In America

I'm sitting in my new room in Roanoke, Virginia, USA smoking a cigarette and serenely pondering where I am and wondering if where I was wasn't some awesome drawn-out dream or maybe a book that I read that took too long to read. The smoky croon of Cat Power's Chan Marshall makes my eyelids heavy and my thoughts turn to heavier. I hung an American flag by my bed that predates the aquisition and purchase of Hawaii and Alaska giving it 6 rows of eight stars each representing the contintental states of the USA. I browsed through pictures from the photo CD that Anne had made for me of my photos of Paris. I clicked on one randomly and it happened to be the picture I took at the Lourve of the painting Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by French painter Eugène Delacroix, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830. I read excerpts from Leah's blog, a person I knew once who is somewhere lost in paradise. She's far away from the realities we all face as Americans such as getting pissed off at traffic lights, on-line shopping, TV, TiVo, iPods, iPhones, air conditioning, credit card debt and news about the Olympics in a country that supports genocidal dictators.

People have asked me since I've moved back if I'm "settling in." I usually answer with a question..."what do you mean by "settling in"? I mean, I didn't have the culture shock I thought I was going to get, I didn't get depressed or confused or nostalgic like I thought I might. Instead, I've settled into a routine of hanging out. Enjoying doing nothing but hanging out with my new roomates and old friends Brett and Jenny. Mostly, I've been trying to convince myself that this is my life. This is permanent and this isn't a vacation from whatever it was I was doing before. I'm not going to pack everything I can carry with me on a plane or fit in my car and head off to the next adventure guaranteed to last a week or so then back to the routine of working and going back to my apartment in Munich which has felt more permanent and more home-like that anything I've had in the past year or so.

Settling in includes accepting the past and reconciling with the future. Back in the Winter, I was starting to make long-term plans for what I wanted the future to include. I looked up jobs on Roanoke.com, I revised my resume, I even printed out an application for a grad school program at Radford. Nothing has come from any of that preparation. I'm back where I started. No job, no hope for a job, no desire to start working, but eventually the money I made in Germany will run out and I'll be forced to join the working world again. Doing something so I can have money to do other things. It's not so bad, I guess.

Reid and I went for a hike today and as we were driving down the rural route to the top of Catawba Mountain, I paused to look at the small log-cabin businesses, houses proudly sporting the former flag of the Confederate States of America, tractors, subsistence farms in front lawns, the Moose Lodge and mountains encompassed by Kudzu. I thought about how interesting this would all seem to a person from England or Germany or anywhere else in the world. America is truly unique. Looking at European cities and towns everywhere from Starnberg, Germany to Leuven, Brussels, you get the feel that it all fits the same kind of pattern. But what would a Münchener think of Catawba, VA?

These thoughts mostly prevail as I drink can after can of Budweiser and try to smile and wink to the west when I think too much about all of the things I grew to hate about America and Americans after living abroad. Then I hear the sweet twang of a Southern accent and I feel at home. I truly feel now that wherever you are, there are going to be ass-holes and there are going to be people that revive your faith in the potential of humanity. And wherever you are, there's always an escape from it all. Just put on your favorite album and drift away to another time or place. Right now I'm drifting away to the cold streets of Munich with Leah on my arm stopping in to see the Sunday night service at the AltesPeterskirche after drinking a bottle of white wine in the Rathauskeller. There was real magic in those moments. There's also something to be said about listening to old and new records, drinking buds and playing cards with two my favorite people in the world here in the Star City of the South, Roanoke, VA.