The laminate counter was sticky, a relic of some spilled soda from 1996, and I was sweating because the air conditioning in the Zoning Office has the same temperament as a 126-year-old furnace. I stood there, clutching a swatch of paint that I thought was vibrant, and faced a clerk whose glasses were perched so far down her nose they seemed to be held up by pure bureaucratic spite. I’d spent 46 minutes waiting for this audience. I had prepared a defense. I had data. But as she pointed to a small, laminated card of ‘Approved Historic Palettes,’ I realized, with a sudden cold spike of dread, that the metal zipper of my jeans had been agape for the last 146 minutes. Every person in this building had seen my checkered boxers. It explains the way the security guard looked at me-not as a threat, but as a tragic, disorganized mammal.

I tried to zip it up discreetly while she lectured me on ‘Colonial Mud.’ That is not the actual name, of course. It’s called something like ‘Foundry Hearth’ or ‘Elder Silt,’ but let’s be honest: it’s the color of a wet dog in a thunderstorm. She told me that the vibrant teal I wanted for my shutters wasn’t ‘historically appropriate’ for a house built in 1896. She spoke about the 19th century as if it were a funeral that never ended. She insisted that the inhabitants of this town, back when they were dodging cholera and riding penny-farthings, only wanted to live in houses the color of exhaustion. It is a lie. A massive, 156-year-old lie that we have collectively decided to believe so we can feel superior to our neighbors.

We have this bizarre collective hallucination that the past was monochromatic. We look at daguerreotypes and faded photographs from 1866 and think, ‘Ah, yes, a world of grey and brown.’ We forget that those cameras couldn’t see the world; they could only see light and shadow. We’ve mistaken the limitations of film for the reality of the human experience. If you actually look at the chemical residue of houses from 1856, you find something startling. People were obsessed with color. They were starved for it. They used arsenic-laced greens that were so bright they’d make a modern rave look like a library. They used lead-heavy yellows that could be seen from 6 miles away. They didn’t live in ‘Oyster Shell’ because they wanted to; they lived in a world where pigments were a form of rebellion against the soot of the industrial revolution.

My friend Riley E., a seed analyst who spends 46 hours a week looking at the husks of heirloom corn under a microscope, once told me that the past was much ‘louder’ than we give it credit for. Riley E. spends their days tracing the DNA of plants that haven’t been grown commercially since 1916. They told me that the flowers of the 19th century were bred for a saturation that would hurt our modern, minimalist eyes. We like things ‘tasteful’ now. We like ‘muted.’ But Riley E. pointed out that in a world without electricity, you wanted your house to scream. You wanted a porch that caught the dying light of the sun and turned it into a 256-candlepower neon sign of social status. To be wealthy in 1876 was to be colorful. To be poor was to be grey. And yet, here I am in the 21st century, being told by a municipal clerk that I must pay $676 in permit fees to paint my home the color of a depressed pebble.

It is an exercise in control. These historic ordinances aren’t about history; they are about the fear of the present. We are terrified that if we let one person paint their house a shade of electric periwinkle, the entire fabric of our suburban reality will unravel. We use the ‘past’ as a cudgel to enforce a middle-class aesthetic of boredom. We pretend we are ‘preserving the character of the neighborhood,’ but the character of most 1886 neighborhoods was chaotic, vibrant, and messy. There were no 16-page manuals on color theory. There was just what you could afford and what wouldn’t wash off in the first 6 weeks of rain.

I find myself wondering when we decided that ‘authentic’ meant ‘dead.’ I stood there at the counter, my fly finally zipped but my dignity still somewhere in the parking lot, and I looked at the clerk. I asked her if she’d ever seen a 136-year-old quilt. They are riots of color. They are psychedelic. They are the work of people who spent 6 days a week working in the dirt and wanted their 1 day of rest to be surrounded by reds that looked like blood and blues that looked like the deep Atlantic. She just blinked at me, her eyes 16 millimeters wide with confusion. She didn’t care about quilts. She cared about the ‘Traditional Woodscape’ guidelines. She cared about the fact that my house is located 256 feet from a historic landmark, which apparently means my shutters have to be the color of a stale cracker.

This is where we lose our way. We’ve created a version of the past that is cleaner, quieter, and much more boring than the one that actually existed. We’ve sanitized the history out of our history. We think that by forcing everyone into a palette of 6 shades of beige, we are somehow honoring the pioneers. We aren’t. We are just making it easier for real estate agents to sell houses to people who are afraid of their own personalities. It’s a design tax on joy. I’ve seen 46 different houses in this zip code that look exactly the same. They have the same ‘historical’ siding, the same ‘historical’ trim, and the same ‘historical’ sense of existential dread.

There is a massive irony in the fact that we have more technology than ever before to create beautiful, lasting, and diverse aesthetics, yet we use it to replicate a version of the 1846 aesthetic that never even existed. We have composite materials that can mimic any texture, finishes that can hold any pigment for 56 years without fading, and engineering that would make a Victorian architect weep with envy. Instead of using that freedom, we build ourselves a cage of ‘Colonial’ rules. If you’re looking for a way out of this trap, you have to look toward systems that value the appearance of craft without the baggage of municipal suffocations. For instance, when you look at the versatility of modern Slat Solution, you realize that you don’t have to choose between durability and a specific vision. You can have the texture that feels permanent and grounded while still demanding the right to exist outside the beige-tinted glasses of the local zoning board. You can actually build something that looks like it belongs in the future, even if it’s standing on a lot from 1926.

I once spent 26 minutes arguing with my neighbor about his fence. He wanted to stain it a color he called ‘Weathered Driftwood.’ I told him it looked like the skin of a dead whale. He told me it was ‘classic.’ We are so obsessed with being classic that we’ve forgotten how to be alive. We are building a world of museums where no one is allowed to touch the exhibits. I think about Riley E. and the seeds. They told me that if you plant an heirloom flower in the wrong soil, it loses its vibrancy. Maybe that’s what happened to us. We’ve planted ourselves in the soil of ‘Historical Guidelines’ and we’ve lost our ability to bloom in any color that isn’t approved by a committee of 6 people who haven’t laughed since 1986.

I remember reading a technical manual from 1866 about paint mixing. It suggested using ‘smalt,’ which is basically ground-up blue glass, to give the exterior of a building a shimmering, crystalline effect. Imagine that! A house that literally sparkles in the sun. If I tried to do that today, I’d be fined 36 times before the first coat was dry. The ‘Historic Preservation’ society would have a collective aneurysm. They’d claim it was ‘distracting’ or ‘not in keeping with the local vernacular.’ But the local vernacular of 1866 was literally ‘look at my house made of sparkling blue glass.’ We have traded the spectacular for the acceptable. We have traded the 176 different shades of the actual 19th century for the 6 shades of the 21st-century’s imagination of it.

I eventually left the Zoning Office with my ‘Colonial Mud’ approval form tucked under my arm. I felt defeated. I felt like a man who had been told that my life must be lived in 16 shades of sadness. As I walked to my car, I saw a 6-year-old girl drawing on the sidewalk with chalk. She was using a pink so bright it looked like it was powered by a battery. She was drawing a sun that was neon orange and a tree that was purple. She didn’t know about 1856 or the ‘Foundry Hearth’ palette. She just knew that she had a handful of color and a blank grey canvas. She was the most historically accurate person in the entire 6-block radius, because she was expressing the human need to leave a mark that is more interesting than the ground it sits on.

We need to stop pretending that our ancestors were boring. They were people who lived through 6 wars and 26 plagues and still found the time to carve elaborate gargoyles into their rafters. They didn’t want ‘neutral.’ They wanted legacy. They wanted a story. If we really want to honor them, we should stop painting our houses ‘Oyster’ and start painting them like we mean it. We should embrace the fact that we have the freedom to choose, a freedom that cost 46 generations of humans their blood and sweat to secure. Don’t let a clerk with a sticky counter and a 66-page rulebook tell you that you don’t have the right to a teal shutter.

I drove home and looked at my house. It was 116 years old. It looked tired. It looked like it was waiting for someone to give it a reason to stand out again. I looked at the ‘Colonial Mud’ swatch and then I looked at the trash can. I threw the swatch away. Maybe I’ll get fined. Maybe I’ll have to spend 266 hours in court defending my right to a ‘historically inaccurate’ shade of sunset. But at least I won’t be living in a lie. At least when people walk by, they’ll see something that looks like it was chosen by a human being, not a committee. And hopefully, this time, I’ll remember to check my fly before I leave the house.