For those of us who were raised in circa-1980s South Floridian suburbs, terms like ‘outdoor market’ and ‘riot’ were first met in air-conditioned portable classrooms in between lunch periods and awkward square dancing sessions, which now, upon reflection, seem aptly Reaganian. The ‘outdoors,’ first of all, were intolerable places we made all efforts to avoid, skirting through fluorescent-lighted hallways and bays, following the whir of ceiling fans, living as if this planet were really not suitable for human life. I was six years old before I was removed from the incubator of my youth and granted opportunity to experience out-of-doors spaces. Thereafter, I endeavored to remain in the machines of convenience that would provide respite from the inhospitable swamp, for whenever faced with the prospects of having to weather the tropical clime, I would be struck by an insurmountable bout of torpitude, which would render me unable to do much of anything. One might think that such an ‘interior’ existence might provide precisely the conditions that would foster a healthy and critical life of the mind: while carried by one car to the next, from one Publix to another, what else does one have to dwell on? Is this not the ideal our 19th- and 20th-century revolutionaries had fought for? That one day the machine would liberate us from the factory and the field, and all would work towards a social utopia? But this comfortable, sheltered life inspired quite the opposite: a proclivity towards intellectual and political torpor grew in me.