notes on suburban madness

living in a gated community wouldn't be that bad if you could get drunk and ram the gate down every few weeks

one night the gate wasn’t opening fast enough for this one guy in the neighborhood so he rammed it open with his lexus

he’d had 6 chocolate martinis [from prepackaged mix] earlier that night

the subdivision charged him $1,200 to fix it the first time

it took them 3 weeks to fix it

while they were fixing it there was no gate

for those 3 weeks it wasn’t an official ‘gated community’

each time he drove through while the gate gone he laughed and felt a ‘sense of accomplishment’

living in a gated community wouldn’t be that bad if you could get drunk and ram the gate down every few weeks

the kid holding sign for the Pizza Hut $5.99 large cheese pizza is strong

the Pizza Hug sign-holding kid stands at the corner of central sarasota parkway and hwy 41

his sign is on the ground.

it’s 94 degrees

he’s drinking a Coke

he’s listening to an iPod

he’s not ‘doing his job’

his boredom is like a powerful force that I can feel right through the glass windows and air conditioned air inside my mom’s infiniti.

you never see anyone walking around in the suburbs so the only way to find out anything about who lives here is to see what they throw away on trash day

this subdivision has the word ‘estates’ in the title

people here want to look like they have money and some of them do but 80% of the recycling is cheap beer

one guy was throwing away a perfectly good suitcase

sometimes i want to run my emotions through a digital delay pedal set on infiinite loop

last night at the temple sinai barbecue they ran through the same set list (‘you make me want to shout’) as they did 20 years ago for my bar mitzvah

for a second the room collapsed down into two dimensions like i was looking at everything in a movie

lots of crazy jewish mothers with their kids on the dance floor

i heard the narrator in my head actually say ‘this is where the neurosis starts.’

later on i watched a woman tell telling something to her parents—they were probably in their 70s or 80s—and they were all laughing.

i had a different thought then: ‘they’re suvivors.’

earlier than night i drank several beers and jumped around in the air-inflated jump house

one of the kids said ‘it’s hard for grown-ups to get in and out’

it was thunderstorming while we were in there

sometimes i want to run my emotions through a digital delay pedal set on infinite loop