The Suburbs

It's very conflicting being a kid from the suburbs who has escaped, originally full of distain for what you leave behind, the monotony, the cookie-cutter ways, but at the same time realizing that the best times of your life were those when you were bored out of your gourd with your friends in your youth. The song really touched me, and I'm just going to go through it bit by bit and let you all know what it meant to me. It may not be the meaning they were going for, but it's how the song touched my soul.

The way it came off to me, I don't think the verses are meant to be chronological, they're just snippets of a childhood spent in the 'burbs in the 70s and 80s. You learn to drive, your friends joke that you're going to kill them all, but who care, you're the one with the license, let's grab the keys and go.

The suburban war seems more innocent to me, more like the imaginary wars you'd dream up with the kids from the other side of the subdivision - but by the time you set out all the rules and home-bases and such, that ever-present boredom struck and everyone wanted to run off and do something else.

Kids do want to be so hard. They're always in a hurry to prove that they're grown up and don't want to show weakness through emotions because acting "like a baby" is the last thing you ever want to do, yet those times of unabashed joy, running and screaming through the yards are the things that stick with you for years later. Those memories are often all that there is left now, since the walls to these subdivisions and even whole sections of housing we grew up with are now being razed or are in such terrible states that our memories no longer mesh with what's present reality. All we have now are the dreams, the memories, so what was it all worth? What did it all mean?

Having a kid when you're still young means that there may still be a few of those physical touchstones around while you're raising your own, show them the beauty that made up the pillars of your memories while you can... daughters may be a little more receptive to such talk, since you often have to flesh out what's there with words instead just sights, but of course, you'll do your best if you end up with sons as well.

Back to the teen years, hanging out in the parking lots or under the overpasses, anywhere you can just be together away from possible parental meddling, just waiting for the time that you can get out of there, away from all this nothingness, yet that nothingness is already moving into the past, it's already gone, and you're just too young without enough perspective to realize it at the time.

Sometimes I can't believe it, I'm moving past that feeling again, of finding out that everything I thought would always be there is no longer there, that everything moves on. You get to a point in your late 20s or in your 30s were it really starts to smack you in the face, constantly, over and over that this is true, and every time you move past that feeling it comes again and again.

I hope to have kids before I'm just so jaded to the fact that nothing is permanent in life, so that I can still experience the beauty of a new world with them as well instead of being a dead anchor of reality, killing all joy with the fact that it's all temporary...