I don’t care if the world is burning on my phone. Everything is 5 minutes away. Also: get off my lawn.
I hadn’t seen a parade in years. Did u know they are an incredible display of power and solidarity?? In Los Angeles parades can only be protests.
Our feeds tell us that the California exodus is because of the state’s Trans-Communist Regime, who have made it expensive and dangerous for people to live in cities like my former home. That wasn’t really our concern. For me it was more like, I couldn’t be just another face in a crowd, ya know? We wanted to be closer to family and spend less money on things. I also have a compulsion to uproot my life every few years thinking that my problems won’t follow me around, but I get tricked every time.
In LA people look warm and crunchy on the outside, while being kind of standoffish. Mentally they’re usually…some place else. Out here it’s flipped. People have a deeply uncool exterior, but they’re very friendly. They talk to you and make eye contact. No disrespect to Californians. I’ll always feel like one. It’s just different.
I grew up in the suburbs. I loved it and I hated it. But now I’m seeing it differently after being away for a decade. Today, over half of the country describes the area in which they live as suburban. The fastest growing parts of the country are outer suburbs, places that are 30 or 40 miles away from cities.
The general consensus about the suburbs is they’re either completely evil or unbelievably wholesome. It’s either The Wonder Years or American Beauty, but it’s never cool or interesting. If you’re a young person, the suburbs are usually a prison, a place to break free from. A bubble of comfort and decay. It’s where bad stuff hides in plain sight. Big green lawns perpetrate isolation. Think of the opening scene of Blue Velvet, one of the greatest movies of all time about the suburbs, where a guy has a heart attack while watering his lawn during a nice sunny day in Reagan’s America. The neighborhood, a row of white clapboard homes punctured into acres of cornfield, then slowly reveals the evil that is concealed. Or last year’s nostalgia-bath awakening of I Saw The T.V. Glow, where the main characters realize their lives in suburbia kept them from being their true selves.
But the suburbs are different now. They aren’t even what they were since just before Covid. I’d argue that’s because of technology. Online we can now simulate environments like never before. And we’ve been sucked into it more than ever before. And with the rise of remote work, the suburbs have brought in more types of people. Being extremely online, having parasocial relationships; it’s easier to break free, to find your people, and be something else these days. No need to go anywhere. The suburbs might suck to a lot of people, but at least we have Zoom, livestreaming, the dark web, Discord and Tik Tok to make us feel like we can have any experience we want. We really live on the Internet. Sure, it’s not the real thing, but it has made living apart easier.
If my wife and I didn’t have remote jobs, we’d still be slogging away in the LA trash compactor. We wouldn’t be able to quiet our surroundings and live somewhere more chill. And that’s a lot of people now. It’s kind of like the hippy boomers fleeing the cities post-1960s and taking it back to the land. In our town, lots of young families are moving in. Lots of millennials. For a while I wondered where where all the Polish people in the city of Chicago went, and the answer is here to the suburbs. They have climbed the socio-economic ladder.
City racial diversity gets talked about a lot, but there is a distinction. While cities may be diverse, they are still segregated. Chicago is a classic example. It is vertically segregated e.i. the affluent north versus the poorer south. LA has its closed off pockets too. The suburbs, though, seem more integrated. I was actually surprised at how racially and ethnically diverse the suburbs here are. There are a lot of people from Arab, Baltic, and South Asian countries: Syria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Lebanon.
My wife always gets annoyed when we run into people who express worry when we’ve said we’re from LA or Chicago, like they think we live in a constant war zone or something. But don’t people know about segregation? Most of us are here because of White Flight. It’s still alive and well guys, existing along racial and economic lines. We’re on the northside, with all the other middle and upper middle class strivers, hermetically sealed off from where the scary stuff is apparently happening down south.
Suburbia: America’s biggest invention
America created the suburbs. The midwestern suburbs are where the Right planned its coup of American society in the 1960s, inside mid-century prefab living rooms that hosted gatherings of the John Birch Society. Also I think it’s interesting that the suburbs have produced the most serial killers in the country, and specifically here in the midwest. John Wayne Gacy was actually from Norwood Park, a Chicago suburb that I live near. And Jefferey Dahmer was from nearby Wisconsin. Techno-anarchist Ted Kaczynski was raised in the Chicago suburbs. Though not a serial killer I guess, that protector of uptight suburban views, Charlie Kirk, was from around here.
But the suburbs are also funny. They’re filled with people you’ll see and wave to all the time but never hear from, or from people who are addicted to participation. That speed bump that was put in? You can thank the neighbor’s efforts battling the Public Works Department for that one, and he’ll never let you hear the end of it. It took him years, and no one gives him the credit he deserves. After I bought a sprinkler for my lawn, I started noticing sprinkler’s everywhere, and man, there are some awesome sprinkler systems out there. I realized I kinda messed up. Now I have 9 tabs open on my phone for sprinklers and I’m consulting ChatGPT constantly.
The arc of history is long, but it bends toward just wanting to vibe out in the suburbs. That was Obama’s favorite line in Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech.
Believe it or not, we have cool coffee shops and book stores here in the suburbs (shout out Half-Price Books). My wife says I should make some new friends, but I have limited bandwidth, and it’s already been taken up by friends I’ve had since elementary school. I have my group chats and I do couch tours, in which my friend and I just remotely watch YouTube concerts together. I already knew it was no use, when, in an attempt for communal activity, I asked my mother-in-law once if she would go to a Bob Dylan concert with me. She declined. It’s okay though. I think I’ll just go outside and touch grass, my lawn is really nice.