This one was triggered by Facebook’s thrusting upon me of information about people I barely know.

Probably for the first time in my life I felt nostalgia for suburbia – suburbia itself rather than some of the things my personal experience in suburbia happened to contain. There’s something very satisfying, in an barren kind of way, about one specific kind of suburban scene. This photo articulated it to me:

Endless paving, empty sky, a block of barren building, and a playground. It’s a parking-lot infinity pool. I don’t even know if I’ve experienced exactly this, can I be nostalgic about things that haven’t happened? I have a mental image of the end of autumn, dry and windy. It’s an industrial, minimalist counterpart of many natural scenes. No detailed shapes, no flora rustling. Just flat lines. You could all sit on some concrete and do nothing. Shadows that are long and un-interrupted. The only other company is cars passing by, and they barely exist. Sounds don’t echo, they vanish.

I guess it feels like a blank canvas. A lot of fun things in my life have happened in very, very boring places. Suburban backdrops serve pretty well.