After talking with my wife, I realize that I didn’t do a very good job explaining what it is I am trying to write about here. Well, technically she realized it and told me that she won’t be reading my blog unless I can do a better job.

Let me try again.

What is fascinating to me about my suburban life is not that the suburbs themselves are particularly strange or interesting. I mean, they kind of are, but that isn’t what I am trying to get at. I really want to avoid a detached, ironic take on things, as if I were some cool urban hipster describing the quaint cultural activities of the locals. The fact is, I am a suburbanite through and through. I was born and raised in the ‘burbs, and have lived here all my life. Like a lot of kids from the suburbs, I always thought about doing something different, more exciting, more extreme. A significant amount of my adolescence and young adulthood was filled with dreams of escape and adventure.

To me now, however, the prospect of adventure as I would have defined it when I was 15 pales in comparison with the simple joy of sitting on my couch watching The Backyardigans with The Littledoo. It turns out that I like it here. A lot.

I grow tomatoes in my backyard.

I hang out in my garage with my power tools.

I play fantasy football. And baseball. And NASCAR.

I volunteer in the nursery at my church.

I talk about baseball with my next door neighbor over the back fence.

It is amazing to me how much satisfaction I derive from this stuff. I can’t get enough of it. I am fully bought in, in a way that I have never been at any time in my life. Being a suburban dad works for me in ways I never expected. It is deeply satisfying on a really fundamental level. What I intend to do here is to try and give an account of how cool this all is, and to write about the little (and the big) things that I take such unexpected delight in.