Readjustment
The signs rush past at 60mph, instead of 80kph, and are written in an English dialect with which I’m quite familiar. It’s late evening, and it’s 93 degrees, and the readout is presented in Fahrenheit. Before I got in the car I had used the bathroom at the airport, where it dawned on me that I could flush my toilet paper again.
I’m already quite frustrated having returned to the US. Not by being able to flush my toilet paper: I think that’s one of the few things America gets right (but we don’t have any bidets so what’s the point in pooping anyway), rather because I feel like I belong here and understand it here. For some reason that scares me. For some reason, I’m far more comfortable as the alien, the outsider, the one who, as I believe I’ve mentioned before in this series, has an excuse not to fit in.
But it’s not just trauma!
If you’ll permit my flagrant abuse of the t-word, that is. It’s not just whatever social maladaptations I suffer that cause my fondness for the foreign. I miss seeing words I don’t understand, trying to decipher them from context and morphological processes and sometimes even just phonetically where the alphabet was of a non-Phoenician origin. Every day was a learning experience. I’ve been back less than 24 hours but I don’t anticipate this country challenging me in the same way. Perhaps I have to seek out my learning opportunities now — perhaps back in the states I finally have time to study all the things I felt too tired to on the road. Maybe now I can take closer looks at people again and further develop my understanding of humanity. But really I just want to look out my bus window and see unintelligible scribbles.
It’s all Greek to me!
— Me, trying to be witty in Greece
And perhaps a more depressing realization is that I’ve returned to the land of cars. Public transit in the US is notably abysmal. There are small pockets of the country where citizens have managed to get it working quite well, but on a whole, this is a car-oriented nation. There are very few national parks, for example, that I will be able to reach by any form of mass transit, whereas in the parts of Asia and Europe I visited, the inability to access a park from a nearby city would have left me flabbergasted, not resigned. It’s been a while since I thought of it but returning here reminds me of some of the angst rereading Abbey’s thoughts on our country late last year gave me.
Everything is fucking broken
I don’t want to paint non-American countries as shining symbols of efficiency, as even the Japan’s well-earned sheen can be smeared spending enough time there, but there was a moment before reaching immigration here in the US where, in the bathroom none of the soap dispensers, paper towel dispensers or hand driers worked, and someone else, returning from Jamaica I believe, said something to the effect of “welcome home, everything’s broken!” Why the fuck is everything broken in this country? How are we falling down on the job of providing roads that don’t damage vehicles and means of properly washing hands to our citizens and visitors on a daily basis? Why is the food so shit here compared to Europe and Asia?
Can anyone fix our country?
Deprogramming
The readjustment process is essentially a phase of deprogramming. I need to get myself out of the habits and mindset in which I once was: I have to be on greater guard against crime and violence in the US than I had to be in Asia, for example. Something I noticed this first morning back in the states is that I don’t have to worry so much about “what am I gonna do today?” The time here is not limited by law as it was elsewhere. There’s not so much an impulse to rush around and see it all. These last months were much slower due to previously-noted health reasons anyway, but I still have this sense of urgency in my gut that my time here is limited. It is, in a metaphysical sense, limited, but fleeing death is no more sensible a way to live than is presuming immortality.
“We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you, in putting too high a value on time”
— Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
It is true, however, that I have about seven more weeks of travel ahead of me, bouncing around the country visiting family and friends, before I settle back down into a home, a rhythm, a coffin, so perhaps I needn’t worry too much about deprogramming just yet. I’ll probably just reacclimatize to America the same way I acclimatized to every country I visited. Stumbling through stores and restaurants and locals' lives like a walrus in a china shop.
But what a journey, right?
Flying is one of the worst things a person can do for the environment, supposedly. Using a website I found on google, I discovered my flight from LAX to NRT alone was 2.8 times the amount of CO2 emissions “that can be generated by a person in a single year […] in order to stop climate change.” I had three flights of similar distance and about two dozen shorter flights (in that time/remaining). Someone remarked it was “quite a journey,” implying I saw so much. But as I updated my map of countries visited, I noticed that, even ignoring how little of each individual country I saw, the countries I did see covered such a minor amount of the globe.
When you learn more, you discover there’s a great deal you don’t know. The more I’ve seen on this trip, the more I now understand I haven’t seen. The world has gotten so big. Or maybe, rather, my appetite has gotten so big. Maybe instead of this trip helping me to figure out what I want, repairing a perceived deficiency, it has instead expanded the list of things I want, the places I want to see, cursing me with an actual deficiency, or at least a self-evaluated one.
This is probably the most important part of the deprogramming ahead. Suffering comes from desire, and I desire so much now. I want to see so much, and I want to reshape my own nation with the power of no mere dictator, but a god. This is not a good mindset for a human. It will only bring me pain. Now that I’m on the verge of reestablishing a routine and roots, it’s time to do some work on myself.
