Suburbia


I'm not quite certain why I hate suburbia so. It's certainly fashionable to do so these days, though usually that's enough to make me stop doing something right there.

Fashionable or not, there is just sort of a soul-rending feeling that 'Suburbia' with a capital 'S' gives me. Communities should grow and accrete in an organic fashion. Rows of identical houses that spring up overnight, same size plot, same size lawn, same size family - these things disturb me. It's certainly artificial enough to land well within the realm of the uncanny valley, and perhaps that's at the heart of it.

I grew up in an old city, a little over 200 years of age. Which in America makes it the equivalent of growing up right next to the pyramids at Giza. That has a certain psychological effect on a human. What you take to be natural are streets the width of two horse-drawn carriages. And alleys the width of one. Every alley is that width. You don't know why till much later, but in my mind, it's the proper width for an alley to this day still.

Save in the downtown area, streets aren't in terribly exact grids. Or as is the fashion these days, gently rounding curves that only have one tie to reality - the turning radius of a car. The houses and avenues follow the land, more than the land being shaped so every yard has the same exact slope, and the streets are so level you could teleport from one road to the one furthest away in the neighborhood and not stumble as you set your foot down.

With such an incredibly artificial environment as the one presented by Suburbia, you start to have doubts about the sort of people who'd willingly live there - are they just as artificial as the 'neighborhood'? In all honesty, they're probably not - a safe place to live for a decent price, not far from work. The rest doesn't matter terribly much to them, I suspect. Whatever terrors besiege them in the night, the artificiality of their neighborhood isn't one of them.

Lucky bastards.