It’s always good to go home for the holidays for a reminder on how the normcorps live. Where all the holiday games were Facebook posts gone ‘viral’. Where the gifts are whatever’s trending on Amazon. Where the #cottagecore or #mariekondo or whatevewr else was popular on Instagram finally filtered through to teeming masses. Sportsball is everything, parents get sucked into coaching and kids into playing and it’s not a minor commitment — you really get sucked into it back at home.

I wasn’t around before white flight sent all the norms to the suburbs, or even if that’s how it happened, but we can all agree the suburbs are the center of banality, and farther out in the small towns there was some character and a lot of land and space so people could be very interesting in their space. The crazy coots in their farms could get crazy and weld old machine parts into sculpture or put half buried cars in their lawns as art. The suburbs had HOAs and laws to keep things looking the same and improving their land value.

And in my lifetime, this is where counterculture was ripe. The suburbs were banal, and seemed preoccupied with how much your home was worth or how perfect your lawn was. And I imagine if you’re surrounded by that, you might fall into that.

The city, by this point, was like a ruin pub — abandoned yet full of people in spaces that activated something other, something not banal. moved to the city… We here in the city are lucky to have inherited such a fertile ground

It’s like something out of a horror film, how