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I remember earning bonus points in my first online discussion—emails composed on beige consoles we had to stand in line to use—for a quip about suburbs being a subtle sort of hellscape and home only to families whose children’s souls had been left behind during the white flight of the mid-twentieth century. I myself was bound for a Bauhaus flat or a cozy hobbit hole or an eco-tech future of the Gene Roddenberry variety.

It should come as no surprise to fans of unsubtle irony that I am now sitting in a partially-finished basement in a St. Paul suburb (but a first-ring suburb, which is practically urban if you really think about it).

The degree of embarrassment, the sense that I have self-compromised, and the slight but persistent feeling of shame have been burdensome. I often hate myself for making this choice.

I often hate myself for things like forgetting to brush my teeth, not having more hair, eating too much, the way I walk, forgetting where I put my keys, being tall, 8th grade, forgetting to pay my therapist, and not being a more enthusiastic dog owner, so this is not too surprising.

This morning it struck me that perhaps the only things not being served here, though, are my ego and my aesthetics.

I told myself that the absence of one could be enviable, the absence of the other degrading, but at least somewhat preventable.

However, there’s still far too much talk of lawns here and little diversity of culture.

I’ve one classically-educated neighbor who will occasionally let himself slip into questioning the purpose of existence. When he once confessed that his explicitly Aristotelian outlook was failing to help him make his way in what he feared might be an absurdist world, the moment was too much and we quickly finished our beers and have not sat alone in each other’s company since.

Well. My phone rang just as I was finishing the previous sentence. The lovely and bookish white man across the street called to ask if our car had been rummaged through. When I went outside to check, the Hmong-American father next door happened to be out, and he shared his worry that his family’s move to our block might not be as peaceful as he hoped it would be, given the recently rifled cars and stolen mail, and we talked about the state of the world, our children, and his complicated relationship with the cops on the East Side where he owns a small business.

It was all a bit on-the-nose, but what can you do?