The Suburban Abyss

I spent two days toggling back and forth between Northeast Ohio’s twin titans of FM classic rock: 97.5 WONE and 98.5 WNCX. I listened while working. I listened while driving. I listened while cooking. I listened morning, noon and night, from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, and by the end of my immersion, my ears, my mind, my entire being was comprehensively fried.

Living in a digital world, there are certain conventions of 20th century American life I’ve eagerly preserved – collecting records, subscribing to a newspaper – and cutting coupons is among them.

Every band exists somewhere between myth and reality. There’s a spectrum of falsities and truths, and I imagine the Red Hot Chili Peppers of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" lived somewhere in between, and that the truth, if we knew it, would mostly be boring. Music can inspire, it can help us face the world with a sock on our cock and scream “THIS IS ME!,” but it’s risky business searching for an ideal for living within a pop song.

In new spaces, records have a way of taking on new lives, of opening themselves up to new interpretations and renewed appreciation. And that was the case earlier this spring when, as I found myself missing everything we left behind in Boise, I started drip-feeding Television’s "Marquee Moon" and Patti Smith’s "Horses."

Clearly Smith and Verlaine did not have the static comfort of suburbia in mind when they wrote these songs, but the way I gravitated toward "Marquee Moon," in particular, makes sense considering it feels like we’re living on the moon.

The gripping conclusion of “The Moving Saga” is here!

 

In August 2020, we crossed a nation in turmoil in a rented minivan.

 

Our move to Ohio was not a vacation, and we did not try to trick ourselves into thinking it was. There was no side trip to Yellowstone. No stop at Rushmore for a selfie. Nothing of the sort. The swimsuits we packed never left our suitcases.

 

Leaving the bad scene in Boise behind on Aug. 10, we wondered what awaited us on the non-holiday road as we entered the bowels of Middle America.

In July 2020, we bought a house over FaceTime.

We did not, as the Phrase of the Year goes, have that on our 2020 bingo card. The house was 2,000 miles away in a town we had rarely visited, on a road we weren’t sure how to pronounce, in a neighborhood we didn’t know. But by July of 2020, when the world’s idea of “normal” had already been redefined, making the biggest investment of our lives through a small, handheld video screen seemed like perfectly rational and sensible behavior.

Given how blazing hot the Boise real estate market was – even in the middle of a raging pandemic – we had expected the house to sell fast, and “fast” in the Boise market had come to mean as little as one day, and often following a bidding war.

 

Our expectations were heightened even more following 13 showings in the first nine hours our house was on the market. But when we heard from our realtor, it was not with news of any mind-blowing offers – or any offers at all. Instead, she shared the initial feedback she was hearing from buyers’ agents, and it wasn’t promising. For as much as the house had been gussied up with bad art and fake fruit and staged to look more spacious than it really was, prospective buyers were seeing right through the smoke and mirrors.

June 2020 brought a series of wind sprints in the middle of our moving marathon. Up to that point, every step we took – be it taping up another box or booking another home repair – was made with a summer move in mind, but with no guarantee it would actually happen. But when Erica got the green light for permanent remote work, the exhibition run turned into a real race, and we kicked into high gear.

Some say hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s only because for nearly a decade of my life, hitting a round ball with a round bat came easily to me. Until it didn’t. Stepping into the batter’s box that spring felt like stepping into quicksand. I couldn’t find my footing, and it literally felt like I was sinking. I swung above the ball, I swung below the ball, and most of the time when I swung, I felt like I was going to fall. My batting average certainly did. After hitting .343 my freshman year, I ended my JV campaign barely above the Mendoza Line at .224.

 

So what the hell happened? My vision changed slightly from ages 15 to 16, but I was still seeing the ball well enough to draw 14 walks in 64 plate appearances. You couldn’t blame booze or pot or a bad home life either. But it’s possible you could blame the MTV Buzz Bin.

The shutdown on the 25th was inevitable, but when the moment arrived and I got home and shut the door for the first time after the governor had ordered me to stay there, it still felt strange – an eerie tonal shift that turned a work-a-day Wednesday into something not quite like terror but definitely terrible. In response, I made a pot of chili, got drunk and went to bed without setting the alarm. The groggy new morning greeted us with a terrifying question: Now what?

We found ourselves face-to-face with a house stuffed with stuff, a decade-old to-do list of repairs and a second terrifying question: Double down or skip town?