SUSSEX DRIVE - JULY

A computer engineer serves his family unfrozen tater tots, fish sticks, and peas for a dinner feast, then turns on the evening news to see what horrors have plagued the outside world; meanwhile,
A fifteen-year-old baseball pitcher throws a specialty breaking ball that reaches through a tired, grumpy widow’s French door.
A car mechanic scrubs the inky oil stains from his greasy exhausted hands across the street a half hour later, while
An architect in his air-conditioned home studio touches up a miniature model of the innovative pillar where
A high school graduate will work wonders, years after he incessantly binge drinks from a bottle labeled Smirnoff’s with his friends in celebration of his long-awaited departure from suburbia.
Much later that night an anxious teenage male and a voluptuous young woman would clandestinely share bliss in a bed of heat and perspiration, while
A stressed mother next door reads her spoiled young child a bedtime story in a final attempt to get her into the land of dreams. When that finally happens,
A cardiovascular surgeon’s pager beeps while he is attending a happy hour that he must suddenly leave in order to open a diseased heart;
Several immature boys, just entering puberty, have their eyes glued to the television set in hopes that they might sneak watching a rerun of South Park; and
A short, cubby, pizzafaced sixteen-year-old destroys his sleeping schedule and bursts the arteries in his eyes with his addiction to the newest role playing computer game.
A dying elder’s troubles disappear at the dead end of the street, and a confused newborn is brought to her new home at the road’s entrance.
Since everyone on the dusty, cracked, potholed and important suburban street has their own opportunities to grab or problems to take care of,
Why would they call a place like this unexciting?

- Jayson Kowicek