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I get an uneasy feeling in the place my father lives, although I can’t give it a name—this tension. It hovers as I drive through the streets

of French-manicured lawns and sibling houses, each a rearrangement of the next, an inch shorter here or an excess of trimmings there.

 

I consider the appeal of the Lego-like restaurants and stores scattered precisely from the horizon and back. How it seems they exude a filtered chaos. The irony. That these systematic structures dismantle the categorical library of surroundings I’ve deemed natural.

 

Every last Lego: watching.

 

The closest I’ve come to naming this feeling is something like Middle Class White Suburbia, but still, it’s not quite right. Class conjures society, the big S. A lost cause. We live in celebrated isolation—the little s. A series of fenced suburbias. Big smiles, dogs yapping, doors locked at nine. In the places where nothing happens,

 

                                           just the way We like it.