My sister and I used to watch all of these dubbed family sitcoms while growing up. Back from school, while mamá prepared lunch for us, someone on TV would enthusiastically yell paso a paso over an English speaking announcer. Or, for no apparent reason, another show would overdub its intro with the same English title, but pronounced with a slight accent instead. The way houses and streets on the shows looked like was as foreign as most of the jokes and cultural references characters would spurt with bad lip-sync. Laughter would burst out of nowhere, but they didn't seem to hear it. We didn't quite get yet what a laugh track was, so it didn't make much sense to us. But we would watch anyway, waiting for the cartoons to start. Cartoons did make sense.
The first days since arriving to the US, driving around the suburban expanse, there was something unsettling about it. This wasn't just foreign to me. For all I knew, this suburban aesthetic belonged to the realm of fiction. It was the strangest feeling, getting lost around the seamless sleepy streets with empty houses that looked like hollow facades on a television set. Throughout the years that feeling that crept on the back of my neck started to fade, but never completely. And I don't know if it's because under a crust of reason there's the idea that if this place actually exists, what about all those monsters we learned not to fear when we grew up? But maybe, maybe it's because I've met people born here who hold the same doubt. It's not a doubt, doubt has a shape, it weights. This is more of a cautionary humming coming from a deep, primal cognitive mechanism. The one that tells you a thing doesn't add up before you can do the math. That this is the spot where saber-toothed cats might hunt. The more familiar I am with the territory the less I feel it. Not on the nights biking half drunk half crazy down ghostly roads that in the wee hours look all the same, like a dead block that keeps coming back, looping over. Ride fast enough and you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself taking the next right in the most vivid of dreams.
Still sometimes if I'm walking around a quiet square of the map, as triggered by some kind of sensory queue a muted high-pitched warning will start ringing again and my hairs will raise and my fingertips spark at the turn of the corner, expecting the end of the sprawl and the laugh track.
The first days since arriving to the US, driving around the suburban expanse, there was something unsettling about it. This wasn't just foreign to me. For all I knew, this suburban aesthetic belonged to the realm of fiction. It was the strangest feeling, getting lost around the seamless sleepy streets with empty houses that looked like hollow facades on a television set. Throughout the years that feeling that crept on the back of my neck started to fade, but never completely. And I don't know if it's because under a crust of reason there's the idea that if this place actually exists, what about all those monsters we learned not to fear when we grew up? But maybe, maybe it's because I've met people born here who hold the same doubt. It's not a doubt, doubt has a shape, it weights. This is more of a cautionary humming coming from a deep, primal cognitive mechanism. The one that tells you a thing doesn't add up before you can do the math. That this is the spot where saber-toothed cats might hunt. The more familiar I am with the territory the less I feel it. Not on the nights biking half drunk half crazy down ghostly roads that in the wee hours look all the same, like a dead block that keeps coming back, looping over. Ride fast enough and you’ll catch a glimpse of yourself taking the next right in the most vivid of dreams.
Still sometimes if I'm walking around a quiet square of the map, as triggered by some kind of sensory queue a muted high-pitched warning will start ringing again and my hairs will raise and my fingertips spark at the turn of the corner, expecting the end of the sprawl and the laugh track.