Evacuating Suburbia

Throw out them LA papers

And that moldy box of vanilla wafers.

Adios to all this concrete.

Gonna get me some dirt road back street

~  From L.A. Freeway, Lyrics by Guy Clark

“Concrete and cars are their own prison bars”

~ From Toes, Written by Zac Brown, John Driskell Hopkins, Shawn Mullins and Wyatt Durette

Retirement talk has been revolving around the domestic circle a lot lately.  Mine, not the wife’s.  You see she’s been retired and according to her it’s the shit (that’s urban slang for she likes it).  I know this because she tells me it’s the shit all the time, quite often after I've dragged my worn out bones into the house after a day at the office and an hour on the freeway with a few thousand of my fellow Americans feeling like shit; about 10 pounds of it in a 5 pound sack (which is old school for suburbia blows).  

There was a time when I figured I wouldn't retire; just drop dead at my desk.  Nowadays there are times when I feel like I’d rather die instead of going into the office.  So now the wife and I are kicking around some options.  I could pull the plug in October when I turn 62.  Problem is that I’d have to bridge the health care gap until I turn 65 and with the GOP controlling congress and possibly the White House in 2016 Obamacare might get euthanized and I’ll end up self-medicating.

I would feel a lot more secure bridging that gap with some extra cash.  To that end we've talked about exchanging our four bedrooms and a pool for two bedrooms.  And it’s here where the rock meets the hard place.  For years now I've been lobbying for pulling up stakes and heading for a home in the country, taking with us a brimming bank account of security.  I’d have better luck ordering a veggie burger at a cattlemen’s convention.  The wife simply isn't having it.  She’s planted roots so deep here that there’s a fellow in China wondering what the hell that is growing up through his floor.  She’s got no desire for the country and no intention of leaving the San Francisco Bay Area. 

I've tried; Lord I've tried, to find some middle ground.  I began with Idaho and Wyoming, which wasn't really middle ground but a starting point for the negotiation (You know, like low balling the car dealer). And who knows, in a moment of weakness she might have said, “Okay, I’d love to live in Pinedale, Wyoming.”  Yeah she laughed that one off alright.  Then I reeled it in a bit to Oregon.  Then it was Oregon a few miles out of say, Roseburg; a sort of suburbia in miniature.  Then it was someplace rural in California.  Well that turns out to be pretty much impossible because unless you buy waterfront property at the desolate, godforsaken Salton Sea you aren't getting any money out of the home sale.  The whole fucking state is ridiculously expensive.  Every argument and persuasion I've thrown at the woman, she hits back at me like a line drive shot up the middle. The wife has made one concession summed up by her now rote reply, “Well, go ahead.  I can visit you.”

I've lived in the Bay Area since my parents moved us out here from Salt Lake City when I was three.  I grew up in suburban San Mateo, about a half hour south of San Francisco.  Three separate times I've lived in San Francisco itself and after getting married my bride and I lived in Berkeley a few blocks from Telegraph Avenue in the shadow of the University of California.  Now I live in what can best be described as a bedroom community about 25 miles from Downtown San Francisco on the often clogged I-80 corridor.  And I’m about over it.  Its reached the point at which every day, urban living seems to bleed off a little more sanity and patience with what we laughably call civilization.  The Bay Area has become a big overpriced condominium that houses stress, depravity, narcissism, rampant consumerism and a whole host of other depressing isms.

The Bay Area likes to bask in its reputation of being chic, urbane and cultivated and all the while being diverse. What I see in that self-adoration is an outright canard – a lie, a prevarication.  Or is it just me?  Maybe the Bay Area is all of those things it claims to be but I’m not seeing it.  

It might be the Googlers and other techies that seem to be gentrifying the whole area, not giving a shit that the people who serve them their meals, clean their offices or teach their kids are in poverty or at it's very brink. It might be the hipster whose main concern in life is the next big thing. Maybe it’s the young exec sitting on a BART train with his head buried in The Wall Street Journal, pretending not to notice the woman standing next to him, clearly pregnant and ready to pop.  Or it could be Mr. Slick who I’m watching as I write this.  He’s pulled into the handicapped spot and he and his equally slick chickie are heading into Starbucks for coffee.  Tough shit for the old fellow with the hip problem who is going to have to park down the street and hoof it.  You snooze, you lose; right? Or it might be the people who go to Delores Park, a crown jewel of San Francisco, to drink and smoke weed and really not give a shit about the young families with small children who would like to enjoy the park as well free from a contact high.  Oh and when they leave the park, they leave it a blighted littered disgrace.  These aren't isolated events in urban America; it’s the norm. There’s a feeling of entitlement that people get to do whatever the fuck they want to do and then let someone else clean up whatever mess they've left; whether it’s garbage, the dent in your car or the aggravation and anger for that insult they just blithely tossed out.  Rudeness has become the norm whether it’s a 12 year old mouthing off to an adult or a driver who cuts you off in traffic so that he can beat you to the stop sign that’s 20 yards up the road.  Urban America is a place where the ends justify the means; just get it done and I don’t care how you do it.  Character, morality and ethics are out of fashion; quaint, inconvenient relics from some bygone era that their grandparents (or old fools like me) talk whimsically about.  Time isn't on your side in urban America.  Time is a bandit.  If you don’t get out of the house ON time you LOSE time, sitting with thousands of fuming motorists on a trip to nowhere on what’s ironically and ridiculously termed a freeway.  And if you don’t get that project done on time, that bandit could steal your job because if you can’t get it done then we can find somebody who will.  Oh and did I say I don’t care how you get it done?

But it isn't just the renunciation of values and ersatz sophistication.  There’s the tawdriness that belies elegance. This occurred to me when I was sitting at an interminable traffic light at Fitzgerald Avenue in nearby Pinole.  Fitzgerald is I’m sure a bonanza for the town.  But it’s quite simply a vulgarity.  If I’d decided to step out of my car, baseball in hand, I could have flung that ball and hit any one of, Burger King, Wing Stop, Wendy’s, Carl’s Jr. KFC, Starbucks, Sizzler, Taco Bell and Home Town Buffet.  And intermingled with plastic food are the boxes, both big and little that peddle things that you might need but really probably don’t; the technological gimcracks and gewgaws that fuel an insatiable frenzy of spending.  And there are hundreds and hundreds of strip malls just like this from Pinole to Berkeley to Oakland all the way to San Jose. Miles and miles of fat vats and purveyors of useless junk that has a practical life of a year or so and a residual life of decades.

In his novel So Much for That, Lionel Shriver hits metropolitan America on the head; "There's something especially terrible about being told over and over that you have the most wonderful life on earth and it doesn't get any better and it's still shit. This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but...it's a sell...I must have forty different 'passwords' for banking and telephone and credit card and Internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them up and that's our lives. And it's all ugly, physically ugly. The strip malls...the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and Home Depots...all plastic and chrome with blaring, clashing colors, and everyone in a hurry, to do what?" 

I've been warned.  You won’t like country life.  Their politics are different and what in the hell will you find to do.  Politics?  How in the hell more fucked up can they be in rural America than metropolitan America?  It’s a fucking free for all food fight all over the country.  Months ago I made the conscious decision to keep politics to myself and let the other guy keep his own politics. I've long since stepped off my liberal soapbox and cut it up for kindling.  Who in the hell was I going to change anyway?  This is America and you’re free to believe what you want and I've given up preaching the gospel to people as hard headed as I. 

As far as what to do?  I can give up a dry aged steak for a chicken fried steak.  I've no problem saving a hundred bucks and trading a day of Giants baseball for spending five bucks for a hot dog and a Coke at a local little league game. I don’t need to go to the latest trendy restaurant.  I don’t need to go to a club.  I don’t need to see the art exhibit that everyone else needs to be seen at.  Art galleries give me a headache anyway.  Frankly I’d rather ride a horse than a cable car or hike a mountain trail than stroll around Union Square.  I’d much rather sit beside a riffle on a trout stream waiting for the fish to bite than sit on I-80 in my car waiting for the accident to clear. 

The wife and I have a sort of running dialog.  It often starts with a story on the news.  It might be the motorcyclists who shut down a section of freeway on their own, because they can, so that they can perform dangerous stunts that we might all have to pay some price for when someone crashes and splits open his melon. It might be the guy who shot the other guy and his wife and kids because; just because. It could be the guy who’d had enough of the pressures of urban life and decided to kill himself by jumping in front of a BART train and the thousands of people who got pissed off because he was so inconsiderate to put them out by offing himself like that. Or maybe it’s a bunch of old guys in San Francisco who feel ill-used because the law says that they can’t loll around butt nekkid with their dangling aged old scrotums sweeping the ground for all to see at some outdoor tables at a coffee house on a major city street.  And so as the wife and I watch these stories, agape and amazed I turn to her and ask, “And you wonder why in the hell I want to move to the country?”  And she responds, “Go ahead, I’ll visit you.”  As the days and the madness; the stupidity and the outrageousness continue, I’m thinking she might need to invest in an overnight bag.