This post was composed while listening to Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) by The Arcade Fire.

I went for a comfortable jog around the neighborhood around Garmin today.  I was literally lost in suburbia, unable to tell where I was or where I was going, if anywhere.  These are my reflections from my three miles spent on the great outdoor treadmill of cul-de-sacs and intentionally tangled roads:

• It’s in the low 50s, wet but only threatening to rain again.  I’m alone on the sidwalk in the gloom.
• I’m passed by some teenagers in their 90s red BMW.  They park on the street two houses down from another 90s red BMW.  They sit in the car, seeming to wait for someone else.  I eventually jog past them.
• I pass driveway after driveway of minivans waiting for me to pass at my pedestrian pace before they can back out onto the street and drive by as far on the other side of the road as possible.
• I shuffle through a four-way stop where a maroon minivan has stopped well in advance of my arrival.  She could have come and gone before I reached the intersection.  I think she’s checking me out. But I can’t tell; the windows are tinted.
• I jog down a slight hill and around a pine-tree lined corner where houses are made of stone.  They stand out against the wood siding of a brick-layer-union-busting neighborhood.  I grew up in a pine forest.  These houses’ facades  remind me of my childhood home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains like a green tree car freshener hanging from a mirror in a sticky-hot car reminds one of an evergreen forest, which is to say: close, but no cigar odor was masked.
• I follow the road side into several dead end cul-de-sacs, which is Catalan for “Bottom of the Bag”.  In the bottoms of these bags, with identical houses all facing each other at slightly different angles, I wonder if anyone looks out and wonders why the neighbors would choose such an ugly shade of taupe.  Dogs bark in warning that this is not a through street and non-residents are not welcome.  If we had wanted people jogging by, we’d have bought the house on Sleepy Hollow Drive.  This is Sleepy Hollow Circle.  You must be lost.
• I look down when I run.  This neighborhood is over 10 years old, which is to say it’s falling apart and the streets have several minor potholes.  I notice some plastic pellets that are evocative of the ammunition from a toy gun I once wanted so badly as a child.  I finally got it one day.  It was my most prized possession.  Until I saw a commercial for something else and wanted it more.  The toy was discarded and the rubber ammo is likely littering a driveway somewhere like plastic land-mines for my brother’s GI-Joes.
• Another minivan passes.  This one’s windows are not tinted.  She gives a sideways, suspicious glance.  This isn’t a through street.
• Does this street go though?  I really am lost.  How could I know where I’m going?  The roads are intentionally obfuscated by real estate planners who want to conceal the fact that an actual meadow was destroyed before East Meadow Lane was built.  Transplanted trees keep me from being able to see the next street over.  The landmarks are houses that all look the same.  Wait–that one is powder blue and this one is baby blue and this one is rotated 30-degrees off from the one up the block.
• More litter:  Soda bottle caps.  Mountain Dew is for snowboarders.  Pepsi is for cool kids with leather jackets.  Coke is for people who want the whole world to get along.  But this cap is useless and the trash can is so far away–except on Tuesday morning, when every trash can is lined up at the end of every drive next to the house numbers and an American flag icon painted on the curb.
• The cool air has made my nose run into my open mouth.  It’s salty–it’s real and honest.  It’s playing outside in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It’s climbing a pine tree.  It’s the safety of a road in the woods.  It’s living in a stone house and getting warm by a fireplace that isn’t for show.  It’s desire that isn’t sated by high fructose corn syrup or plastic BBs or a red BMW.  It’s personal, but it isn’t alone like these streets are alone.  I haven’t seen a single person who wasn’t safely hidden behind a curtain of steel and crouching airbags.

If you’ve read this far, you either have a biological imperative to love me (Hi Mom!) or you’re really convinced that Suburbia is an environment built to be discarded.  In the latter case, you will also enjoy watching James Howard Kunstler talk about Suburbia at TED.