The Long Way Home

I become more eremitic--or worse.  Of course, that makes me a good traveller.  But it does little for my day to day life.  I like the sound of foreign voices speaking languages that I cannot follow.  I like being places where there is no social media to teach people more about being stupid in the same way.

I enjoy people in the abstract.  I am not a misanthrope, exactly.  I don't wish all that many people really bad things.

But the list may be growing.

I want two contrary things: more time in the weird zone and more time "tending my garden."

I almost said that I was "onanistic," but I double-checked the word.  I will use it in a later post, of course.

I have more trips coming up.  Ili and I pledged to travel somewhere every month, even if it is only a longish weekend.  But I want some doozies.  The world is becoming too homogenized not to see what's left of the "otherness" that still exists.  I am, without doubt, a form of Orientalist.  I want to see what is "strange" and "exotic."  And I want to come home to "normalcy" for awhile, to the place where I have catalogued all the experiences and have placed them in the "museum."  There I want peace and quiet and music and books and walls full of art and a friend or two.

And I want good restaurants.  Those, I am afraid, are most scarce where I live.  A good restaurant is about food, of course, but there is so much more to it than that.  I make good food.  A good restaurant is an experience.

I have said everything here except what I want to say.  I continue to edit and censor myself knowing that I will alienate what is left of the small group I know.  I want to tell you about what shit I don't care about any more that becomes more and more of people's conversations.  Everyone, it seems, wants to rush to the middle no matter how conservative or liberal they are.  They want to pile up on the common denominators.  They want to tell you about their experiencing of the most average of things and then tell you how special it is/was.  I feel I'm living in a weird through-the-looking-glass version of the 1950s again.

"Make America Average Once More."

Only the poor can tell you what the heat and the cold and the snow and the rain are about.  You must be stripped bare to come back again.  Sometimes you just have to take the long way home.

I took the first picture.  The rest are Ili's.