#little boxes

This is important because at the time and ever since, reactionary forces keep trying to jam the nation into that image as some kind of blissful idyllic ideal.

But the image of suburban America in the 1950s was pure fantasy sold to cover over the wounds of a deeply traumatized nation.

The US 1950s ideal of one employed breadwinning man and one unemployed housekeeping wife living with 1d4 minor children in a freestanding house in a sprawling new-built suburb pretending to be an idyllic small town/country estate was invented in the wake of the massive unaddressed generational trauma of the one-two-three punch of the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War.

The image was never fully embraced and even at the time was a regular object of mockery.

The image of women as ditzy housewives was violently enforced to erase the gains women had made in employment and the competence they had displayed during the war. Likewise the attempt to crush the Black people who had also demonstrated competence and capability. Veterans’ trauma was swept under the rug.

The very idea that the prefabricated commercial advertiser-driven idyl of the lone nuclear family swathed in its swaddling 1950s housing development, sold to anesthetize a still-war-traumatized generation living in the 1950s of the Korean War, of “Losing” China and the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, of the great eruptions of the Civil Rights movement, of the Cold War and bomb shelters and sundown towns, is the way things are “supposed” to be is utter, ahistorical nonsense.

I have received the calling to turn trash into little pen jars

7:47 am in my dream home, the natural light is coming in through the windows big as walls. And I don’t even have to go outside to touch grass. Or lily pads. Whatever those are. Green. With envy. A deadly sin if I still can recall. A dumb concept if you ask me. We are all going to die. Might as well sin.

Brutalist but with a feminine twist. I was just looking at photos of a place I used to live and it looked a lot like this, but harsher, more angular. Punishing. I guess that’s why I liked living there and it was my first choice over the nicer ones. The nicer ones were nice — New England prep school boarding school type jazz. Windows with mahogany trim. Or some kind of dark wood. Dim lighting. But no. I wanted to live in a Brutalist brick. It looked like a cinder block with stories. And windows. All uniform.

weirdly, something I rail against. And yet want? Who or what am I? always railing against something and nobody railing me. when is it my turn to be the railee

I don’t know.

and the children go to university

where they are put in boxes

and they come out