Suburbia and my weekends

Blogging in NJ and at night. I have been spending my weekends these past months visiting my girlfriend J in Princeton, NJ. J is working very hard getting her PHD in Neuroscience at Princeton University and must be in her Laboratory at the minimum every 12 hours. This prevents her from coming to Manhattan as she used to. Meanwhile, I have learned to adapt to Suburbia and like most things when you submit to something it becomes easier to vibe with. Initially, I found the landscape of Suburbia hostile, cold, fake and devoid of soul. Ok, these feelings still stand but I have found positive things about here too. For example there is a lot of nature out of here. There are many trees, animals, and fresh air. The house has a patio, back yard with lots of nice grass to lay down on. I am such a city boy having grown up in Manhattan that I often wonder how large the yards are and how much grass and house devoted to one family. All around me are giant homes. They are big for suburban standards even and I think but to me someone raised in a small apartment these are like Cathedrals of suburban, white American, goodness and the equivalent of mini-Castles of the privileged upper classes. The garages are the size of Apartments and house 3-4 cars and this is not enough space for their are often more cars in the drive way. I like to imagine sometimes the difference of spacing lets say in the Meadow in Central Park on a weekend compared to the amount of turf I am allotted to sit on all to ourselves. We can order people off our land if we needed to! Well not "our" land but "their" land! There is a lot of us-them "ours" and "their" out here Maybe not more but more noticeable because of less people. Also, there are things like boundary lines of properties and this odd phenomenon where the neighbors are just meters from us outside like and no one has met before and there is no waving or acknowledging. The invisible property lines act as shields preventing the normal niceties and odd intimacy when you are the only people out that the eye can see but still maintain ignoring each other. I thought this was a byproduct of the city due to the crowds. Now I see it is either human nature or our society. It is similar to how we stare up at the numbers in elevators. Why do we avoid human contact?

This is one thought I have here when I sit outside and look at large homes with the large yards. I take note as to how this nation and others have been sliced up, divided and parceled out. The question lies though to me is who gave someone the authority to own and sell it and own it in the first place? How is it "thiers"? How are our loveliest lakes, coast lines, beautiful areas owned at all and by such few people. Once owned they are exclusionary. It is hard to walk out here. If you walk in any direction you either hit private property or a highway. There are remnants of barb wire from the farm days. There is much history here and it was rural here not so long ago. Now this has been replaced by strips malls, and private homes. In days of old in Europe and other lands there was always paths for the public "throughways" through lands. It was understood that people needed to pass through. I think you can see old example of that near here and throughout old America. This was before cars existed and man traveled on horse or on foot. Now a days one cannot just walk unless they risk their lives and walk along the road. The roads are unsafe to walk aside due to high speed traffic.

The lands they have converted to be criss crossed and dissected by roads and highways. Where there are not roads are small buildings housing small business' of all kinds. These small business' all by necessity have their own asphalt parking lot. The buildings are not build to any kind of conformity and are tacky. These strip malls and hundreds of thousands (million) miles of asphalt parking lots define the United States landscape and this is to me is very unappealing. It is clear to me that this evolved with out any planning. It developed organically and we know no differently as to how our landscaped looked. I think this development has stunted our society and makes the suburbs less appealing. Most of this is how our nation developed along with the automobile and the lands conformed to the automobiles in the form of parking lots and high ways, roads, drive ways and garages. In Suburbia the Car rules. I propose a revolutionary idea to redesign our landscape to a more aesthetic reality.

More on this another time...