coming back to america

ever since i left my high school, edward c. reed high school in sparks, nevada and moved to indonesia to finish 11th and 12th grades at jakarta international school, i have been avoiding america as best i can. i went to a small sequestered liberal-arts college in rural minnesota, a bastion of academia, liberalism, and suffocating, soft-sell tolerance with a monastic bent. i studied in paris and india during my time there, spending summers in nova scotia and winter holidays back in jakarta. from there i moved to new york city, my first apartment after college with a friend in harlem, a massive 2-bedroom for $1400 a month with an insane russian landlord who was a scientologist and liked to fiddle with his rottweiler's asshole when we went down to pay the rent.

i fell in love with a french guy 12 years my senior and did everything i could to move to france to be with him, mildly alienating my family and crawling back to new york a few months later with 2 suitcases, $40 and a place to stay. I stayed in NYC another 4 years. Then I came here. New Orleans. the loveable and hilarious and sincere and volatile third world of america.

we left sparks, nevada 13 years ago. i never missed our subdivision with the modular homes ( i now reel at the smell of the plastic and chemicals used for these houses, the sick, sad process and roads from which they came), the bored rebellion of small-town coffee shops and smoking secretly. the boredom, the admiration of greater horizons that seemed so un-attainable. the kind of low-brow humor, the tenuous social networks that evolve and thrive in these little towns. the angers, the relationships. the embarassment. so long! wanted to be somewhere bigger than that. where people thought bigger and weren't really afraid of it.

and then there was texas.

we got back from an extended weekend in texas with V. landed in houston (horrible place) and then a 2 day trip to austin. austin is nice enough. pretty. it has the fresh water springs and some hills. there are plants and set-backs for the houses... texan architecture and then they embrace some amazing modernism as well. dive bars and haute restaurants. nice. its like boulder meets cowboy. or something.

texas represents america to me.. it is big, it is bored, it is insecure and it is inward looking. americans have no sense of sex appeal, of the secret or of the alluded-to. they want to be bashed over the head with some big tits and then relax with a violent movie. the food portions in texas are huge. the cars are huge. the 80-foot elevated freeways are huge. nobody walks, nobody has a center of town. the pervasive feeling of it being your first night out as a 16 year old is everywhere in social spaces like bars and restaurants. even for adults who think it brave to talk to a stranger and braver to reveal themselves.

our first night in austin we went to 6th street, kind of the bars and restaurant tourist strip. it was full of overly-made up 21 year olds and fat tourists and a few goth/metal types. fine. the scary part was that i think we saw at least 6 separate bachelorette parties that night. like the kind with the matching outfits and blown-up-condoms tied to their faux-one-night-only veils. i thought the condoms were funny.. were they saying hello or good bye to the condoms? they only have a matter of a couple of years before they are ploy-blend shorts wearing heifers. (sorry) so make the most out of that ass before it is twice the size.

it is amrika (thanks Rushdie). the foreign land of consumption where the cultural message is eat fast and big, fuck, but not too much, or at all because if you believe in sex you are going to hell, mega-churches (yes, that is a word), cars, guns, hair bleach, hair spray, gasoline, food, malls, freeway exits, jeans and elastic. bad fats, trans-fats, beef and bread. air-conditioning. it's america. they believe in it, why don't i?