Other Americans

Feeling kinda springy and raw. This all came out at once, like an egg. It’s also not very orderly and has some lumps. Like a scrambled egg. This is only about half of it so may be a two- or more parter.
-JA

I met an American the other day, talking quickly and about all manners of things, talking over people but friendly and laughing and drawing his listeners in, and when he mentioned he’d left some things in Texas I maneuvered closer, unknowingly cutting off a young English woman in his broadcast zone.

The talker was from Brooklyn, had been everywhere, wanted to know where I was from and where I’d gone to college. He was a big Formula One fan and he had a theory that people should stop worrying and start marketing more. It was a crazy kind of generous capitalism he was preaching and even if it didn’t make sense in the current state of things it was interesting and ultimately, I felt, harmless. We discussed everything from brisket to border crossing and when I suggested we exchange information he grew cagey, providing only an odd email address I suspect contained deliberate typos. It was the best conversation I’ve had in months.

I also spoke with a younger guy with dual citizenship who plays for the local minor league hockey team in Laval. He went to Yale and he’s studying history. Extremely bright and has a lot of stuff figured out. He asked me about my experience with AI and that always opens up a valve in me. I hate that I had to ask if he was a Trumper before we continued but it’s a necessary screening question at this point.

I’ve been lucky here so far in that I haven’t run into any examples of the types of Americans I hate, the ones who either don’t know what they’ve done, don’t care, or are gleeful about spreading their insecurity and trauma brain to everyone else.

In zombie attack stories like the Last of Us I used to be bored by the premise. Who cares about a villain with no agency? A bunch of slow-moving hungry diseased versions of people you used to know, that’s creepy, but is it scary? Well now I know it is. It’s not just the stupidity and the hollowing out of gray matter that makes them frightening, it’s the innate need to spread their condition to the rest of us. Whether it’s scraping the fluoride off each other’s teeth or trying to prove that gravity is an illusion or that medical science is less valid than astrology, the fantasy only has currency if you can find others to share it with.

And so those of us who are concerned about the way things have gone, are going, will go, we speak in whispers, aware of our tone. Careful of who we reveal what to. Conspiratorial.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I think I just need to express myself in the context of community. I haven’t felt at home anywhere for a very long time in the U.S., and I'm accustomed to that. But out here, in the rest of the world, while the seas churn there and everything gets muddier every day and the fascists' plans roll out with, sorry, not as much resistance as we need, I feel more comfortable in my anonymity than I ever have.

I fantasize about integrating into one of these neighborhoods, renting a top floor apartment in a triplex on a side street, having coffee on a terrasse in the mornings and bantering with that one neighbor who looks like he never goes to bed, then going inside to write about it. This will probably not happen. I will probably need to leave in a few months and where I go after that I don’t know. Even hopping over the border to Vermont seems risky, as the definitions of citizenship narrow and the protocols for harassing and deporting any of us get looser by the day.

It's not even clear what there is to win by going back. And you can't appeal to the zombie leaders to have compassion or to take responsibility.

(to be continued)