The Suburban Abyss

I had started thinking about the album on a run after the humidity against my skin and the pre-storm static in the air transported me back to the summer of ’97, and revisiting "OK Computer" that afternoon ultimately led me back to "Kid A," because it always gets back to "Kid A." "Kid A" exists at the opposite end of the Radiohead spectrum, far away from the artful guitar squall of "OK Computer," a...

I didn’t know what to expect when I landed in Boise on a hot and sunny Thursday afternoon. Shortly after arriving, having reconnected with my brother and a work world I had only seen through Zoom since August, I took a short walk through downtown, my head in a daze of post-flight fatigue and sensory overload. Whenever she flies, Erica talks about waiting for her soul to catch up with her, and this...

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ on June 22, this week’s transmission diverts from the episodic format of The Suburban Abyss for a reading of an essay on Neil Young’s “Sugar Mountain,” originally published in the out-of-print "lost" debut issue of Desperation Fanzine.

Shopping at Costco is something like a hero’s quest with multiple narrative conflicts: man against man, man against society and, most importantly, man against self. In every direction, Costco leads you into temptation – vats of sugar and fat, tubs of chemical dipping goop, sensible slacks that share a brand name with the giant jar of minced garlic – and everything is priced to deliver you straight...

Other than 'Nevermind,' Teenage Fanclub's 'Bandwagonesque' was there in my 14-year-old consciousness more than any other album, and more than any other album up to that point in my life, 'Bandwagonesque' made me think about girls, and in much deeper ways than anything I had heard on pop radio.

I spent two days toggling back and forth between Northeast Ohio’s twin titans of FM classic rock: 97.5 WONE and 98.5 WNCX. I listened while working. I listened while driving. I listened while cooking. I listened morning, noon and night, from the time I got up until the time I went to bed, and by the end of my immersion, my ears, my mind, my entire being was comprehensively fried.

Living in a digital world, there are certain conventions of 20th century American life I’ve eagerly preserved – collecting records, subscribing to a newspaper – and cutting coupons is among them.

Every band exists somewhere between myth and reality. There’s a spectrum of falsities and truths, and I imagine the Red Hot Chili Peppers of "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" lived somewhere in between, and that the truth, if we knew it, would mostly be boring. Music can inspire, it can help us face the world with a sock on our cock and scream “THIS IS ME!,” but it’s risky business searching for an ideal fo...

In new spaces, records have a way of taking on new lives, of opening themselves up to new interpretations and renewed appreciation. And that was the case earlier this spring when, as I found myself missing everything we left behind in Boise, I started drip-feeding Television’s "Marquee Moon" and Patti Smith’s "Horses." Clearly Smith and Verlaine did not have the static comfort of suburbia in mind...

The gripping conclusion of “The Moving Saga” is here!   In August 2020, we crossed a nation in turmoil in a rented minivan.   Our move to Ohio was not a vacation, and we did not try to trick ourselves into thinking it was. There was no side trip to Yellowstone. No stop at Rushmore for a selfie. Nothing of the sort. The swimsuits we packed never left our suitcases.   Leaving the bad scene in Boise...

In July 2020, we bought a house over FaceTime. We did not, as the Phrase of the Year goes, have that on our 2020 bingo card. The house was 2,000 miles away in a town we had rarely visited, on a road we weren’t sure how to pronounce, in a neighborhood we didn’t know. But by July of 2020, when the world’s idea of “normal” had already been redefined, making the biggest investment of our lives through...

Given how blazing hot the Boise real estate market was – even in the middle of a raging pandemic – we had expected the house to sell fast, and “fast” in the Boise market had come to mean as little as one day, and often following a bidding war.   Our expectations were heightened even more following 13 showings in the first nine hours our house was on the market. But when we heard from our realtor,...

June 2020 brought a series of wind sprints in the middle of our moving marathon. Up to that point, every step we took – be it taping up another box or booking another home repair – was made with a summer move in mind, but with no guarantee it would actually happen. But when Erica got the green light for permanent remote work, the exhibition run turned into a real race, and we kicked into high gear...

Some say hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s only because for nearly a decade of my life, hitting a round ball with a round bat came easily to me. Until it didn’t. Stepping into the batter’s box that spring felt like stepping into quicksand. I couldn’t find my footing, and it literally felt like I was sinking. I swung above the ball,...

The shutdown on the 25th was inevitable, but when the moment arrived and I got home and shut the door for the first time after the governor had ordered me to stay there, it still felt strange – an eerie tonal shift that turned a work-a-day Wednesday into something not quite like terror but definitely terrible. In response, I made a pot of chili, got drunk and went to bed without setting the alarm....

I never really liked our house in Boise. Especially when the Great Recession wrecked havoc on our lives and our home value.   Waiting it out in a house that seemed to get smaller by the day, we grunted our way through career changes and a stubborn economy that ended up booming in Boise, giving us a big chip to cash in a decade later.

“What about Hudson?” “Hudson, Ohio?” “Yeah.” “Really?” Shortly after setting our sights (sort of) on Pittsburgh, Erica comes out of deep, deep left field with the suggestion of moving to Hudson, Ohio, two towns over from where I grew up and home to overpriced gourmet cupcakes and well-to-do sweater boys named Sasha and Hunter and Chase.

"It started with Pittsburgh." The debut episode of The Suburban Abyss takes us back to Boise, Idaho, January 2020 – post-holiday/pre-COVID – and the innocuous Parade magazine listicle that planted the seeds for our move back East.