Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

Zombie Apocalypse In Suburban Superstore

April 6, 2010 · Suburban Survival

At-homes, what's your worst, most demoralizing, place and time?

Living Scared To Stay Upbeat

Ought to be fine, right? Pop in after a speed workout at the gym, pick up cheapie pens and envelopes, eyeball interesting stuff. Staples can provide a certain pleasure and uplift, aisles and aisles of hope, in tangible form, that a guy can get his sh*t together. Organize, label, file, never forget anything because it's all down on color-coded sticky notes, voice memos spoken into the cool little digi-recorders in electronics.

Except -- what in the world was I thinking? --  I'm here too late. Nobody in the store but but me and the Big Box Zombies, what staffers turn into during the quietest weekday hours, starting about 10 AM. They drift around, stand like mannequins, jaws slack, eyeballs blank as the dry-erase boards I always want to buy but don't. Elsewhere other kinds of living dead emerge and take over, and here we go, another day in Suburbo Zombieland. Time, Pater, to make a break for home or maybe hole up in the Upper Unsuburb Starbucks, refuge for humans trying to keep contact with the non-zombie world. Please say it's still there. Starbucks is a little scary, owing to the state of seige, but at least nobody will go down alone. In case of mass attack, we fight as one, pouring scalding brew of the day off the roof, smashing heads with notebook computers if the front entrance is breached.

I should stop with the zombie movie thing, right? But it isn't so far-fetched. Out here, in the daytime, things get all sci-fi and creepy. After working spouses leave and you get the kid(s) to school, this toxic hush descends. Life, as known and loved pre-suburb, ceases. If you, like me, sometimes feel iffy about the at-home choice, and you're trying to put in a few hours of whatever you used to do full-time, for sanity if not $$$, this is the Time of Greatest Peril. Gotta watch where you go, lest purpose/positivity/energy get sucked away. All it takes, for me, is to look around and see nobody but retirees killing time, baby-slammed mamas, bitter boutique chicks (Did they think they were going to get rich, meet Mr. Right in beading and eco-chocolate stores?). Just like that, I'm mood dead, wishing to God I could get us out of here, except I can't get us anywhere because I'm the at-home.

Experience teaches to stay out of public places during the Z-hours. It's safe to hook up with somebody for a patently upbeat life-affirming purpose -- like, say, pounding out some miles with my running buddy. I think it's fine, too, to do coffee or lunch at one of the cheerier Unsuburb restaurants with somebody interesting and smily. That's think rather than know, because daytime meets happen so rarely. Unsuburbans say they will 55 times for every occurrence. Coming up on six months now since an at-home mama who lives down the street and I started taking about having a yack over a cup of coffee, pushing a year-and-a-half since my one and only lunch with a family friend from way back, whose house is a ten-minute walk from ours. Minerva and I met her when she was right out of college. She used to condo-sit and take care of our cat! Maybe we'll re-lunch in 2010, but I do not hold my breath.

Don't get the idea that Unsurbans are unfriendly. Okay, they are, but the aforementioned are very warm individuals. And the gender thing, which puts distance between at-home dads and moms, isn't the story either, at least not the whole story. I believe my friends, like me, live wary, cautious, scared to leave their own safe havens and go out into Zombieland. 

At-homes, you know what I'm blogging about. What are your worst places and times, when your mood and self-esteem are in greatest jeopardy? What do you do to boost morale? Avoid like the plague?

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