Tomorrow Is Here

Tomorrow has arrived.

I received an unexpected bonus at work, and by this time tomorrow I will have ended my lifelong quest to pay off my housal unit mortgage.

I chatted with a co-worker from Bangladesh over a cheese steak lunch today (yep, a poor dietary choice, I know), who is somewhat distraught regarding his purchase of his Natomas housal unit in 2007. He lived in Dhaka for most of his life and from 10:00AM to 10:PM every day, trucks were allowed to rumble down his street. Tens of millions of people. He hated the noise. Now, twenty years later, he cannot stand the sound of the silence of suburbia. He longs for the ability to walk his girls to the park, but the park is too far. He drives. If he does take them outside after work, they get mosquito bites, much to the consternation of his American wife. He knows that cable television, the Internet, and various other forms of personal electronica will consume his young family, alienating themselves intentionally in their own electronic silos, inside their own rooms, inside their own housal unit, inside a "community" where no one talks to one another, where no one visits because no one knows their neighbors' names, inside a nation that could care less about real social interactions outside of Twitter and Twatter.

I'm ten hours away from my final payment on a housal unit I have no real attachment to, because it's firmly planted inside Elk Grove, a city with no future. Suburbian housing provides a living arrangement that has no future. While I intend on continuing to make this housal unit my home, while I intend on taking the time and care to fix things that break and to make it presentable to the rest of the world, I know that many of my "neighbors" won't. Indeed, they already aren't. I enjoy their company, yes, when they make themselves available outside of just opening the garage remotely, driving in, and closing it behind them. But I also know that they are generally mobile, moving from one unit to the next, with absolutely nothing nothing! to pin them down to this community. If they want a better unit, they'll have to leave. If they want a smaller unit, they'll have to leave. If they change jobs, the new commute would be even more unbearable and they'll have to leave. When their unit ages, they'll leave to newer units afar. When maintenance calls, they'll have to leave because to perform maintenance on "maintenance-free" housal unit materials like seamless gutters or vinyl siding defeats the purpose of buying the stuff.

Truthfully, I cannot hope to live here for the rest of my days. I will be forced out someday. I think that as energy becomes scarce the true cost of building shit miles from everything else will be revealed. I think that as this neighborhood ages, people who have even less attachment to things will move in, to rent, to care even less for the place they inhabit. This is the endgame of suburbia.

My plan going forward is to finally save some money for a change, to allow for the future possibility to live in a desirable, human scaled, walkable, architecturally relevant neighborhood, but all those places around here are so fucking expensive because people know their value and people care about them. I'm forced to live in sterile, lifeless, stucco-clad suburbia until I can amass enough wealth to afford a real community.

Tomorrow marks the first day towards that new goal, now that my seventeen year goal has been reached.

Wa-hey.