Great Suburban Traditions: Number 14 – Rush Hour

Here we go again... (pic: SAHIP)

Around once a year I get caught up in the rush hour. I think that the reason I’ve never had a ‘proper’ career is that I still remember all the rush hours of my 20s, when I had the grave misfortune of going to work every day. Specifically, I remember how rush hours took at least two hours out of your day, every day, just so that you could get to and from a job that you hated.

     Yesterday I got caught in a traffic snarl around Dupont Circle in DC and – should we atheists turn out to be wrong - enjoyed a glimpse into the punishment I will likely undergo for eternity, having in the course of my life indulged in various activities not permitted by the bible. I will be in a line of traffic, and a long way up ahead I will see the light change from red to green. I will get ready to advance, and the cars and buses and trucks in front of me will rev a little, filling my nose and lungs with unpleasant fumes. Then the light will change back to red, with nobody having progressed a single inch.

    This will remain the same, for ever, and every time the light changes to green, I will retain a stupid hope that the traffic is going to move. I will never be able to see what is going on  up there – it could be road works, it could be an accident, it could just be the sheer volume of bovine commuters sitting stoically in their cars waiting out their lives, listening to the local traffic reports running through where all the problems are and why, but never mentioning the unexplained delay at Hell’s Dupont Circle.

      When jammed in like this, do people ask themselves, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ If they don’t, why not? How could you sit in this kind of traffic twice every day and not doubt at all the point and the worth of what you are doing? Why do I never see people abandoning their cars and shouting, ‘Ah, fuck this, I’m off to live on an organic farm in Montana.’ Then they run down the street waving their arms about and cackling at their new-found liberty, while all the other drivers look on with envy.

    I realise that people deal with commuting in different ways. For some, it’s the only time they get to spend on their own, away from family and work colleagues – as soon as the door is closed they make duck noises, fart like sailors, and sing random snatches of songs from the 1970s. Then once they’ve got all that out of their systems and settle down, they learn languages, listen to audio books, or sit with microphones wrapped around their heads talking earnestly, showing the other commuters that they are so important that they’re already on a conference call at 7.30am, or still on one at 7.30pm (“Need to talk to Tokyo”).

    Maybe if you do this every day you develop the precious virtue that deserts me when I’m behind the wheel – patience. Although, once the traffic loosens up a bit, you don’t see many drivers exhibiting this quality as they make a rush for the space ahead. Courtesy, caution and concessions are for fools naïve enough to think that there’s any reward here for fair play, while others steal ahead and make it back to suburbia ten seconds faster.

    You finally arrive at your silent, same-old destination and wonder, “Why was I in such a rush to get home?” Falling asleep to the imaginary preview in your head: Coming up in tomorrow’s episode – yet more of the same.

Great Suburban Traditions: Number 13 - The Sunday Morning Trip to Home Depot

Where reluctant men spend their
midlife Sunday mornings

When I was young, single and running free from all responsibilities, Sunday mornings meant three things: late awakenings, extended breakfasts, and uninterrupted, hours-long reading of newsprint to a soothing soundtrack of Music for Hangovers. There was little movement involved, and certainly no heavy lifting.

Accumulating years brought with them all the trappings of what is comically termed a ‘settled’ lifestyle: three females, all of them fucking nuts in their own sweet ways, and - most burdensome of all - a garden. This latter symbol of having made it all the way out of town pre-supposes hours of musing and relaxation in an idyllic, naturally perfumed sub-utopia. In reality it’s a combination of rampant horny weeds, stunted and tasteless vegetables, vicious and feral insects, and mud caused by daily storms and perpetual drainage problems. To solve the latter problem, Mrs. Pop has started laying down flagstones so we can step through the mire.

Aisle be buggered - paving away for no returns

This has meant being recruited for trips to Home Depot on Sunday morning – the sort of intra-marital chore you can only avoid by feigning a mid-life crisis, inventing a 19-year-old mistress, and driving off for good in the open-topped twatmobile you bought by cashing in your only life insurance policy. I escaped Home Depot for several years by maintaining that I was boycotting the company for contributing to George W Bush’s 2004 election campaign, but my marriage has finally outlived this excuse.

One recent trip was endured, and several heavy flagstones were hauled on to a trolley, heaved into the back of the car, then removed at the other end ready to pave the soggy slope down the side of our house. But it turned out we didn’t buy enough, so this past weekend we went back for more. Back to Home Depot, filled with hundreds of other people who don’t want to be there, resenting each other’s existence, facing off with sullen expressions behind trolleys in aisles where only one can pass. How to get out and away as quickly as possible is the only thought inside the head of every single customer. At least it is for the remotely sane ones.

We loaded twelve very heavy flagstones. Sweating and feeling ready for a major back-related incident, we left them unattended for five minutes to go and pick up some paint we’d ordered earlier. When we came back, the trolley and the flagstones were gone. We looked around, but there was no sign. We checked the pile of flagstones on the shelf, but no zealous, muscle-packed employee had swiftly re-stacked them. After stalking through the store with no success, we wondered if we’d died and gone to a fate worse than hell, trapped for eternity in a DIY netherworld on a futile circular quest for the Twelve Lost Flagstones of Aspen Hill.

I ran to the cash tills. A little old guy had just pushed ‘our’ flagstones through the checkout and was heading towards the car park. I ran up beside him and asked him why he’d nicked our trolley. Forget those wars and protestors in Syria, Egypt, Brazil and Turkey, right at this second I was feeling the intense hurt of a most immediate abuse of my human rights. You could say that my perspective had been narrowed by the thought of having to haul another dozen flagstones off the shelf.

The little old man waved a receipt at me as he did his best to beetle off with his load. “All paid for,” he said, failing to look me in the eye.

“You just swiped our trolley and ran off with our flagstones!” I observed accurately, if somewhat pathetically.

“All paid for,” he repeated, waving the receipt again.

In some ways, I’ve never really assimilated to the US lifestyle. In other ways, though, I definitely have. “You fucking asshole,” I told him. “Just go and fuck right off.”

If someone had been quick enough with a cell phone, there could now be a video of me on YouTube harassing an elderly man half my size, pushing a heavy load as I swear at him. It’s not my proudest moment, but he had to be told. I backed off and went to give the latest flagstone news to Mrs. Pop.

We hauled a new load of flagstones on to a new trolley, slowly becoming amused at the old cunt’s audacity. On the way out we spotted him getting help from a member of Home Depot’s devoted staff as they loaded the flagstones into the back of his Honda. I accelerated towards them, then braked hard just short of his knee-caps, then we shouted out some more ungracious parting words as we swerved away, shrieking like teens heading for the beach. It was such a successful bonding exercise that we might go back again next week.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 12: Learning To Love Your Lawn Mower

Travels through space, but can it cut grass?

This week’s episode of Dr Who showed the Doctor in a sentient rapport with his Tardis – an upright, oblong, time- and space-travelling police box that turns out to have feelings. I can relate to this, as I have a similar relationship with my lawn mower.

When we moved here a dozen years ago, we were advised that American suburbanites get Central American sub-suburbanites to cut their lawns for them, at a cost of around $20 to $30 a week. Being filled to the brim with Scottish blood, I went and bought a mower of my own for $140, and recouped my costs within about a month. Ever since I started calculating the ever incremental sum that I’m saving, I’ve sensed a very special bond between us.

In the instruction booklet, it said that in order to eke a longer life out of your mower, you should ‘winterise’ it every autumn so that it’ll be in top shape for the spring. I can’t recall exactly what this involved (some sort of getting on your knees and lubing and waxing and taking it to bits) because I lost the booklet, but me and my machine reached a different

Great Suburban Traditions No. 11 - Failing To Take Down The Xmas Lights

Jesus gets ready for Easter

Unlike leaf blowers, dog turd and piano recitals, this is one suburban tradition that I love – January comes and goes, and still there are people who have not bothered to take down their festive decorations. In every neighbourhood, there will be at least one garden with a sad, deflated Santa, a defiantly glowing reindeer, or a crib scene missing Jesus, who has long since grown up and absconded with his mates to smoke pot and drink stolen Miller Lite in the nearby woods.

As winter wears on, bulbs blow and storms tear down the strings of lights, rendering the displays increasingly sad and shabby. And I’m left with the warm inner feeling that beyond the front door sits a family too lazy to do anything about it. Mum, Dad and the kids – all of them too reassuringly sane to stand around in freezing weather wrestling with wires and step-ladders. Hell, just leave it ‘til Easter. Maybe by then someone will have found Jesus and nailed him to the tree.

Great Suburban Traditions: Number 10 – The Leaf Blower

I often complain that suburbia’s too quiet, even though the human desire for silence and inertia is the main reason that suburbia even exists. And just because it’s quite, that doesn’t mean it’s peaceful. In autumn especially, semi-urban dwellers seem able to tolerate a profoundly jarring kind of noise annoyance – the almost ever-present, soul-gnawing monotone of the leaf blower.

Yesterday, on a beautiful and still Sunday afternoon, and in a rare show of decadence, we were sitting in a friend’s hot-tub enjoying the end of the long weekend, casually chatting and, as it happened, quaffing Moet Chandon as the sky around us slowly changed colour behind the silhouettes of spindly, naked trees. It should have been perfect, but a couple of gardens away someone had decided to take out their anger and grief at another Redskins’ loss by clearing the garden of leaves. We got to enjoy his motorised penile extension’s buzz-saw growl and the olfactory consequence – wave after wave of gasoline wafting across the fence.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 9 - Badly Dressed Men

You see them only at weekends. After the effort of suspending all residue of wit, spontaneity and character from Monday to Friday in order to blend in with their fellow faceless professionals at the next desk, the white suburban male is sufficiently sapped of energy that he can only succumb to the worst manifestation of sartorial defeat. And so, while cowed into carrying out the chores his wife claims to have been doing all week (when in fact she was at Book Club talking about the area’s top 250 delis), he dons the universal uniform of the bedraggled dad – baseball hat, over-sized t-shirt, and crumpled knee length khaki shorts, all supported by depressingly brown loafers or sandals.

Badly Dressed Suburban Man’s identity is then boiled down to two basic items. 1. The sporting allegiance proclaimed on his baseball cap, which is generally worn backwards until the age of about 35, then turned front on to hide a receding hairline and to avoid skin cancer. 2. The name of a college on his t-shirt. He didn’t necessarily go to that college, but no one’s going to be interested enough to ask him if he really is a Duke graduate or not, so he can get away with it. Sometimes the t-shirt is just blank. Navy blue seems to be a favourite, as it can disguise the summer sweat a little better. The main thing is, it shouldn’t under any circumstance match the shorts, but that’s not a problem. After all, what actually goes with beige or pale grey?

You’ll see masses of them listlessly operating shopping trolleys, wandering the mall in a daze, or standing on the sidelines of a sports game automatically yelling, “Good job, buddy!” approximately once every sixty seconds. In the right hand pocket of their shorts is a Blackberry, which they fondle to remind themselves of who they really are on week days. The money maker, the main man. Although the wife has forbidden them from taking the Blackberry out and pretending to be reading important e-mails, they surreptitiously caress the keys, thinking that the weekend does at least have one saving grace – it makes going back to work on Monday morning more of a relief than a duty.

This passive assault on fashion hasn’t changed one jot in the 11 years I’ve lived here. You can admire its stasis in the same way that you might happily occupy a few hours by watching a tortoise walk in circles. You could even claim that its progenitors are, albeit unwittingly, involved in a collective statement against the fickle transience of mutating trends. Or perhaps it’s a collaboration of housewives dressing their husbands down to stop them looking hot to potential predators. The husbands acquiesce for the sake of a quiet life, and because hell, just because a t-shirt’s 20 years old, doesn’t mean you can’t still wear it, right? What's more, you can jump in the pool and drown yourself without ruining a good shirt.

More Great Suburban Traditions:
No. 8 Going To The Mall
No. 7 Cocktail Hour
No. 6 Grocery Shopping
No. 5 Limited Guilt
No. 4 Asexuality
No. 3 Dog Crap
No. 2 Neighbourhood Watch
No. 1 The Piano Recital

Great Suburban Traditions No.8: Going To The Mall

If you wanted to put a positive spin on a trip to the mall, you could point out that it’s full of lovely young women flashing you friendly smiles. But don’t delude yourself that they’re up for the kind of water closet cubicle fun that the seasonally employed, nihilistic main character of ‘Bad Santa’ indulged in with middle-aged housewives during his lunch break. These are commercial smiles aimed at dislodging only hard cash from your trousers, and presumably it still works. For a tight-fisted misanthrope, though, the real fun part of going to the mall is to talk to a Young Flashing Smile for five minutes, buy nothing, and then watch the tortured way she will try but fail to bid you a friendly goodbye.

I was at the mall yesterday, and even though the Financial Times is claiming on today’s front page that the US economy is now in recovery, that news has yet to manifest itself in the nation’s sanitised kirks of commerce. Customers were scarce, but there was an abundance of sales people, and those on the open concourse with their market-style stands were the most desperate of all. Years of looking away from hard men’s stares in English pubs hasn’t quite trained me well enough to avoid the lurking eye of the commission-hungry, artificially fragrant, high-heeled harpie who insists on telling you that Mrs. Pop would love this revolutionary new nail varnish.

“Why is it revolutionary? Does it make you take to the hills with an armed militia and plot the overthrow of the military-industrial complex?”

“Hey, what’s the accent? Are you from Australia?” is usually the response to that kind of comment. Training taught them to keep the smile big, but the talk must always be nice and small. It’s around this point, as they guess that you might be mildly insane, that the veneer of civil discourse starts to betray its first cracks in the sales assistant’s voice. At the same time, your presumed madness might be their best chance of a sale today, so they’ll make one last effort by halving the price.
This happened yesterday when I walked into a posh chocolate shop. Following the statutory agreement that we were both doing fine, I didn’t make an immediate grab for the shop’s most expensive items, so the saleswoman told me that Halloween goodies were two for the price of one. I bought some stuff as a salve for my girls’ football team, because they’re all mewling that they have to play on Halloween. Then the saleswoman charged me full price. “Er, didn’t you just tell me they’re two for price of one?” I asked. “Ha ha, so I did,” she laughed, almost hysterically, like she’d been saying it was just a generous offer on the spur of the moment, but she didn’t really mean it. So could you pay the full price? Pleeeease?

It wasn’t so hectic in the bigger shops, where staff are possibly less concerned about the faceless parent company going bust. The reason I actually went to the mall was to buy a roasting dish on offer in one of the department stores. I couldn’t find the one I wanted, and the only person visible was a teenage sales assistant, who ignored me because she was too busy texting. One day it will occur to American retailers to train their staff to help people, but without all the oily pushiness and naked insincerity. That day will be when we’re all up in the hills having a hell of a nice day with our armed militias.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 7 - Cocktail Hour

You have to say one thing in suburbia’s favour. It’s so fucking dull out here that every day at six o, clock, without fail, you’re dying for a good stiff drink.

Just think. The day’s behind you, and you’ve accomplished nothing besides getting half way through the laundry, buying some groceries, successfully managing the school run, drinking scads of coffee (and peeing it out again), and thinking vaguely about some much more fruitful, creative and rewarding projects that you’d rather be doing instead, but are currently putting off until the next decade.

Ahead of you lies the evening, when you’ve got dinner to make, and home to stay at. This could further involve activities as pulse-pumping as finishing off the laundry, watching a broadcast program on the highly popular electronic medium known as television, or trying to read a book or a magazine before falling asleep in the process.

In between, though, is cocktail hour. There’s no getting around the fact that this is the best moment of the day out here on Quiet Street. That keen rush of want, round about 1800 hours, is almost as delectable a hit as the first swig of the drink itself. It comes with the acknowledgment of the need - which is an integral part of knowing, recognising and ultimately enjoying your own weaknesses - followed by the decision on whether to succumb or defer the pleasure for a further 24 hours.

Either way is fine. Give in, and you get the drink. Resist, and you can allow yourself the brief and deceptive comfort that you are not, really not, in any way alcohol-dependent. This makes the following day’s cocktail hour all the sweeter. If you’re in that rare suburban club that can hold out until Thursday (otherwise known as The Big Fat Liars’ Society), then good luck to you and all, but you should know you’re severely missing out on suburbia’s greatest reward.

The ironic thing is that in US suburbia there’s rarely a bar (or anything else useful) within walking distance. One of my great schemes that I’m putting off until next decade is a chain of impromptu roadside suburban cocktail stands, open between 5.30 and 7 only, to be called something like The Shot Of Life. They should do roaring trade, and by the time every street’s spoilsport puritan has called the cops, we’ll have packed up and left.

This would require people to leave their houses, talk to their neighbors, loosen up, and publicly take part in something considered to be detrimental to one’s moral, mental and spiritual health. In the rest of the world it’s known as ‘drinking.’ Here it would be a revolution. Until then, we remain the silent majority, serene and satisfied for an hour each evening as we gratefully knock back our fool’s medicine.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 6 - Grocery Shopping

Yes, I know, it’s not just people in the suburbs who have to go grocery shopping. But the difference for suburbanites is that going grocery shopping is one of the few times that we get out the house. Ironically, we spend a lot of time pining to leave the house for a change of scenery, but the only time it happens is to do something we hate. Or, as I regularly express it when I’m on the way out the door: "I’m just off to the fucking shop."

That’s a sort of cry from the heart hoping that someone else might take the chore off my hands. But as my daughters are nine and 11, they’re no more likely to volunteer for the task than in future years when they’re 17 and 19 and in possession of drivers’ licences. As for Mrs. Stay-At-Home-Indie-Pop, she’s not home mostly (that’s why, alert readers will have noted, I’ve got the SAHIP gig), and at weekends she sensibly follows her daughters’ lead of ignoring my desperate appeal. If I’m lucky, a response may echo from some distant corner of the house, such as, "Bye, see you later" or "Don’t forget my hibiscus and broccoli tea-bags."

SAHIP. I’m a SAHIP. I’m saaaaaaa hip.

On weekdays, supermarkets are full of horny housewives who ‘accidentally’ bump into you, spill their shopping, and then after you’ve helped them pick it up, thank you by inviting you back to their place for no-holds-barred, no-emotional-strings-attached sex. I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened to me. Probably on average at least never in my eleven years as a SAHIP. Not that I’ve been looking for it, you understand.

It’s different at weekends, when you can see Clueless Saturday Dad wandering around the supermarket aisles with a crumpled list in his hand, accompanied by an irascible kid (usually a boy) trying to kick him in the nuts from his prime vantage seat in the front of the trolley every time Dad turns down his demand for something unhealthy to eat. Saturday Dad’s too pre-occupied working out why he’s now going down the same aisle for the eighth time and still hasn’t found shortening ("What the fuck is shortening?" he’s now finally asking myself) to listen to the increasingly shrill demands for the tropical fruits bubblegum maxi-pack. Eventually he caves in and thrusts the Superbowl-Sized Cheetos Jumbo Bucket into junior’s hand before breaking down in tears when he sees the length of the queue at the deli and realizes he’s going to miss the Tampa Bay Fratheads’ midday kick-off against the Chunkneck College Beefboys.

Anyway, as if going to the shops wasn’t already an unadventurous enough experience, there’s Morton.

I’ve changed Morton’s name in case he’s one of the three people that read this Blog. He’s a cashier at one of my regular local supermarkets. He’s a very big, morose lad in his late 20s, and he never smiles. When I say never, I mean never, as in ‘sex-with-horny-housewives-I’ve-met-in-the-supermarket’ never. It’s his life policy. I’ve been passing through Morton’s till for years, and not once has he hinted at any kind of internal or external happiness.

It’s now got to the point where I’d rather go to a cashier with a longer line than watch Morton dolefully scan my groceries. You may think I’m exaggerating, but the moment I see Morton, I feel profoundly depressed. It’s not empathy. It’s resentment at his failure to escape a job and a life he clearly despises (why can’t he find work as a SAHIP?), and the imposition of his misery every time I go shopping. When you catch a glimpse of Morton it’s like being physically struck around the head by an embodiment of all that’s hopeless in the human condition. Like the dementors in Harry Potter, Morton will suck your soul out, make your shoulders slump, and force you to feel, "Jesus Christ, what is the point of going on for another single fucking minute?"

If there’s no avoiding Morton’s queue – say, for example, there are 16 people in line at the checkout next to him, and he’s completely free – then I’ll always be polite and friendly to him, though I won’t bother trying to waste an attempted joke, which would be like pissing on a Californian forest fire. Not because I want to be nice to the sad fuck, but because the day he comes to work with a plastic carrier bag full of heavy weapons and goes on the rampage, aisle by aisle, he might just notice the bloke who politely answered his drawled and automated query of "howyadoin" with a chirpy, "I’m fine thanks, how are you?" and finish me off cleanly with at least ten bullets to the head rather than letting me bleed slowly to death through a single, careless shot.

It’s the kind of exciting outcome grocery shoppers secretly yearn for.
Great Suburban Traditions: Number 1 – The Piano Recital
Great Suburban Traditions: Number 2 – Neighbourhood Watch
Great Suburban Traditions: Number 3 – Dog Crap
Great Suburban Traditions No. 4 – Asexuality
Great Suburban Traditions No. 5 – Limited Guilt

Great Suburban Traditions No. 5 - Limited Guilt

Much of our time in suburbia is spent dealing with solicitations for money, either by post, telephone, or a personal knock on the door. It’s part of the tradition that the last two only call when you’re either dropping off for an afternoon nap (the interesting thing to do post-lunch in the 'burbs), or about to sit down to dinner, which may be irritating, but at least gives you an excuse to hang up or slam the door in their tired, hope-drained faces. I’ve never done it, but I bet that going door to door to raise cash or sell something is the quickest way to lose faith in the human race, aside from watching wrestling fans watch wrestling.

It’s logical that, in a country that mostly shuns the idea of the welfare state, the suburbs are targeted as a perceived area of surplus cash. And the great thing is, there are enough good causes to go around and make everyone feel that little bit less guilty about living in a privileged, if lifeless, neighbourhood.

The snag is, however, that once you’ve written a cheque to three worthy environmental causes, your name gets put on the Worthy Environmental Cause Suckers’ List. So rather than making you feel that you’ve done your bit, you just get more and more letters from organizations that desperately need your money NOW to stop a melting polar ice cap from flooding your front yard (at least it would wash away the dog crap – see Great Suburban Traditions No. 3). You give to a good cause, but end up feeling even guiltier because of all the other good causes you haven’t given to.

Even worse, once you’ve joined the Sierra Club, to quote a very worthy but particularly annoying cause, they sniff your cheque, sense there has to be more where that’s come from, and then bombard you with more money requests. Wait a minute, you planet-saving scum, I just sent you my annual membership, and now you want more already? Get off my case until next year and leave me alone. Don’t send me e-mails, and don’t send me the magazine - you’re wasting trees and I never read it anyway. It just makes me feel guilty about stuff like not turning off my computer at the wall every night and failing to cycle 3000 miles to my holiday destination.

Ultimately, though, your suburban sense of innate self-entitlement gets the better of you. There’s only so much room for guilt out here when there are lawns to be mowed and flat screen TVs to be installed. You decide that the best way of getting green is to grow your own vegetables, theoretically saving you a future trip to the supermarket. You also decide, “Screw them, I’m not going to give them anything if they keep asking me for more cash every second week anyway.” The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s fifth successive urgent appeal goes straight into the recycling bin, and I don’t even bother to open the envelope and take the free address labels out any more, though that’s mainly because I already have 600 Chesapeake Bay Foundation address labels, and I only ever post about three letters a year.

Paradoxically, the less you give, the fewer solicitations you receive. And as you hear no more appeals for help, you convince yourself that all must be right with the world, provided you don’t read the paper, turn on the news, pick up the phone, or answer the door. Not that anyone comes to the door since I dug that bear-pit in the front garden to catch the Girl Scout cookie sellers.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 4 - Asexuality

How do you act in the 'burbs: depressed
 and suppressed, or singing and swinging?

Not that anyone ever claimed the suburbs were sexy. That’s not what they’re here for. But sometimes you wonder if the whole concept of suburbia was dreamed up by Puritans to create sexual no-go areas where carnal thoughts are entirely confined behind closed curtains.

When I cross the city border into DC, I can feel something change. There are people walking about. There are people walking about who set you to thinking all the blazing, immoral, indecent, sweat, bump, thrust and grind thoughts that we’re helpless to prevent ,so we might as well mentally enjoy until we’re too old to feel the blood happily flooding out of our skulls (the original brain drain) and into the temporarily festive sluice of arousal. All those thoughts that are blanked out in suburbia until, with the doors double-locked, you can enjoy the furtive unspilling of your hardcore imagination.But flaunting yourself in suburbia only invites ostracism. Those rare human beings wanting to display their feathers will sprint in the dark from front door to car and speed off to the fleshpots of Bethesda and Friendship Heights, lest they be seen as homebreakers on the prowl. An attractive soccer mom is only a theoretical concept, because even if you could see through the dark glass of the SUV as it raced down your road, the cellphone-covered, accusatory sour face would have you reeling with guilt, like a Catholic choirboy caught fondling the rosary while inadvertently picturing the Mother Superior’s lips unpursed.

Not that I’m deluding myself the theoretical soccer mom would be in any respect excited at the sight of me unloading the groceries from the back of my car and shuffling up the garden path while scouring the front yard for Chelsea’s Last Crap (see GST, No. 3). The screeching of brakes, an unwound window, a leering wolf-whistle and a yell of, “Excuuuuse me, but you are one fucking hot house-hubbie!” would no doubt be as unnerving to your average ‘burb-imprisoned stay-at-home dad as a 3pm drive-by shooting. Though it would probably take something a little more special than my skinny ass in a thirty-buck pair of jeans to wrench a soccer mom from her cellphone.

At weekends, however, there are drunken swing and swap parties on every street. True, I’ve yet to be invited, but there must be something (or someone) going down when the lights do likewise at 10. New kids are born, and divorce suits get filed. Adultery must be conducted in secret, ultra-padded underground chambers – the same places where people drink alcohol. That’s all fine, though. Just don’t show up on the surface singing at midnight. In suburbia the golden rule is that all your simmering desires and leashed-in human frailties should be kept in a safe place where they won’t disturb the peace.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 3 - Dog Crap

Just say No! to Chelsea

There are two kinds of dog owners in suburbia. The first kind are the sane and the civilised who have a fenced-in yard, take their dogs for walks on the end of a leash, and who carry around small plastic bags to clean up their pet’s crap. My direct neighbours have a dog like this, a healthy and slim black labrador named Maggie I’ve just had the pleasure of looking after for the weekend while they were away. Just to get it straight that I love dogs, see.

The second kind are the sociopaths who have no fenced-in yard, and who let their dogs roam free to crap wherever they feel like it. After all, it’s a free country for dogs too, right? That would be the dog from two doors down, a spaniel of some sort who’s taken a liking to the smell of our front yard and constantly craps there. Now that the yard smells of nothing but its rear-end waste, she likes it even more.

That this dog is called Chelsea is a further blow. The crap-happy hound started shitting on our grass right around the time Russian billionaire Roman Abramovic took over my least favourite football team in the world, Chelsea FC, and they started winning trophies by virtue of the multi-millions they spent on Europe’s best players. That a dog with such a name would take to dumping on my space just as its namesake football team was buying its way to glory seemed doubly unjust.

I sent a very polite e-mail to its owner saying that I didn’t much enjoy clearing up her dog’s mess, and could she do something about it, please. Much too polite, as it turned out, because she ignored it. She’s employed ‘doing something on Capitol Hill’ (presumably not working on legislation to prosecute violators of environmental laws) and is a very busy woman, it seems. Professional dog walkers come during the day and walk the dog properly. At all other times, the voiding cur has free rein to squat on my turf and let it all out.

What sort of neighbour ignores a polite e-mail? If someone had sent me an e-mail like that, I’d have gone round with flowers, an apology, and an assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. Because, like most people, I’d be kind of embarrassed that my dog was shitting on someone else’s property. I’d see it as my responsibility.

Chelsea still kept calling around to drop off her fecal deposits. Sometimes I’d see her and try to chase her back down the road, but the animal was too dumb to realise I was angry, and would just unapologetically come over to be petted (I’m sure if she could speak she’d have asked me to wipe her arse too). And so I started putting her piles of crap in a plastic bag and leaving them on the neighbour’s doorstep. My other neighbours said I needed to post them through the front door to get the message home, and maybe they were right. One day I got so mad I typed out a firm letter. I threatened, reluctantly, “further action” (though I’d no idea what that would entail). Before I could change my mind I dropped it through the letter box. But the woman who works on Capitol Hill doesn’t work on Capitol Hill for nothing. She ignored it.

The next step was to actually call round. “Could you please clean up the crap your dog’s just left on our verge?” She squinted at me like I was a rogue pedlar. “Verge?” was all she said. Ah damn it, my big moment and I go and choose a British word. “You know, the grass part next to the road.” She cleaned it up, but with bad grace and, again, no apology. It’s amazing how some people have the knack of making you feel like you’re in the wrong for them having a dog that craps in your yard.

Finally, I stooped to her level. Last month I scooped up four piles of Chelsea’s crap in the snow shovel and dumped them right on her front doorstep. It took me over two years to get this far. Our garden’s been clean ever since. I suppose you have to speak the only language these people understand. Crap.

In another positive development, Chelsea FC are not doing so well right now. They’re six points off the lead in the English Premier League, and Abramovic is falling out with the coach Jose Mourinho for having wasted too much of his cash on expensive players who haven’t produced the goods. I like to think I’ve messed with Chelsea’s karma. In fact I think I’ve dumped all over it.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 2 - Neighbourhood Watch

There’s a crime wave sweeping across suburbia. You may not have seen it, or even heard about it. But fear not, Neighbourhood Watch will soon be stamping it out. Yes, North Chevy Chase has declared the War On Crime!

I received an e-mail the other week from a woman I’ve never met, but she lives a few streets away. She’d set up a Neighbourhood Watch on her street and wanted to tell me about some police seminars being offered at the Audubon Society in case I wanted to do the same.

Why in the name of sweet weeping Jesus would I want to do that? Because “my husband and I [oh my God, the Queen of England has moved to my ‘hood] have become concerned about some car thefts, burglaries and robberies in our area,” she wrote. “Some”? How many is “some”? You just know that there’s maybe been one car theft and one burglary in six months, and a robbery two towns away she read about in The Montgomery Gazette.

Crime in suburbia’s not easy. Every car has an alarm, so you’d have to be careless to have one stolen. Likewise every house. We once locked ourselves out and it took a professional locksmith an hour to get us back in. Not that we’ve got much worth nicking. Our TV’s a modern, fat-backed antique at seven years old, and my CD collection is unsaleable - I’m such an elitist that the police would track them down and trace the burglar in hours. (The official police report: “The criminal was apprehended trying to sell a Jackie Leven boxed set to customers at a Burger King in Wheaton. They became suspicious that the cult Scottish soloist’s collected works were some kind of an explosive device and alerted security.”)

True, there was a home invasion (an ‘invasion’ being as few as one or two persons) a couple of months back in the posher part of the neighbourhood, down towards DC. That’s where some of the houses are so big that the invader’s defense will be that he thought he was strolling into the Mormon Temple for some quiet time. If you had enough savvy, you could invade and live in one of the spare rooms there for months, and the only person you’d ever meet would be the cleaning lady.

And an unwelcome ‘invader’ would certainly be cause for a Watch campaign. In suburbia we don’t even like invited guests to be in our house, in case their feet inadvertently brush the carpet pile the wrong way, or their kids leave snot trails on the upholstery. But we put up with them anyway, for a couple of hours a month, if absolutely necessary, provided they send in advance a doctor’s certificate giving them full medical clearance.

But what about all this crime? Until I moved my office to an upstairs room at the back of the house at the end of last year, I spent seven and a half years watching the neighbourhood through a downstairs window from my desk. Believe me, nothing ever happens. There’s no one around to make it happen. If someone walks past the house you jump up. “Christ, what’s that?!” Oh, just a human being. The postgirl, in fact. Don’t worry, she’ll soon be gone.

The only crimes on our street are committed by the dog two doors up that regularly craps on our front lawn (to be the subject of a future ‘Great Suburban Tradition’), and the quarter-witted commuters who speed down our street at 40mph every morning because they can use our neighbourhood to shave 15 seconds off the journey to their doubtless essential jobs.

Other than that, the "concerned" and beady-eyed watchers on patrol are going to be hard pressed to spot much criminal activity around here, unless they stop me late at night walking back from the Ri-Ra bar and demand to see my ID. The chances are that there would be an immediate crime involving aggravated verbal assault.

Great Suburban Traditions No. 1 - The Piano Recital

All suburban kids take piano lessons at some point in their lives. If they don’t, their parents worry they might turn to drugs, alcohol and under-age sex, and all before the age of ten. Mine are no exception. They’ve been taking lessons for two and a half years now, which is fine by me because which one of us wouldn’t like to be able to play the piano? But no one warned me about the recitals, a ritual whereby parents gather in a suburban living-room and politely pretend to be impressed by the below-average musical skills of kids they don’t know.

At their last piano teacher’s (whom we left because she accused one of our daughters of stealing “knick-knacks” from her – quite what a ten-year-old girl would want with the possessions of a pious, austere woman in her 50s is anybody’s guess, but when, at the end of one lesson, she was ordered to empty her pockets, only to show that there was nothing in her pockets to empty, we decided it was time for a less Victorian-era approach to piano tuition), recitals were stiff occasions, with printed programmes, formal dress and the inevitable pot luck obligation, an important part of modern American culture which decrees that people showing up at someone else’s house without a plastic Tupperware container or a foil-covered casserole dish will be mace-sprayed, gagged, bound and dumped in the basement until the occasion is over. Purely for the sake of sparing them the embarrassment of not having contributed, of course.

Things looked more promising with the new piano teacher, and not just because she’s a very kind and friendly woman. Recitals would be informal, she said, with people milling around and chatting while kids played piano in the background, if they felt like it. Did we need to bring anything? Nothing at all. This looked good. Plus, the new teacher is in our neighbourhood, so perhaps we’d bump into one or two people we knew. Though my wife made the kids promise to play as early as possible to make sure we were home in time for ‘Desperate Housewives’.

We didn’t meet anyone we knew, although this could be related to the fact we don’t actually know many people in the neighbourhood. And though it was all very civilised, the problem with the new recital format soon became clear. The White American Suburban Pop (WASP) has yet to learn the basics of making conversation in any situation where there is no flaming barbeque loaded with burning dead animal parts, a six-pack of beer, or a large screen TV about to show some form of ad-blighted sporting spectacle whose result will be forgotten by tomorrow morning (or, even worse, remembered). There was no opportunity for buddy-popping – an all-male version of body-popping that involves a mutual backslap, the clinking of two bottles and a joke about “the wives” talking a lot, but which is not at all gay - and soon I found myself babbling on to reserved, silent types about piano lessons, and pianos and, erm, the time I played baritone euphonium in the school band over thirty years ago. Receiving little response, I then felt as awkward as they looked and shut up too.

So while kids ran around, ate biscuits and played piano, the buzz of conversation among adults, who looked like they were spending their first evening out for a decade, remained absent. Not that the women were much better, but at least they smiled instead of looking like they’d just landed in purgatory and would rather be off hunting wild boar. My daughters played and we indulged them with praise, though thankfully they were as imperfect as all the other kids. No one wants to look like the smug prodigy’s Dad, eh? Although the night could have been a little more memorable if I’d started grunting primevally at the mute WASPs, pointing at my scrotum and shouting, “Look what this produced – a perfect note rendition of ‘The Merry Farmer’! Ha!”

We left in time to be home for ‘Desperate Housewives’. I was astounded to find out we’d only been there for 45 minutes. And we made no new friends. But it's the taking part that counts.