Did the Era of Neighbors End?

I was out taking down my Christmas lights and I thought about how lonely it was in my neighborhood. I literally don't see my neighbors except for passing each other in cars. Some of them I never see. And no one socializes. Now our houses are spaced apart. This could account for some of this. And maybe you could say everyone is just really busy. But maybe there is something else.

Take my old neighborhood. Everyone got together. Everyone was friends. You might say that was a function of having young children. Maybe. But when I go back to my neighborhood which has since turned over the people who are still there say people don't socialize  like they used to. They said the new people have no interest in getting together or being social. Some of this can be explained by urban versus suburban or even conservative versus liberal. Our old neighborhood was closer to the city.

But the fact that my old neighborhood seems to be suffering from a lack of socialization like my new one tells me that the age of neighbors might have ended. Of course we all know what replaced it. The online world. We now stay inside our forts and socialize versus venturing out to see what the neighbor is doing. Some of it is two income households. Clearly. Some of it we are more insular by nature with our ear-buds and smartphones. Or maybe we are just too damned busy.

The big porches on homes are really no longer. Most new homes don't have them. In my grandfathers time people used to get dressed up to go out on their porches in the evening. Then like a grand procession people would pass by and pass the time of day. Something we no longer possess.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Suburban Tale of Woe #69

There was a man named Rooney in my neighborhood who had a Hummer and a pool and a big house. He was one of those assholes with a tattoo and always walked around with his shirt off and everyone hated him even before the age of mass consumption ended because he consumed more than even mass consumers. He drove around in his black Hummer and never seemed to work and that pissed everybody off too. His wife was some beauty queen built like a Destroyer and that pissed off everyone especially the men. And he wore these clothes that a fifteen year old would wear. Maybe

Anyway the crash came and a sign popped up in front of his house FOR SALE BY OWNER. Then it fell down and someone put another sign up in black magic marker FOR SALE BY OWNER. That one fell down too but lay in his yard for a month. Then a realtor sign appeared with the picture of a June Cleever woman saying SPECIAL REDUCED PRICE. Then that sign fell and nobody picked that up. Then it snowed and the old sign in magic marker popped up. This went on through the spring.

Then one morning two white trucks appeared and Rooney disappeared. Nobody saw him again. Then the trucks disappeared and his lawn grew all sorts of weeds that started to breathe again when the herbicide wore off. Trash blew around. Someone threw a can of GOOD TIMES beer on his front lawn. Then when the weeds got waist high someone cut them down and some Indians appeared. They were from Pakistan and seemed pretty nice. Nobody knew what happened to Rooney

So then I'm sitting in the parking lot of Starbucks. I'm just sitting there and I see a guy pull up in one of those little trucks shaped like a house. ROONEY REMODELING is on the side. I'm staring at the truck when a guy in a leisure suit or a sweat suit that looks  like a leisure suit gets out with a long white stripe from his shoulder to his foot like a convict. He has gray hair and goes inside looking around like someone might shoot him. It was ROONEY alright. Someone said he was living on the other side of town. In a house. Amazing.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Road Not Taken--Rocket Man

Hair of the dog.

The vodka is fighting the tomato juice, but it does the trick, and I mitigate the vagaries of selling popcorn at the Kane County Fair with ten screaming Cub Scouts, Bloody Mary firmly in hand, shades firmly affixed. The margaritas from the night before are a headache I’d rather be doing without, but osmosis and a little old-fashioned self medicating has gotten me to the point where I can drive Cub Scouts and be the charming father of two, husband of one. But I have to make a decision. We are constantly presented with rules that we can either choose to follow or break. Does one go through the unmanned toll? Does one pay for the case of water in the bottom of the shopping cart that no one sees? They are small, middle class rules, but rules all the same. My choice is simple. Do I take the time to hang a big looping U-turn and return to the highway for the Dairy Queen I missed … or do I cut into the McDonald’s parking lot and plow across an excavated field of old pipes and earth movers, past the surveyor posts flapping like markers of the road not taken?These are the choices of our lives now. The big choices are mostly behind us by middle age, and we are reduced to schoolboys trying to whisper when the teacher’s back is turned.
What the hell.

http://www.pantonnepress.com/chapter1.pdf

The Road Not Taken--First Page of Rocket Man

Hair of the dog.
The vodka is fighting the tomato juice, but it does the trick, and I mitigate the vagaries of selling popcorn at the Kane County Fair with ten screaming Cub Scouts, Bloody Mary firmly in hand, shades firmly affixed. The margaritas from the night before are a headache I’d rather be doing without, but osmosis and a little old-fashioned self medicating has gotten me to the point where I can drive Cub Scouts and be the charming father of two, husband of one. But I have to make a decision. We are constantly presented with rules that we can either choose to follow or break. Does one go through the unmanned toll? Does one pay for the case of water in the bottom of the shopping cart that no one sees? They are small, middle class rules, but rules all the same. My choice is simple. Do I take the time to hang a big looping U-turn and return to the highway for the Dairy Queen I missed … or do I cut into the McDonald’s parking lot and plow across an excavated field of old pipes and earth movers, past the surveyor posts flapping like markers of the road not taken?
These are the choices of our lives now. The big choices are mostly behind us by middle age, and we are reduced to schoolboys trying to whisper when the teacher’s back is turned.

What the hell.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0129-hemingway-attic-novelisjan29,0,6014669.story

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Revolutionary Road

Back about four months ago a reviewer said, "Rocket Man reminds me of Revolutionary Road." I thought, well, interesting title. That was it. Another review came in a few weeks later, same comparison. I still did nothing. Then came another. And another. Then I heard about the movie and I finally went to a bookstore. Richard Yates struggled in 1961 to get readers. His book came out and basically dropped from site. Now why is that? Here is a book that pegs suburban living in the 1950's, nails down the monotony, the feeling that we should be doing something more than just going to work and coming home to a house in a suburb among other people doing exactly the same thing. Maybe the reason Richard Yates novel found a hard audience is because people do not like a mirror put in front of them. Now the novel and the movie are deemed brilliant. Seen through the safety of almost fifty years we can safely relate to this suburban couple. I have had people react violently to Rocket Man. Some had defended the suburbs. The Daily Herald just came out and termed the article "Author's new Novel Takes on Suburbs" http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5The assumption that an author is attacking an institution is implicit in the headline. There have been fears from other people that Rocket Man would be alienating, neighbors would stop talking to us, we would be politely shown the door back to the city. In Revolutionary Road, the couple see themselves apart, some would say in the year 2009 they see themselves as the "cultural elite." People who have reviewed the novel have been dismayed with this view and see their eventual comeuppance as just deserts. We are told from day one to not rock the boat and we don't appreciate our art pointing out our foibles, posing the question that there must be a better way. Yates named his novel, Revolutionary Road, thinking that the placidity of the fifties had to give way to something. It did, the sixties. But here we are in 2009 with another novel questioning the way we live in the year 2009...I wonder what the teens will be like?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=262957&src=5

http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0615213073/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1