American Suburbia

American Suburbia exists nowhere, in no time - no place. I'm not talking about real American suburbia of course  - the only part of America I've been to is Hollywood and LA airport (a one night stopover to and from New Zealand a decade ago now), The American Suburbia (and the capitals are intended) I'm talking about is the imagined one, the one cobbled together from the expected sources; films, (mostly horror films,  also Tom Cruise's second film Risky Business) books (The Secret History, The Virgin Suicides) and television - numerous documentaries and dramas (The Wonder Years). Then there are the less expected sources, or at least the less well known, Charles Burns graphic novel Black Hole, and Glenn Danzig's first two bands, horror punk legends The Misfits and noisy death-rockers Samhain. Somehow all this has got mixed up in my imagination, and American Suburbia has become a place and not a place. Suburban areas in real life are connected to cities - the edges of towns - but I cannot imagine this imagined suburbia connected to anywhere. Suburbia without a centre, satellites without a planet to crash into. Portrayals of this suburbia are often negative, places of claustrophobia and other peoples expectations - but there is something about them I find intriguing, places of mystery and possibility, and a strange dream-like solitariness. I hear urban legends whispered about in school yards; the old man who works at the gas station was once a  spy, and that kid who vanished is lost in the sewers beneath the school, still there now and can't get out... and then there is the darkness outside of town. The darkness is that space - usually situated on a hill - where someone can look down at the street lights of the town (and what colour I wonder, are American street lights?). Soft and hidden in rural shadow, this darkness is something comforting and hidden, a place to slip from the imagined squares of American Suburbia (those square clapboard houses set amid neatly mown lawns) to somewhere older and more shadowed. The kind of place where people might vanish or come back - abandoned places, old houses, and you can dream here on the edges of nowhere, before you slip back into the parking lots and the baseball fields and the stores where there are probably old horror comics from the 1950s in some room out the back.
This place doesn't exist - I've spent at most 48 hours in America - but this fictional geography is real to The nostalgia I feel is real too, for the streets where the leaves in autumn are bright and fevered as any old photograph, and where the wind  is cool with those dark hills that watch from the outskirts of these suburbs that belong to no town, no city.