Act 6, Scene 1: “Remembrance of Things Past”

TRL emails his old neighbor, the one across the street, the only one in the entire neighborhood with whom he had actually struck up a relationship. And the neighbor reports:

“The new neighbors are nice.”

TRL believes this is code for “boring.”

“They spend a ton of time outside with their kids and seem to have befriended the neighbors next to them with kids.”

TRL knows the next-door neighbors. Boring. So boring plus boring.

“They have a pool table”

No doubt for the basement, which they will call the rec room, decides TRL. The suburban cliché has resettled the house.

“and what seems like a lot of stuff...they had delivery pods in the driveway for a couple weeks.”

Over-materialized. And slow to stuff their house. The equivalent of shoving food down a goose to fatten its liver.

TRL grins in his fourth-floor brownstone home office, the sound of the T’s wheels braking below, and cars’ rubber eating the road. He feels like he just escaped the Turkish prison in Midnight Express.