from things we knew when the house caught fire

short by drury

They were the bad neighbors. That was the thinking. But let me back up.

here is a list of things:

• BMW (him)
• Sport utility vehicle (her)
• Franchise coffee (whole bean, bought by the pound, kept in the freezer)
• A Martha Stewart garden you pay someone to garden
• A clean house, brightly lit
• A divorce
• A family who downhill skis (with helmets on) and participates in organized community sports
• A sixty-hour work week
• A daycare where you pay overtime
• A babysitter who sleeps over
• A dog with a new leash who eats biscotti

The perfect suburb is a delicate thing. It takes a careful balance of ingredients - all the perks of being near to the big city without all the ugly side effects that would turn it into a strip mall or ghetto: crime, traffic, malt liquor billboards, diapers, and dog food cans blowing around in the street like urban tumbleweeds.
Best Amerian Non-required Reading 2003 p. 117

forty signs of rain quotes

Charlie got out, grinning, and carried Joe to the Blue / Orange level. He marveled at the infectiousness of moods in a group. Strangers who would never meet again, unified suddenly by a youth and a toddler playing a game. By laughter. Maybe the real oddity was how much one's fellow citizens were usually like furniture in one's life.
p. 138

He was disoriented. e saw that moving from one paradigm to the next was not like moving from one skyscraper to another, as in the diagrams he had once seen in a philosophy of science book. It was more like being in side a kaleidoscope, where he had gotten used to the pattern, and now the tube was twisting and he was falling and every aspect of what he saw was clicking to something different, click after click; colors, patterns, everything awash. Like dying and being reborn.
p. 249

vonnegutt quotes

From Jailbird (library)

p. 7 "And so on. It insisted on being a very unfriendly story, so I quit writing it. "

p. 178-9 "About the young man and his radio. I decided that he had bought the thing as a prosthetic device, as an artificial enthusiasm for the planet. He paid as little attention to it as I paid to my false front tooth. I have since seen several young men like that in groups - with their radios tuned to different stations, with their radios engaged in a spirited conversation. The young men themselves, perhaps having been told nothing but, 'shut up' all their lives, had nothing to say."