👁️ Sidewalk Socialism
When did you first realize that you can't get there from here?
For most of my childhood and adolescence, I lived in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas.
Specifically, in Southwest Forth Worth. It was in many ways the kind of idyllic suburban upbringing now so frequently eulogized by the far right. We had a nice house with a yard. I had my own bedroom and lived within walking distance of my middle and high schools.
Our neighborhood was what would now be called “inner-ring suburban.” We were still basically in the city, but that particular kind of southern and southwestern “city” built around cars, so everything was still far apart. The intimacy of our little suburban spoke was nested in a larger network of four-lane roads, surface highways, and soaring interstates, even back then constantly packed with fast-moving traffic.
This was a problem for a very curious and energetic pre-teen like me. There were bookstores and comic shops and all-ages music events and, my god, university hosted public lectures happening just down the road.
That road, unfortunately, was Hulen Street.
The quiet two-lane street at the bottom of our hill let out onto Hulen. There was no traffic light at our intersection, just a stop sign, and Hulen was four lanes across, and busy. So you basically had to turn right with the flow of traffic.
Of course, my problems were bigger. I would guess I was 14 when I finally couldn’t take it anymore and decided to brave Hulen on my bicycle - a luckily rugged, stiff-framed mountain bike that I loved. More than likely, my goal was to ride my bike to a Half Price Books, a used bookstore and enduring human achievement that has probably in a very real sense been the most important cultural institution in North Texas for going on four decades.
One of their many locations was about three miles away from our house (I still go there nearly every time I visit town). I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could ride my bike down Hulen in actual traffic, but I needed to get to that damn store. So I worked up the nerve, after several weeks of careful planning, and rode my mountain bike down the hill to our stop sign.
Then I rode along the lawns abutting Hulen, in the grass, towards the bookstore. You see, there was no sidewalk along Hulen, which I’m suddenly realizing is the crux of this story, the minor yet all-revealing detail.
Readers: For a few years now, in addition to exclusive deep dives into Mormon serial killers and Chinese crypto grifters, I’ve given my premium supporters sneak previews of larger works. They’ve gotten early glimpses of my current Tornado Cash documentary project, and before that draft chapters of my Sam Bankman-Fried book.
This weekend’s premium installment is something just a little bit different - a first draft of a more personal one-off essay, reflecting on how my childhood has shaped my politics. It’s a particularly personal story, so as with the early drafts of more journalistic work, you’ll excuse my keeping it inside the circle.
