I was taking a walk outside, and needed to get some air because I was working on an assignment and needed a break. It was a piece on some Mexican children’s author, and I was only half way done. I had no idea where I was going, but hey, what better way to get somewhere you’ve never been. I walked past a development and I could barely see into it because of the giant trees surrounding the compound. Could this development be as innocent and secluded as it seemed? So I decided to go in and find out.
I realized I’d been here before, but never actually seen it. I usually drove through here in the morning. Walking through it now, I was able to see things I hadn’t been able to see before, see them with true clarity. I could see the truly decrepit nature of the suburban jersey neighborhood. When you’re whizzing past in your SUV, you don’t really see what’s truly outside the windows. All you see is this superficial façade, but when you actually take the time to walk, you see the trash littering the ever-present inch tall green grass. You hear the screaming children always I the atmosphere, whether it be playing or real. When it comes down to it, the suburban
neighborhood really is an awful place.
But there are beautiful parts also. If you look hard enough, tucked away underneath some swing sets or behind some aluminum fences there is beautiful scenery. There are truly jungles hidden behind these shebangs. Creeks and forest try to escape from the bowels of the neighborhood, but are stopped by pounds of concrete and metal. Nature crying out, being withheld by man’s false sense of security and power. How easily nature could break them, but she doesn’t, she humors us.
I realized that this neighborhood was also a country club. Hundreds of golf playing money mongers rolling in their bourgeois decadence. I was surrounded by these pigs, no escape, I just had to plow on through and try to get out of this fire pit. Now they were starting to notice me, their fat necks slowly turning to look at me with their beady little eyes. “Ye gods, they’re everywhere” I muttered while I picked up my pace. One came up to me and asked for directions to the main office, I had no idea, so I gave him some bogus directions to follow and ran away. Others were starting to notice me more, sort of follow me while playing their game. I had to escape, there had to be an exit.
There was this smell that follows you around in neighborhoods like these. You won’t notice it if your not paying attention, it is a very discrete smell, but it’s there. It is the smell of a dead animal. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find the damn thing, so I resorted to breathing through my mouth. But that wasn’t all, some of the straggling golfers started to follow me, hunt me down. They wanted to ask me questions and to talk to me about money and President Bush. I didn’t have time for this hokum, I had to get out.
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