#this is 48

me (walking away unbuttoning shirt): I've gotta get outta this thing.

her: Freeze.

me: What?

("Pony" begins blasting from porch speakers.)

I mowed half my weird suburban lawn just now. It's just another experiment to me. I've lived here for almost 17 years, and I still don't know lawn care. I see space to grow food and branches for kindling. Beyond that, I've just been watching the expectations of my neighbors, watching like a tourist, soaking up a little bit of the shared poison.

Despite that unsigned social contract, I've only really cared about happy kids, food, music and books and the weird art of this nuclear family as a signpost. "Hey. Let's all not spend our few hours in misery. Work. Play. Sleep. Make the good while we can."

I think the unsigned social contract might be a spreadsheet, a math problem, a standardized test that I chose to skip. I'm apparently only auditing suburbia still.

Yet the hooks are still in me somehow. I still manage to feel guilty about my lawn experiments, the little ways that I get to ignore the contract I never signed.

So, fly your freak flag, fly it without fear, fly it without guilt. It's hard, but I've got your back.

I beg to differ.

First all-nighter in a while. This has been a weird day. I text-dumped a bunch of end-of-year thoughts, but I’m now listening to Nina Simone and getting this nonsense off my chest.