Entries Tagged 'DigitalNomad' ↓

On Dec. 21, I described leaving the United States for México in my blog post “Memo from Mexico City.” I’ve since been living in the country’s southernmost and poorest state, Chiapas, intending to write a “Memo from San Cristóbal de las Casas.” That hasn’t materialized, because life is busy.

Now, though, I’ll dash off this quick, second post from Mexico City—also known as CDMX. By way of Viva Aerobús, I arrived back in the capital roughly a week ago to take care of crucial stuff, such as buying fresh New Balance kicks for running and picking up some PlayStation Castlevania games. Before I knew it, I was discussing education with teachers occupying the downtown Zócalo and watching black bloc throw rocks into government windows. As hard as I try to keep my nose in science fiction novels and my ears tuned to temperate podcasts about long-dead philosophers, such encounters seem to keep happening to me—as if I’m pursuing a slightly personalizing variant of a preternatural path that other Douglases have already snaked through, creating our mysterious, ongoingly synthesized web of time. You know how it is!

I’ll try to limit my metaphysical musings—the U.S. State Department would never have me author memo-cables—and focus on impersonally important events.

Educating everyone

Since mid-May, teachers from around México, primarily as part of CNTE—the National Coordinator of Education Workers, a powerful, protest-heavy offshoot of the country’s largest education union—have converged on the Zócalo plaza where the presidential National Palace is, and upon surrounding streets, occupying with tents and demanding the repeal of the 2007 ISSSTE law for the sake of sustainable pensions and wages. Reportedly this protest, which shut down several terminals of CDMX’s main international airport on May 23, coincides with teacher strikes in Panama, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil.

This past weekend, some—Section 22 of CNTE among them—wanted to stop the occupation because of the authorities’ tepid offers, but the rank and file, angry at trade union leadership for murmuring of retreating, surged despite heavy rain, seizing the stage at the union leaders’ meeting-place. On June 2, CNTE temporarily shut down the San Ysidro border crossing from San Diego to Tijuana, aiming to pressure the Mexican government. Now, negotiation with the federal authorities is supposed to continue at least into the late morning of June 4, perhaps later. The former Education Secretary of Chiapas, Javier Álvarez Ramos, once a teacher himself, told La Jornada on June 3 that CNTE must propose various possible solutions, and that President Claudia Sheinbaum needs to realize the vast majority of Mexican teachers are more than 40 years old, so the pension issues—such as age of eligibility—must be addressed.

In my view, Sheinbaum deserves admiration as Mexico’s first woman president, first scientist president, for her firebrand way of repeatedly standing up to Trump (albeit not on every item), and for her support of Mexican migrants and refugees crossing the northern border. On the other hand, however, her government continues to discriminate against migrants and refugees crossing Mexico’s southern border—such as those homeless in Tapachula—she resists raising taxes on the rich, and she’s made some other dubious decisions.

Sheinbuam, who enjoys a remarkable 80+% approval rating, has recently spoken in support of teachers in the abstract, but says budgetary constraints prevent her government from accepting CNTE’s demands. If you want to follow how the protests play out, I recommend tracking the CNTE tag on La Jornada‘s website.

I understand the teachers’ emphasis on specific financial figures, because people have to start somewhere, but sometimes, not unlike the Duffy character in James Joyce’s 1914 short story “A Painful Case,” I worry the Marxist money-über-alles stuff just has activists chasing their own tails across the centuries as wage-increases are met with price-hikes and the insistence that nothing but money can be the root of all evil continues to cloud people from seeing the social-emotional human relationships underneath the money, underneath the way our particular civilization (not the only one humanity has had!) happens to monetize, to gamify outgrouping, and obsess over moneytokens unceasingly (when was the last time you had a conversation about shame or courage to the same length people discuss property values, interest rates, or inflation? What if depictions of defense mechanisms were on the front of the business section instead of the NASDAQ? Okay, the stock market is a defen— Or to put it crudely: do lonely guys chase skirt to improve their skill at making money, or do they make more money to better chase skirt? So what’s fundamental here, pal, which is steering: pesos and pennies—or love and hate?)

But with all that background in place, what was the vibe on the ground at the Zócalo, when I went there on June 1?

The CNTE teachers seemed possessed of an almost otherworldly cheerfulness, beyond the overall increase in happiness that Mexicans have versus USians in general regardless of time, place, or protest. It reminded me of Occupy Dallas, when I brought water there nearly a decade and a half ago, or when I checked out Zuccotti Park wi—. The bullshit of extreme endosocial zero-sum seething anger and guilt and terror that dissociated populations don’t know surrounds and interpenetrates and saps them of motivation constantly, making them blame themselves and their genes instead of their tyrants large and small, was just gone, like poof, gone. Leaving smiles and jokes and abrazos (hugs). It was the another world is possible before the riot police show up.

One woman I spoke with, an elementary schoolteacher named Guadalupe, told me the photos of her schoolkids encourage her to stay at the encampment, to keep enduring the hard parts of it, because if she’s not paid enough to survive, how can she continue to nurture them? As in the image that opens this blog post, Guadalupe showed me, on her phone, pictures of her smiling kids, who looked like a Mexicanized version of the midde-schoolers I used to substitute-teach in Fort Worth and Seattle, or perhaps you could say my students were a USian-ized version of them. It really made me miss “my” middle and high school children—I still remember many of their names, years later, and wonder how they’re doing, where they are in the big web of time tracing around different paths, pulling this, repelling that, maybe finding strength as a heroic vampire-killer in some silly video game. Did any leave the United States, and if so, under what conditions—ICE? Somehow, of everything in this post section—the pensions this, the president that, the money over here, the taxes over there—the most important moment of visiting that tent was just sharing stories with Guadalupe in my stilted Spanish about my schoolkids and hearing about hers. That’s why we were both there, ultimately. Effort for humans and the future shouldn’t feel like a chore or duty, but fun, exciting, discovery (exosocial).

I talked to the teachers under the tent as best I could about how in the United States, the politicians and school administrators lie, claiming to the major media that at the poor campuses, respiratory pandemics are no worry, just open the windows, use the pink puffy soap from the bathroom dispensers. But the windows have been stuck shut for decades and the dispensers are soapless and smashed, little plastic shards all over the sticky, scuffed linoleum (or vinyl asbestos tile) floors. They said it was the same deal in places like Chiapas, Oaxaca.

An elementary school teacher named Ulises told me, when I asked what teacher unions in the United States need to know about the CNTE protests, that we have the same enemy: the multinational corporations, the supranational oligarchy. I asked Guadalupe if there was ever any issue with software copy-protection preventing students from accessing educational materials, the United States intellectual property regime. She said not with the pen-and-paper resources, which are easy to photocopy ad libetum, but occasionally, computer software presents her classes with various paywall hurdles. (My Spanish wasn’t good enough to get any further details.)

There was a younger teacher there at the same tent who knew she was the most attractive, as did everyone else, at least from the impersonal eye that no one really has (if you truly love someone, they’re the most beautiful regardless). She put down her phone and asked about me, learned that I’m a substitute teacher and a freelance writer/journalist, and so on.

Half-jokingly, she said I should return that evening with alcohol, and other flirty things that I couldn’t translate—except by watching the body language of the others and sensing the blushing of my warming cheeks. When she found out that I plan to stay in México for years, she held out her hand, fingers down, in a pretend offer of marriage.

Apparently the weeks of tent-life—the grungy, earthy nature of occupying—had turned the teachers’ humor rather ribald, for she then said, spacing out both her hands as if measuring a large fish, “I like big ones, though, you have to have a big one.”

So I reached into my slacks and whipped out—

—my phone. “Por cierto (Indeed),” I said, gesturing at the huge Samsung in its hardshell case, “¡es muy grande!“

That wit, which needs no translation, won me applause. I didn’t go back that night with wine, however, although perhaps I should have. Well, in some other multiverse. In this one, I had a major article (extra material) under consideration at Rolling Stone to edit.

First things first.

Factional feminists?

And now, a confusing story with, maybe, a simple solution. Or not.

Certain vendor areas in Alameda Central—a huge public park in downtown CDMX, said to be the oldest public park in the Americas—are reportedly disputed, and have been for a month or so, maybe longer.

The dispute was—probably still is—between two groups of artisans selling their merchandise. One is referred to as Mazahua indigenous women; the other, feminists. Already it’s a mess. The indigenous women can’t be feminists, and none in the feminist squad are of the Mazahua?

Meanwhile, there’s a third factor: the Mexican authorities. A May 31 La Jornada article, the only news item I’ve come across about this dispute so far, says that according to the Mazahua spokesperson Elizabeth, the Mexican government is establishing a ‘green zone’ to legalize heavy marijuana-smoking in the disputed area. Heavy marijuana-smoking that’s already taking place. And already taking place, too, are worse things, according to the article: too much alcohol, urination and defecation, and so on. I’ve heard from more than one person that there’s definitely a lot of ongoing drugs & whatnot in the area, but I don’t know the extent of any associated problems or who might be causing them. Apparently the indigenous vendors have asked for a crackdown, received nothing in response, and now have to police the area themselves.

Per La Jornada, the feminist vendors were upset because the Mazahua vendors had taken over the disputed turf, preventing them from selling their merchandise—moreover, according to local onlookers and a woman apparently sympathetic to the feminist vendors with whom I briefly and unskillfully spoke in Spanish during the May 30 clash, the Mazahua artisans stole some of the feminist vendors’ stuff, and/or got rid of it, trashed it.

This video I took on May 30 briefly shows a tussle over a banner (or item of clothing?) between two women, apparently from the two separate groups. It seems another woman—I’m guessing from the ‘feminist group’ a.k.a. ‘anarchist group’—successfully de-escalated the tussle. If I’m seeing that correctly, it’s an interesting, optimistic occurence not mentioned in the La Jornada article, which quotes Elizabeth as saying the “feminists call us Indians.” (I haven’t been able to discern what the woman with the bullhorn is saying in the below video.)

Making matters worse, the feminist merchants, according to La Jornada, got no help from the authorities regarding the alleged Mazahua vigilante policing/stealing, so they decided to make their ire known dramatically. During the May 30 show of force, they threw rocks at the Post Office, breaking something like seven windows, and added graffiti to its walls: Sheinbaum is not a feminist; Femicidal state; Down with the patriarchy; Street vendor mafia!

Why target the Post Office? Because it’s there, at/near the disputed turf, and it’s part of the Mexican government. Some onlooker locals—male—expressed dissatisfaction with this to me: the post office is for all the people, they reasoned, and while femicides, they acknowledged, are a serious problem, what does the Mexican snailmail have to do with femicides? One woman onlooker local was less polite in her slur-packed description of the feminist vendor group… Another likely reason for targeting the Post Office is the intersection in front of it is quite busy, meaning taking it over helps ensure publicity.

Publicity? The messaging, unfortunately, wasn’t clear, and it wasn’t just my subpar Spanish—some onlooker locals expressed confusion as well. What does alleged theft by the Mazahua group have to do with femicides? Of course, the graffiti was presumably meant to diss the Mexican government in general, including their (as everywhere) lack of sufficient prosecution of masculinist murderers/rapists. Not so much a diss to the rival Mazahua group in particular.

This May 30 video of mine shows rocks being shipped express to the Post Office windows by the feminist group. (I still don’t know what’s being said through the bullhorn in this video, either.)

Some floated theories as to other interests that might be behind the unpopular vandalism/architectural remixing. One Mexican local I spoke with suggested that perhaps right-wing saboteurs are infiltrating feminist groups, inciting actions that will damage their credibility among the majority. Someone else suggested that could be a machination to make Sheinbaum look weak or bad: See? The homegrown anarcha-feminists don’t think Sheinbaum’s any feminist of theirs, which means the president has no real mandate to speak for women.

Personally, while I think such speculations shouldn’t be discounted, I also don’t think anyone should just automatically rule out the possibility that the dispute is exactly what it appears to be: a turf war between two rival local groups. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

That said, the drone that suddenly showed up overhead was pretty spooky—I managed to film it for a few seconds, embedded below—but is that the flying device of an evil moustache-twirler orchestrating world events from within what looks like a mere taco truck, or just an overpriced sky-gizmo piloted by some bored tourist? Maybe it’s Stratfor’s, the creepy Austin-based private spy firm (now part of RANE) that I investigated and published articles about roughly a decade or so ago, including its myriad advising of multinationals, such as the Dell computer company, on how to do biz in México. Who knows?

Speculation can be important (when labelled as such), but it’s also cheap and easy—anybody can kick their feet up, spitball a few pet theories as to who the real moustache-twirlers must be, and call it a day. If I get a chance this week to talk further with either set of vendors, both of whom are out selling pretty much daily, I’ll update this post.

What’s my simple solution? Maybe if men stopped rapes and femicides, and stopped tolerating loose support or ‘joking’ support of such from their male acquaintances, or remediated their ignorance about such crimes, we wouldn’t have to decipher what this May 30 clash in front of Belles Artes was all about.

Except, maybe the graffiti on the Post Office would then just say something else—the two groups seem to have other things to fight over, after all. And are the over-the-top drugs mucking up public spaces really necessary? I don’t mean to be a prude, and I’m mostly in favor of legalizing your whatever, but why not tone it down? What’s the harm in being healthy? I know it’s a lot of work, but your best weapon in life/resistance is a strong mind.

Maybe I shouldn’t be expressing any opinions at all, and just observing. Witnessing the whole affair put me in mind of Star Trek. Those Voyager episodes with the ill-defined worldbuilding, for one thing: two stereotyped groups clashing on the planet of the week, no granular details required about their backstories. But besides that, the Prime Directive. You know, the rarely followed rule (in Star Trek or real life) that outsiders shouldn’t interfere with the internal affairs of other societies. I think witnessing—like some Ursula K. Le Guin anthropologist protagonist—is fair enough, and I don’t have any nuanced position on the Prime Directive, especially since as so many science fiction stories demonstrate that “mere” witnessing can, a la quantum mechanics, turn real quick into affecting “somebody else’s” situation. Well, I have nothing wise to say here, so moving right along.

There were a number of humorous juxtapositions that I’ll conclude this with. You know, if this were a srs bizness journadoodle article, like say about the Reorganizing Government Act of 2025, there wouldn’t be a bunch of meandering and certainly no out-of-nowhere pic of Captain Janeway from Voyager (nobody cares about Chakotay). But why can’t this just be a blog post? For me, a huge part of witnessing the May 30 scuffle was the bizarre juxtapositions, the web of life tangling up in ways that didn’t straightforwardly sell anybody’s metaphysics, except perhaps that of the surrealists.

For instance, bicyclists—some of them Rappi or DiDiFood deliverers—rode carefree around the feminist merchants’ blockades as pedestrians took quick detours and kept going, which La Jornada described with only some truth as walkers not being allowed to cross the intersection whatsoever. Some braver ones did. Anyway, it seemed surreal, as if for many passersby, the fire, the rock-throwings, the windows loudly crackling apart, the blaring bullhorns, none of that existed: it was just any other day in the capital.

To be clear, I wasn’t there the whole time, so La Jornada may have seen things I didn’t. For instance, La Jornada wrote that ambulances took some half-dozen people to the hospital, which may have been true—I didn’t see it, but I left before the scuffle ended.

Speaking of, that was another weird juxtaposition, the voyeurism: there was quite a semi-bored crowd circled around watching this whole affair like it was a baseball game or something. They’d occasionally walk a few feet over to the nearest food truck and buy some tacos, like a baseball fan grabbing a hot dog from concessions. Then they’d resume watching, perhaps commenting to their buddy next to them about how the “score” between the two groups was progressing. Rome Coliseum vibes.

Another peculiar juxtaposition. CDMX, like San Cristóbal de las Casas, has trash cans spaced perodically on sidewalks, a nice convenience indeed. While I was taking photos and videos of the feminist group’s show of force, I had an empty Electrolit—a popular drink here akin to Gatorade—in one hand. As I stood by a sidewalk covered in shattered glass, I proceeded to peer around, politely looking for a polite trash can to gently deposit the bottle into. Shards of glass everywhere, fires burning, people yelling, and still: Perdón, ¿dónde está la basura, por favor? (Excuse me, where’s the trash, please?)

Lastly, there was one particular Mexican food truck vendor dude there with a woman who seemed his wife. Asked about the scuffle, he told me this kind of thing—why not paint with a broad brush sometimes?—has been going on for years. He approached his discourse on the topic as though he were a meteorologist describing transient yet recurring weather phenomena. The feminists are mad about the Mazahua; the Mazahua are mad about the feminists; round and round; want an enchilada? Then he rolled up his newspaper and, listening to the feminist bullhorn yelling, playfully swatted his apparent wife on her culo.

Well, she didn’t seem to mind at all, or maybe I’m just an optimist. Anyway, describing protests as impersonal weather phenomena is sort of a common civic freeloader trope meant to ward off any potential engagement with the particulars of this or that incident. Strangely, being an outside-observer to this whole scuffle, made me see it a bit more like a civic freeloader, and less like the jouno-activist I am. And yet here I am writing up what particulars I managed to learn.

I wonder how many such scuffles go on, day in, day out, around the globe, minimally reported or not reported at all, the full story lost to the winds of time because no one quite crawled out on the web of ongoingly synthesized history far enough to snag the information before it was all gone, all lost…

Unique judicial elections

In the United States, all federal judges are appointed. But in several states, state-level judges are voted for. In Texas, for example, the judicial elections are even by political party. I have no opinion on whether judges should be appointed or elected or when or why; sadly, I’m under-informed on the entire issue.

But I’d be remiss not to note that on June 1, Mexicans voted for thousands of judges countrywide for the very first time. More elections for additional thousands of Mexican judges will take place in 2027, a staggered system. No other country, including Mexico previously, has ever voted for judges to such an enormous extent, so it’s quite the political experiment.

A Mexican friend who voted in the morning on June 1 told me that he and the other voters at his polling place could see information about candidates’ curricula vitae on their ballots, and that they were very enthusiastic and proud to be voting for judges. However, that’s too small a sample size to really know how it stacks up against reports that Mexicans are almost evenly split on the question of whether judges should be elected, with hundreds of judges refusing to participate in protest.

The astonishing experiment is something to keep an eye on, at the very least. Reports indicate there was low turnout—13%—and that Sheinbaum’s Morena party is winning judicial benches, including control of the Supreme Court. This would give Morena dominance over all three federal branches of government, which some are comparing to the 3/4-century of one-party rule by the right-wing PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), even though Morena’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (ALMO), Sheinbaum’s predecessor, didn’t win the presidency, displacing PRI, until just seven years ago (2018).

Sheinbaum herself doesn’t see Morena’s victories as a problem. “Whoever says that there is authoritarianism in Mexico is lying,” Sheinbaum said on June 1. “Mexico is a country that is only becoming more free, just and democratic because that is the will of the people.”

Friends, FAQs, and farewell for now…

I’m staying at a hostel in CDMX a few more days before heading back to Chiapas. An elderly Christian proselytizer from the United States arrived at the hostel the day before yesterday; he says he has divine guidance and that he once prayed away a dread disease. Last night, he repeatedy warned me not only to refrain from upsetting Mexican drug cartels as a journalist, but to not upset Elon Musk or Donald Trump even just on Twitter, lest they come after me. I will not take his advice. An Eastern European woman listening to the conversation with a radiant Eastern European scowl informed the table—including him—that what he imagines Trump will do to tweeps such as myself (well, Bluesky), Putin actually does in real life to her compatriots. She also told him that some people pray hard and still die, so his God isn’t very divine. Eastern Europeans don’t fuck around.

On June 1, I hung out with Iván Maceda Mejías from Letras Con Locuras (Letters with Madness), the name of a radical mental health magazine put out by activists I discussed in my first CDMX memo. Find their second, April issue here. In the next few days, I should see Luis Gerardo Arroyo Lynn, a journalist with Mad in Mexico, an affiliate of journalist Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America. He’s a fellow vegan; well, I’m mostly vegan nowadays; travel can make it difficult at times, so I cheat a little, which I should probably find ways to fix.

I might even get to see a couple I met briefly at a downtown restaurant in December, who—in a very Mexican fashion that reminded me of rural North or East Texas—were suddenly concerned for this traveler’s well being, and invited him to their table, and gave me their WhatsApp contact info and told me to stay in touch. Why not? Maybe their curling paths crossed mine because the web of time is a variable phenomena myriad wills create rather than a Newtonian box we’re stuck inside clawing at the coordinate walls cynically because lightning or whatever supposedly birthed life … I don’t mean that If you pray hard enough, divinity will rearrange the whole universe to give you a sweet parking space, and protect you from Elon Musk and Donald Trump to boot; moreso, maybe the restaurant where I met the couple has really popular churros drawing people together because the chefs and everyone else are active participant-creators of this reality thing, except not as a metaphor: rather, it’s literally true. Not that your skin cells create/alter reality when you scratch your nose so much (though that too), but more those enigmatic perspective + will components we each uniquely have and employ to realize, actualize that which is around us, as do other powers not commonly described as living, to various extents (if that seems too hippie, picture something as impersonal as Aristotle’s Prime Mover). Somehow this spangled web we weave is easier to understand outside the United States, which sometimes feels trapped in formaldehyde.

To quickly answer a few questions I often get lately:

• Yes, my Spanish is rapidly improving. I began learning Spanish in Texas in elementary school; in high school, I flirted briefly with German and mostly switched to Latin, which I continued studying from that point on—as far as formal education is concerned—the only change being the addition of a few years of ancient koine Greek … except for a few days of French class in college, which I quickly aborted, finding that fancy language extremely silly and impossible for a Texan to pronounce. I had a few short-lived post-school attempts to learn Dutch and improve my fledgling Spanish.
  
  No, I won’t be translating at the United Nations any time soon. I can definitely have simple conversations about the weather or a menu, and if I’m “on,” I can do a bit better, sort of like a not-particularly-literate USian middle schooler’s grasp of English. I can read a lot better than I can converse, even discerning the main ideas of a La Jornada or Cuarto Poder news article without a dictionary, for example. On the daily, my difficulty isn’t so much vocab or grammar, as it is my ear acclimating to hearing native Spanish speakers talking at a zillion kilometers per hour. Remember, even the speech of fluent native speakers in any language is typically riddled with unnoticed grammatical errors, stops and starts, and circuitous ramblings that can throw off any learner who’s desperately trying to decipher every last word properly. I hope a year from now, I’m at the point where I can have some kinda-subtle conversations on topics more substantial than asking for directions and how much otro jugo de naranja costs. Now, if editors want news articles from México, I may have more incentive to study and practice…
  
  
• Yes, I hope to visit the United States. It’d be more feasible sometime between August and December, because reasons, but sorry, no promises yet. I think I wouldn’t bring electronics of any kind in, for fear of Trumpian border patrol confiscating journalists’ devices, now that I’m a rolling rock freelancer or stone or what have you. I’d just put my needed documents into an asymmetrically encrypted tarball, upload it to the secret X-marks-the-spot online, then buy a cheap laptop Stateside, put Lubuntu Linux on it, and download the tarball once back in anxiety-covered CONUS. Also would help with travel to win the lottery. I guess my biggest concern is that, while I’m there, Trump might decide to close the border on some pretext or because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, making it hard to get back out, although I imagine he’d want to implement a tiered $ystem. Definitely need to visit and finish scanning some old documents and suchlike that I didn’t get around to dealing with when I left in December—and before the Golden Dome is erected to keep missiles out, USians in (whether just psychologically or by additional border strictures).
  
  
• Yes, you can still snailmail my Seattle PO Box—the same address on this blog’s sidebar to the right—and I’ll get a photo or scan of whatever you send eventually, and the magnificent human who checks my PO Box on my behalf can, in time, deposit checks or whatever else might need to be done with your old-school letter. There are a lot of people I owe snailmails and emails. I’ll reply soon; I haven’t forgotten! Just, moving to another country with another language, et cetera, takes a lot, while trying to keep up with news and everything else. Patience please, and thanks!
  
  
• Long-term plans? Idk, man, I have a vasectomy and no mortgage, no kids, what do I need long-term plans for? I’m gonna finish paying off my debt, slowly tapering off psychopharmaceuticals, and reading and writing. What else is there?

This blog post, Memo from Mexico City 2, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2025/06/04/memo-from-mexico-city-2/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

June 1, Mexico City: Discussing teachers’ protest with Zócalo occupiers On Dec. 21, I described leaving the United States for México in my blog post “Memo from Mexico City.” I’ve...

Note: I took all of the photos in this post except the above, taken by Ricardo, and one below, noted as taken by Ricardo. I took the video of Iván playing electric bass; he took the video of me doing the same.

Update #1: The inaugural issue of Letras Con Locuras has been published. Our meeting is described (in Spanish) on pages 68-71 with photos; the rest of the magazine is very exciting and vibrant as well!

Update #2: Regarding abuses in Mexican psychiatric/medical institutions, see also this Disability Rights International report, Abandoned & Disappeared, and their related video, both from 2010.

Last Sunday, at the Sea-Tac International Airport, I boarded an Aeroméxico flight headed for Mexico City (CDMX). That followed a sleep-deprived, caffeine-chugging week of intensely working on relinquishing my Seattle apartment: downsizing, donating, discarding, digitizing, and depositing (for long-term storage at a friend’s) seemingly all of my worldly possessions. I never would have accomplished that huge task without the exceptional help of my amazing Seattle area friends. No way. I can’t thank them enough.

And then, there I was: after nine years of living in Seattle and telling people I’d leave the country long term someday, I was finally stepping into the aircraft, listening to Spanish Christmas carols jingle out of the overhead speakers. The plane held maybe 200 passengers. Save for count-on-one-hand number of Japanese folks reading kanji, and count-on-the-other-hand number of white, presumably U.S. people, the whole rest of the metal tube readying to jet through the sky was filled with what I took to be Latin Americans. The flight attendants spoke in Spanish, the announcements were in Spanish—I was headed, as my mom would say, a long way from Gilmer, Texas. Maybe not as the crow flies, but certainly as the imaginary lines found on maps decree.

Just before the flight taxied toward the runway, the attendants tried mightily to close an overhead compartment, the door of which was stubbornly refusing to close without somebody’s strap from their backpack hanging out (not mine, I promise). So they just left it dangling out and closed the compartment that way. It was a subtle little telling detail of the sort fiction-writers prize that concisely gave a sense of how Mexico would be way the hell more laid back than the United States, where such a rogue strap might cause a U.S.-based airline’s flight attendant to bark at a passenger that the item must now be checked at their own great expense. (Decades ago, Southwest Airlines was probably this chill in the States, but no longer.)

When I wasn’t dozing on the flight—my caffeine withdrawal timer starting—I was reading Marty Friedman’s newly released memoir Dreaming Japanese. The astonishingly versatile, poodle-haired electric guitarist, known in the U.S. for playing with Megadeth, gave up his gig with the world-famous metal band at the end of 1999 and moved to Japan, where he rebuilt his career from the ground up, reaching the same or greater heights playing different types of music he was also interested in. It seemed an apropros read for my long-term travel since I’m getting a little sick of writing what sometimes feels like the same journalism articles (even though they’re not), for an audience that seems too precious to lift a finger about injustices but not too precious to then act confused on social media as to why things are getting worse (even though the audience is more effortful than my bad moods make them out to be). I’m hoping Mexico’s calmer pace will help me pour more prioritized time into writing science fiction.

We landed. I descended the plane stairs, my weighty blue backpack straining my traps, then took a shuttle to immigration. La migra is a concern even for some well-to-do USians because you might get a jock officer who wants to throw his weight around and make your cross-border life difficult. Luck of the draw had me standing in front of a little circular desk, at the center of which sat a very Mexican woman with a full complement of rock’n’roll-looking tattoos on both arms. She seemed bemused by this pale man, at merely 5’10” still taller than most Mexican guys, in front of her, with his hair certainly longer—nearly every Mexican dude has short hair (so as not to distract from needlessly carrying that heavy machismo burden). She asked if I spoke Spanish. “Un poco” (a little), I said, hedging my bets. She let out a stream of rapid Spanish, but I caught enough to understand she wanted to know my job, a standard border question. I’d planned to say Maestro (teacher), but I blurted out Escritor autónomo (freelance writer). Both are true, but in the U.S. anyway, the former sounds less sketch. She sort of looked at me like Really? Really? Because if you wanna prove it, my shift ends at— But more important than any of that (half in my head, I’m sure), she gave me the full six months on my visa, which on rare occasion, ornery guards do not dispense.

After immigration, before getting my suitcase, I took the above selfie, because 2024. Visited the money-changers in their garish little temples right outside the airport, then taxied to my hostel, got set up, and decided to find dinner before collapsing into a deep, caffeine-withdrawal sleep.

As luck would have it, I found Luvina, a vegan bar with U.S. and local(?) heavy metal driving sound waves from the overhead speakers into my skull—quite like Seattle’s Georgetown Liquor Company not far from m̶y̶ ̶h̶o̶m̶e̶ my former home. Once a few communication difficulties were surmounted—the polite waitress unnecessarily apologized for not speaking English—I ordered a plate of nachos with queso and soy chorizo atop. Including tip, that cost me a grand total of $5 USD. At the excellent Georgetown in southern Seattle, the equivalent would probably run you $30 USD. And people are asking why I went to Mexico?

Yeah, WTF am I doing this?

Well, I purchased my airfare prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election going to Trump, so it wasn’t that, although Teflon Don shouting about bringing back institutionalization (lock up those with severe mental health issues, or perhaps a history of them, whether they like it or not, potentially forever) and about (illegally) staying in office past another four years did accelerate me somewhat. So did just about every non-MAGA USian’s lack of response. In 2016, his victory caused a flurry of panicked messages on U.S.-based email lists I’m on—even civic freeloaders (non-activists) were freaking out and exchanging contact info and also buying toilet paper, wait, no, that was the pandemic. Worriedly exchanging contact information might not be Zapatista-level resistance, exactly, but the complete absence of even that bare minimum in 2024 was unsettling, as if everyone had silently agreed to just doormat for MAGA (“focus on other things”), give ’em the green light to stamp the gas pedal all the way down, which they will. Activists might argue that in 2016 they marched down streets yelling, and civic freeloaders might argue that in ’16 they give $50 to this or that milquetoast nonprofit, so why bother doing the same in 2024 when it didn’t work in 2016? But there are other, better options: see how Romania, Georgia, and other countries are currently responding to reactionary takeover attempts in their lands. Even when they’re “tired” or their “head hurts” or they’d “rather watch comedians,” they’re risking their friendships, their jobs, their freedom (facing arrest or murder). Civic freeloaders, sometimes even activists, in the U.S. refuse to admit that they too can take such actions and regain dignity, selfhood, esteem. Therefore showing people counterexamples and options from beyond their familiar borders should be normalized. Like, say, this blog post.

Georgia showed up for itself, Ukraine showed up for itself, Romania Showed up for itself, Syria showed up for itself. None of them waited to be helped, they picked up themselves and fought against corruption and impunity. They didn't beg, they didn't make excuses for themselves. They showed up.

— Anonymous (@youranoncentral.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T13:41:37.725Z

If you'd like the US to annul the 2024 election, then you should probably have mass protests BEFORE Trump is sworn in. Romania showed up for democracy, you can too.

— Anonymous (@youranoncentral.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T16:17:47.528Z

Again, though, politics didn’t motivate my move, if by politics you mean group affiliation (yoking oneself to teams). If you mean perspective or attitude, then sure, I’m seeking adventure. I grew a lot as a person by moving from Texas to the Pacific Northwest in 2015, so a decade later, it’s time to journey similarly, connecting with new sources of joy and knowledge, while pruning away some of the old, withered, under-performing ones. I’m not into the self-immurement thing where people literally build giant walls around their property and spend decades inside, waiting for death via their death-pledges (ever looked up the literal meaning of the word mortgage?). That said, I’ll probably be eating this paragraph—to a degree—at some point, because an increasingly not-young life lived out of a suitcase is likely not for me, either. No need to figure it out right now. Thanks to Border Tattooette, I have six months to work on eight goals, the areas of which are:

1. Fiction-writing
2. Money
3. Physical health/exercise
4. Organizing my life in various ways
5. Journactivism (it never stops)
6. Reading
7. Spanish
8. Mental health

Take me down to the Mexico City where…

At first CDMX—specifically, the Centro area—reminded me a bit of Queens or the Bronx, a world-city with a thousand smells, a million people on the sidewalks, and a zillion street vendors selling wares of enigmatic provenance—and then somebody zooming around automobiles on a motorcycle, triumphantly waving a boombox blasting AC/DC, or numerous other surprises. Except last time I was in New York City (to give a talk on election security at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference), just this summer, there was less of all that than movies make you think. The Centro of Mexico City, by contrast, really does have this U.S.-stereotypical “NYC stuff” everywhere.

Exploring the streets at one point, I passed a vendor whose stall caught my eye. Astronomy binoculars, astronomy laser pointers, and a bunch of radio gadgets like Baofeng VHF/UHF transmitters! Now why would astronomy gear accompany radio gear? I half-expected to see a Jules Verne-esque diving helmet or maybe Geordi La Forge’s visor. Another stall was just one of many offering software. Like some cyberpunk novel, or that Super Nintendo game Shadowrun. Yeah, let me purchase one of these chips for some nuyen, I mean pesos, and stick it into my brain to double my reflex speed, evade those Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. You get the feeling you can find anything here if you look long enough, and indeed, seems people come from all over the place to shop in the Centro.

Most days this past week, the weather’s been ideal, easily 70 Fahrenheit in the middle of December, with the sun brighter than Texas. Sunglasses helped. As the week continued, I listened to organ grinders play their flat-sounding antique instruments and wondered if their controversial sound would grow on me. I bought La Jornada each morning—the New York Times equivalent in Mexico that printed leaked U.S. diplomatic cables a decade and a half ago—for 10 pesos (50 cents) daily and practiced reading at least the headlines. Primarily I focused on practical things, though, such as buying bandaids for a cut on my heel or finding a large hair brush since my bulging suitcase wouldn’t quite fit one. Whenever, wherever you are, you still have to go through each day accomplishing tasks, the incessant becoming Zen Buddhists talk (complain?) about. But every once in a while, you look around and think, Holy shit, I’m in another country!

Lots of little awkward moments to decipher, too. Things you ordinarily don’t think about growing up in just one country for decades. Do I pay before or after eating at a streetside restaurant? (Depends, but usually after.) How do I ensure the ATM gives me the right amount of MXN? (The screens of ones I used made everything clear, albeit in Spanish.) How the heck will I squeeze into this packed subway train? (By accepting that we’re all friends here, close friends.) A lady gave me the kiss-cheeks greeting I assumed was a European thing, how on Earth do I respond? (Just bumping cheeks seemed to suffice.)

Even if I weren’t deep into caffeine withdrawal, all the new learning would still have been enough to send me, each night, into deep slumber.

Mexican mental health activists and Letras con Locura

When I went to British Columbia, Canada alone in 2019, I thought it important to connect with local activists there involved in movements I participate in. That included Food Not Bombs and whatever radical mental health activists I could find. Doing the same thing in Mexico City made sense. Another benefit of meeting with CDMX mental health activists is that I could ask them questions about how the Mexican psychiatric system functions and malfunctions, something I needed to know for myself.

It’s approaching three years since I last discharged from a psychiatric hospital (for severe manic depression), a recovery I largely began thanks to a variant of EMDR called brainspotting. I still take lithium and quetiapine, but am slowly—very slowly—tapering down on each, with the assistance of simpatico clinicians in the States. But none were able to tell me if a rural Mexican pharmacy would have exactly “lithium carbonate (extended release)” or what. So I thought I’d ask the pros, the real experts when it comes to mental health: the survivors, others like me who’ve figured their shit out enough to help others in the same peculiar, stigmatized boat. While having a touch of depression can be trendy—see mentally ill gf memes—nobody of the so-called sane is exactly beating down doors with answers or invitations for those experiencing extreme distress, delusions/strange beliefs, or unshared perceptions (pejoratively, hallucinations; praised, revelations). If this is you, then, like people punched in the face and laughed at anywhere, eventually you have to show up for yourself and each other, or die. Resistance is existence.

Thanks to Luis Gerardo Arroyo Lynn, a journalist with Mad in Mexico, an affiliate of journalist Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America, I was put in touch with Iván Maceda Mejías, an activist here in CDMX. Later, on Thursday, I had dinner with Luis—at the same vegan bar, Luvina—where he patiently answered my questions and pointed me to a report, by Documenta in 2020, regarding human rights abuses in the Mexican mental health care system. It was great to discuss the subject with Luis, including similarities and differences between the United States and Mexico.

On Tuesday, Iván met me at my hostel. We’d planned to meet three other activists he knew a bit later for lunch, but right now we had some time to roam the streets, ostensibly looking for a cafe, talking and getting to know one another. Music is huge everywhere—my music-related belongings I listed on Craigslist and FB Marketplace for leaving my apartment drew more attention than any of my other items—but music in Mexico is ginormous: the Centro has infinite music shops selling electric guitars, basses, drum kits, horns, PA systems, the works. I told Iván about a nice cherry sunburst 5-string Jackson bass I’d seen near my hostel, and we discovered that we both play(ed) electric bass. He’s played in 20+ bands, far more than I ever have; I switched from music to writing in 2006. Nevertheless, I can still play a little today, so out the window went the serious topics of journalism, mental health activism, and the rest as we rushed to find a music shop where we could take turns playing bass.

After jamming out, Iván and I rode the subway to meet another activist friend of his, Santiago Cervera Gutiérrez, then proceeded to ride a second subway train to the Tlatelolco area, still considered part of the Centro. The subway cars were densely packed and they even had a separate train for women (with or without children) to take optionally—women could still ride the non-exclusive train if they wanted. Thought-provoking for sure, but probably it’d be better to actually punish male offenders and sink masculinism fully.

We got some food and my caffeine withdrawal (and intense introversion) must have been showing, because I got a few questions as to my quiet. It was all good and reminded me a little of peer support communities in Seattle where people openly check on each other, usually just a little, when necessary, asking somebody how they’re doing, instead of always saying everything behind people’s backs. Then Iván, Santiago, and I met up with Thania Fernández Arceo and Ricardo Sánchez, both of whom work with Colective Chuhcan, an organization of diagnosees demanding an end to systemic abuses in the psychiatric system.

Iván, Santiago, Thania, and Ricardo had been key to Radio Abierta (Open Radio), the first radio program in Mexico featuring, and run by, personas con algún padecimiento psíquico (people with some mental illness). The weekly show began in 2009. It shut down somewhat recently—partly due to that perennial problem, lack of funds—but the archives are available and members are now making a new magazine, Letras con Locura (Letters with Madness). It’ll be available online. Hey U.S., give that to your Spanish classes! The members had previously published another magazine, so they have a lot of experience. (The earlier was Toing, as in the sound a spring makes—akin to the idiom, a screw loose.)

In 2013, the New York Times wrote an excellent article titled “Ex-Patients Police Mexico’s Mental Health System” (paywall-bypassing archival link), featuring both Radio Abierta and Colective Chucan. I really recommend reading it.

Eating lunch in the Tlatelolco area (pictured atop this section), we shared our mental health stories as best we could, since my Spanish needs improvement and their levels of English proficiency varied. Speaking Spanish, I do a lot of just throwing infinitives around instead of conjugating the verb, or saying things that are close enough, like “¿Cambiar?” (To change?) when asking the person behind the counter if they have change for a certain billete (bill). But it gets the job done, for now. A cofounder of the Seattle chapter of the Hearing Voices Network (HVN) saw the photo of us at lunch and remarked that it looked the same as any HVN peer support gathering in the U.S., only Mexican. Maybe we all have more in common than we like to think.

I gathered from the activists that Mexico has less than 5,000 psychiatrists—by way of comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the number of psychiatrists in the United States, as of 2023, at roughly 25,000—each making, on average, a quarter million dollars a year, I might add. And while the U.S. is not quite triple the population of Mexico, it has five times the amount of psychiatrists. Not that I’m one of those “more services, no matter what they consist of” types, but the difference serves as a sort of barometer indicating how the topic in Mexico is less—how to put it?—official? For better or worse.

The activists told me Mexico has nothing like peer respites. That’s an objective in the United States to establish unlocked, bed and breakfast-like rest spots, staffed by psychiatric survivors rather than clinicians, that serve as a midpoint between today’s two options: tough out your extreme distress at home alone (with busy friends only able to help so much), or get locked up in a ward for weeks or months, very possibly losing your job, lease, and self-esteem. The U.S. has a few peer respites; I toured one in Georgia in 2018 when I covered whistleblower Reality Winner’s sentencing in Augusta. The movement in Mexico, Santiago memorably explained, is “in diapers.” Yet the offices of Radio Abierta at times served as a de facto peer respite for the show’s team, a place where they could air the program, but take care of each other, too. In King County (Seattle), two million dollars was awarded to found peer respites—but was then reallocated due to the pandemic. The respites my friends and I fought for there never happened. Between government funds disappearing, or grassroots radio funds drying up, seems neither alternative—money from The Man or money from playing in a band (or what have you)—is working so long as so many civic freeloaders/system loyalists refuse to defect toward participating themselves or until people get over their obsession with nonstop monetizing/trade. Activists can only turbocharge their productivity wearing superhero capes for so long till we crater too (though there are still ways to get freer, more magical). Suddenly it seemed Mexico and the U.S. weren’t that far apart after all.

We talked about a few other mental health topics. I mentioned the venerable Madness Radio, which airs in the United States on FM stations, Pacifica Radio, etc. To my surprise, the Mexican activists hadn’t heard of it. Now they have! The rest of what they told me were initial remarks or things I need to learn more about. Hopefully I’ll write about the relationship between U.S. mental health and Mexican mental health more formally in the near-ish future.

It was so nice to chat in person with other people who have endured extreme mental health situations. It’s so comforting, to be able to say something like, “Yeah this one time I was locked up, I had this roommate who was barely a teenager, and he’d sit in a chair all day every day in the center of our room, staring at the ceiling, smiling and not budging an inch” and have interlocuters chime in with similar experiences. Whereas talking with people who haven’t had the pleasure of being tackled, tazed, and syringed in the ass with antipsychotic, if you put salt on your food, or ask what time it is, they’ll typically say He likes salt or It’s 11:40. But tell them first that you’ve experienced manic psychosis long ago, and then put salt on your food or ask the time, and they’ll say He’s eating so much salt, must be because he’s bipolar or He’s really obsessed with the time, it’s got to be a symptom of his mental illness. Like, I can tell when goodhearted people are just looking out for me asking if I’m okay, as opposed to not-so-nice people trying to wield this kind of stuff against me, but it’s really wonderful not to have to even worry about it in the first place with company that’s, well, like-minded!

Leaving Tlatelolco, we saw graffiti asserting Fue el estado (it was the state). The graffiti blames the Mexican (narco-)state for the military’s Oct. 2, 1968 massacre in Tlatelolco. Provoked by presidential guard snipers, the regular Mexican military killed scores of unarmed civilians who were protesting the upcoming Olympics. More recently, the movement in Mexico to find the missing Ayotzinapa students has also used Fue el estado as a rallying cry. Those 43 students were disappeared in the Mexican state of Guerrero, disappeared while busing to the city of Iguala in part to raise funds to travel to this same place, Tlatelolco, for an anniversary march commemorating the Oct. 2 massacre. Imagine sitting in the plush corner office of some quarter-million-a-year psychiatrist in the States who can’t accomplish his own desired move away from Donald Trump, and telling him or her all that about Mexico. I’d much rather discuss it in CDMX with the Letras con Locura team. Note that the tragedies just mentioned weren’t unique to Mexico. With the backing of the United States, Operation Condor and military dictatorship ‘dirty wars’ plagued much of South America and beyond for a decade or more, roughly during the same time frame as the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre.

As I alternated between adrenaline and caffeine withdrawal, Iván, Santiago, and I finished the day at the Zócalo, the main, central square of Mexico City’s Centro. Before checking out the Aztec dancers, we watched the lowering of the huge Mexican flag in front of the El Palacio Nacional. Somewhere in that palace, Mexican’s first scientist president and first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum, inaugurated in October, was assuredly discussing with aides how to respond to Trump’s tariff threats, or her new decree shielding the national textile industry (one of those La Jornada headlines), or some other world-historic matter. Iván expressed high hopes for Sheinbaum’s sexenio (the name for a Mexican president’s single six-year term). So did Luis, on Thursday, much more cautiously, but he expressed worries as well. Omar García Harfuch, he pointed out, Sheinbaum’s pick for Secretary of Security and Civilian Protection, is the son of Javier García Paniagua, who during the Mexican Dirty War headed the Federal Security Directorate, a secret-police spy agency known for killing and torturing students, political prisoners, activists. On Dec. 20, the George Washington University-based National Security Archive’s Mexico Project released a curation of declassified U.S. documents about the Dirty War in Mexico, presenting, the researchers say, a “clearer picture than has ever been available of the ‘systematic and widespread’ human rights abuses committed by Mexican intelligence, military, police, and parastate forces that targeted ‘broad sectors of the population’ between 1965 and 1990.”

What to make of Harfuch’s appointment is impossible for me to say, no expert in Mexican politics. Off the cuff, it reminds me of Kamala Harris chest-pounding like any GOP militarist on topics such as border control and crime. The days of presidents not totally given over to their countries’ national security powerbases are long gone, if they ever even existed. In that respect, Mexico and the United States once more seemed not so different after all. Yet Harfuch has been key to detaining organized crime leaders, as in Operación Enjambre, I’m told. Maybe it takes one to know one. Or maybe the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and horrors by his hand are hitting Mexico already. Family isn’t destiny; sometimes black sheeps become the freest spirits. Other times, despite the ridiculousness of the lazy claims that genes control your every thought and emotion, even the biggest rebel can find himself suddenly aping nearly forgotten mannerisms of a grandparent—I occasionally scrunch my nose up in disgust in a way that imitates, I’ve only recently realized, my late paternal grandfather. Sometimes I even do it this far from Gilmer.

Protesta Economica Feminista

On Thursday, walking back to my hostel, I passed a street vendor selling her handmade jewelry—and proselytizing for anarchistic feminism with signs she’d penned and laid out on the sidewalk. Stunned, I stood still, looking down and slowly translating, in my head, the longest one: “Economic independence is fundamental for freedom of women—without it, economic violence becomes a tool of control that perpetuates gender inequality.”

Smiling, she asked me if I had any questions.

I told her I was a freelance writer and journalist from Seattle. I wish I’d thought to ask for her opinion on the women-only optional subway train. Instead, I told her about #OpJane (¡Ellxs arrojan embotellas de fuego!) and said my female friends back in the U.S. would get a kick out of her signs. At this she brightened extra, nodding, and saying yes, please do that as I snapped pictures of her agitprop.

Heading in the opposite direction as the United States, where the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Mexico last year decriminalized abortion countrywide. The stronger and stronger Mexican women’s movement was hugely responsible for this landmark in the liberation of reproductive rights. As this article explains, they showed up for themselves and each other:

“The strategy we did in Mexico City was of a different order. … It was a legislative strategy,” said Marta Lamas, one of Mexico’s most prominent feminists. But “if you don’t have people on the street demanding and pushing, it is very difficult,” added Lamas, a political science professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who testified at the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation in the groundbreaking trial that upheld legalized abortion in Mexico City.

I cheerfully waved goodbye to the street vendor. Days later, I sometimes find myself wondering what her next sign will say.

Mexico, that is to say, the weekend

Red metropolises in the United States—such as Dallas/Fort Worth—are like weekdays at a tyrannical workplace; a U.S. blue port—such as Seattle—is like a weekday at a benevolent dictatorship workplace at best. The ol’ good cop, bad cop one-two. Canada, or at least Victoria and Vancouver based on my 2019 experience, is an ever bluer version of Seattle, a weekday at something approaching an actual liberal democracy workplace, with single-payer universal health insurance and no mass shootings, but still the systemic requirement that you trade your services to the powerful or beg for charity or die, with the idea that another way of life—inclusive sharing—might have long existed completely nonexistent in the supposedly sane minds of most.

Wage-slavery is still a paramount thing in Mexico, of course. But Mexico feels like it’s the f-in weekend.

Even with the Mexican military on the streets—at the behest of former Mexican president Felipe Calderón in 2006, who assigned the armed forces the leading role in his “War on Drugs”—CDMX, or at least the Centro, is a calm, chill place. The laid back attitude is ubiquitous. I saw a cop directing traffic while simultaneously yawning and checking her phone. “Mexican time” is a thing. Take your Marty Friedman Dreaming Japanese book to the vegan restaurant; in the States, you’d be in and out of the joint in under an hour, having barely read two chapters—in the Centro, plan on 90 minutes or more, easy, if you’re engrossed in your book. Why would the waitstaff bring you la cuenta (the check) when they could do plenty of other things and let you read? It’s refreshing but also curious to feel time slide around strangely. What I see on my wristwatch doesn’t compute with what’s going on in my psyche, like some sort of light-speed traveller.

When I went to British Columbia in 2019, I noticed the lower ambient stress levels immediately once I got off the ferry from Seattle. What the—is everyone on Valium or something? And then I realized USians are really just that high-strung, and often unaware of the tense environment they’ve become calibrated to. CDMX is like Victoria but even more so. My body seems to be registering the relaxation. Sure, there are U.S. corporate restaurants like Chili’s and Burger King, but they’re few in number and easy to avoid. The healthy meals I’ve obtained, lacking any “organic” labels, come in smaller portion sizes than their United States equivalents, and taste more genuine than U.S. organic-labelled food, for far cheaper, yet I really think the lack of ambient stress is what’s apparently caused 5+ pounds to fall off me in the past week. That’s just from looking in the mirror and the fit of my slacks, so I could be wrong, but probably not. And people are asking why I went to Mexico?

When I was relinquishing my apartment, my appetite was bizarre. Eating is an exercise in selfish mini-hoarding: packing on the pounds. Meanwhile, shedding all of my worldly belongings seemed, energetically, the exact opposite. So my body felt really confusing (not to mention the caffeine and shortchanged sleep). Here, it seems the widespread sense of safety is permitting my body to toss overboard some of my unnecessary fatty shielding. And while I ran miles and intermittent-fasted and all that in the States when I didn’t have an overdue journalism article deadline dominating my life, in Mexico City I haven’t done anything exercise- or health-wise besides walk around with a crazy blue backpack and lug a ginormous swollen suitcase, which, okay, is a lot. But still, like, was the problem the fish, or the fishbowl?

My friends are far away physically, but it hasn’t mattered much. I’m still messaging with ’em back in the States via SMS, Signal, social platforms, or email, although I’ll have to figure out eSIM(s) or whatever for my phone eventually (don’t get me started on that topic). I called a store in Seattle to follow up about something without even having to dial the country code. My Hearing Voices Network friend in Washington state prison has a Securus tablet permitting e-messaging—basically email—and I was able to attach some of the photos from this very blog post in correspondence with him. Our e-messaging goes swimmingly so long as the guard tearing out their hair reading my baroque sentences decides not to censor anything, which hasn’t happened yet, though that Nobel Prize for Literature panelist working at the prison is assuredly fed up with having to skim my writing.

I’ve noticed people older than I am tend to treat this kind of travel as some tremendous, irrevocable change, but younger people aren’t so thrown off by it. It’s becoming increasingly common to meet someone—as one of my friends in Fort Worth did—far away, the United Kingdom in her case, gaming online, and have a long-distance relationship. For her, it culminated in a month-long face-to-face meeting and even plans to migrate to his country. I mean shit, the notorious Seattle Freeze makes it hard to hang out with people in person in the Emerald City anyway. Is it really that big of a deal that I’m in Mexico for six months? And no, I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when my visa runs out in mid-June. Why borrow trouble? I’m on Mexican time. I’ll figure it out later.

On one of my last nights here in CDMX, crossing a wider intersection with more traffic and traffic lights than usual, I saw, in what’s akin to a bike lane, a young man and young woman rollerblading, moving in perfect sync with diagonally dancing legs as they held hands, sweaty fingers interwined, interlocked.

Last night I did have an awful nightmare. Sleeping in my tiny hostel room, I came to perceive that I was actually trapped in some sort of dumpster, and a garbage truck was about to destroy me forever. I started screaming my head off, so much so that an employee was called to check on me in the middle of the night. He (or she?) opened the door slightly, letting in light through the crack, as I, nude on the floor, tucked into a ball, looked up and mumbled, only English available to me, Nightmare, sorry, nightmare, sorry. “You sure? You sure?” they asked. Yes, nightmare, sorry. I’ve had night terrors off and on my whole life; I’m not sure what caused this one. Maybe loneliness or the fear thereof. Or maybe this whole adventure (and this headbanger’s diplomatic cable of a blog post) has required adopting some bravado, some acting like all this is easy-peasy, when really it is kinda huge.

I don’t particularly have time to think about it. Everything is so focused on practicalities presently. In not that many hours from now, I’m getting on another Aeroméxico flight headed for the Mexican state of Chiapas, where prices will be even cheaper, where I’ll meet up with a friend, where I’ll find an apartment. I wish I had some grand message to give you at the end of this mammoth post, but I don’t. This week has really worn me out, not in a bad way, nightmare aside; rather, happily, like going to a carnival or festival and then, tired, coming back—home.

Which is. Where?

You can answer that with your own cliché. I’ve got a ballooning suitcase to miraculously zip up, and a Spanish-everything plane to catch.

This blog post, Memo from Mexico City, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2024/12/21/title-goes-here/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or related topics) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!

Me (center) with Mexican mental health activists Iván (viewer’s right) and Santiago (viewer’s left), Dec. 17, 2024 Note: I took all of the photos in this post except the above,...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 44 of 52. I skipped entry 43 due to travel in the last week of October. I took the photos herein from that trip. The coastal beach pics are off Highway 101 just south of Oregon’s city of Gold Beach. The forest ones are from northwest California’s Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park. You can find more photographs on my instagram account. Enjoy; I sure did!

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization for the first time characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic. Problems with the United Nations and its agencies aside, WHO is the authoritative international body providing global health education and coordination, a situation likely to remain until supranational power or the (hopefully informed) public replaces it with their or our next organization. Thus, its director-general’s written opening remarks from that fateful Wednesday’s press conference are quite historically notable. If you’ve never read them, you should; the document’s expertly composed and concise, put together in the heat of a very stressful geopolitical moment.

On April 25, 2020, philosopher Heather Marsh wrote a piece titled “The catalyst effect of COVID-19.” Her post too has had significant impact around the planet already, but if you’re from, or answer to, an intellectual background deriving from the last few centuries in Europe, you might find that assessment a little strange: How could something I’m not already aware of and that’s not on Netflix be important? I actually know an erudite, older activist in Texas who explicitly believes the corporate amplification awarded to Eurocentric thinkers, including Nietzsche, is based not on their demographics and proximity to power, but on merit. For such readers, consider it might be challenging to measure impact for an author who gets censored and who in 2014/2015 sparked worldwide and ongoing discussion of pedo human trafficking. Or just look at the academic credibility she already has. Or recall that the Communist Manifesto, which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sent from London to the European continent behind schedule, wasn’t considered historically important until decades after the 1848 revolutions it was meant to influence. Not everything important is already in the important! section of the university bookstore, and who’s arranging the shelving, right?

Walking through the California state park marveling at the redwoods, I was having reminded of Marsh’s “The catalyst effect of COVID-19” due to a wonderful conversation that led me to put a two-and-two together in, I believe, a new way. I’d like to share that small insight. Plus, let’s take a fresh look at Marsh’s post (her glossary may help in reading it; the reading grade is pretty high). A year and a half later, have her predictions about how COVID-19 would catalyze the world come to pass?

Why the most radical transformation the world has ever seen?

The main of Marsh’s post starts with an astonishing sentence: “We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once.” Humans in today’s form have been around for hundreds of thousands of years—and now, the most radical transformation ever? Why?

My little insight answer—besides other factors such as election cycles—that I came up with while the interlocutor and I were hiking back from the redwoods to the de facto trailhead, is that we have two pan- things arriving together, one of them unique, for the first time in our history. As the globe has learned in the past two years, pan- means every, as in everyone and/or everywhere.

The first pan- thing, the unique one, is global communication. As opposed to feudal villages, where you might go your whole life knowing your entire town but never a stranger, we’ve now been approaching a point where everyone can communicate with everyone else, or at least try to do so. Many have made or hinted at this “Information Age” observation—whether that’s Marsh, journalist Barrett Brown, or simply Seattle-based heavy metal band Queensrÿche. Even Marx and Engels noted nearly two centuries ago the importance of “the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.” In 2010, merely six years after the introduction of Facebook in 2004, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt said: “There were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now that same amount is created every two days.” Some are still left out of this info-flood—perhaps people with developmental disabilities, or those doomed to spend their lives down in mineshafts, or others somehow blocked from or not desiring tech access. However, though estimates vary, social media platforms nowadays have billions of users, and that doesn’t count the tremendous amount of additional people if you consider shared accounts and shared devices.

The second pan- thing is the pandemic; humans have suffered pandemics before, but now everybody can talk about one of them—in real time. In the past, crises that have affected all have been too complicated or too removed to impact the daily experience of plenty of individuals such that they understand what’s going on. For instance, issues are around ozone layer depletion/recovery and the Montreal Protocol banning CFCs are simply over the heads (pun intended) of individuals unfamiliar with the subject: Something new will go wrong with the sky? Yeah whatever! Even the frustrating topic of money, seemingly universal, is pretty much irrelevant for decorative members of contemporary royalty, kept in lifelong gilded cages. Yet everyone is threatened by contagion; the novel coronavirus can infect anyone, no matter who or where you are. I imagine there must be exceptions, very few, to universal awareness of the idea of COVID-19 contagion risk (even if some disagree it’s a genuine risk), but—perhaps to the surprise of reactionaries—refugees near the Del Rio International Bridge between Texas and Mexico (a human rights crisis heightened in Sept/Oct of this year but existing previously and surely again) understood the concept of anti-coronavirus mitigation measures, and so do infants, in their own faint way, when they feel their parents’ stress or enjoy/endure longer, soapy bath-times. To sum up, basically everyone on the planet has some understanding, however minimal, that a serious pandemic, or the idea of it for those who (incorrectly) disagree it’s serious, is going on.

In short, for the first time in human history, rare exceptions aside, not only is everyone talking with everyone, but everyone is talking with everyone about a somewhat easy to understand problem that affects all: contagion, from a widespread respiratory virus. I think that’s one huge reason why COVID-19 is catalyzing unprecedented change. Humans are fundamentally driven by knowledge and communication, and are now equipped to share their actions, experiences, and ideas in hopes of overcoming the more or less understandable (if in some aspects shrouded in mystery) planetary crisis and any other crises that surface.

The key point: two rival economic ideologies converting into a single global mono-empire

After saying the thought-provoking lines “It is very tempting to stop everything and live in the moment, but some things need us to be alert, careful and creative. One thing I have been saying for years is the US, China and Russia (and others) are all headed for a major crisis in 2020 (which is here now!) and so is the world generally. While some states are undergoing terror and totalitarianism, others are seeing unprecedented opportunities for healing,” Marsh continues: “The key point is that we are scaling up into a mono-empire from a system of two rival economic ideologies (cold war communism and capitalism).”

In the United States, a younger person may be familiar with trying to convince a reactionary Boomer that capitalism is dumb. The reactionary Boomer might, well, react by saying: “A little stupid sometimes maybe, but communism is far worse, therefore capitalism is the only answer.” Reminiscent of former UK prime minister and arch-conservative Margaret Thatcher insisting that “there is no alternative” to market economy worth anyone spending any time on. If you try to ask Boomers not about capitalism versus communism, but rather about capitalism versus feudalism, or capitalism versus whatever’s coming next, you might get blank stares, or the conversation might improve and open up. Such dialogue demonstrates that Cold War-era USians generally see political options forever boiled down, as in Manicheanism, to two opposing choices: communism or capitalism. That vanishing, yet still influential, stage of history is getting converted, and converted fast, into a single planetary empire.

What is this global mono-empire of supranational power? International tech corporations manipulating, disappearing, and propagandizing knowledge or “knowledge” while permanently storing our personal data that joins other permanently recorded information for their management of a reputation economy that will continue and worsen the extermination of the poor (read more and evidence here). To know what to do about it, we need, among other things, to see what’s before our eyes, as Marsh’s post explains.

Three things to watch for: diminishing trade economy, law of the last circle, and escaping the mono-empire

Before getting started on this section proper, a quick vocabulary note. To read the below passages, as a kind of shorthand, you can think of an endogroup as, due to emergency conditions and fear/guilt symbiosis, affiliated people claiming they have an exclusive identity, idealizing an image (perhaps a leader or symbol), and believing an exceptional myth of their endogroup, while empathic and euphoric conduits to life outside their endogroup are blocked. Endosocial strategies are not necessarily bad, but endosocial extremism is. Endosocialism is contrasted with exosocial expansion, the “[u]ninhibited expansion of self through continual establishment of euphoric conduits through relationships, discovery, creation, spirituality, etc.” Exosocial expansion is something humanity needs more of. (Read Marsh’s book on self since it’s more complicated than this quick Cliffs Notes-style summary.)

Here’s the first thing to watch for from Marsh’s April 2020 post: dramatically decreasing importance of trade.

One, the [trade] economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality, as [trade] economics is. The crash we started the year [2020] off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted power structure [consider] with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.

I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about how the trade collapse/change is playing out in most countries, but I’m aware of what’s happening here in the United States and in a few other places. Of course USians have heard about supply chain problems, such as the article last month in The Atlantic titled “[The United States] is running out of everything.” Those in the know for the past few decades have acknowledged the taboo subject of how in the US, far from its intelligentsia able to remain forever smug about not signing portions of international law from a catbird seat position, will find itself increasingly dependent on, and unable to force compliance from, those it previously mocked (or invaded). USians might notice non-USians are more and more vocal on global social media every day, and that the centuries-old hell is other people Eurocentric philosopher tomes are not stopping, say, Myanmar rebels from sharing their news online. But like trusting Nate Silver in 2016 that Hillary Clinton would win the White House, many in the United States today promise themselves that we’re in just another merely temporary economic downturn. Instead, what’s happening will be far more transformative. I’ve started tracking this topic on my blog using the tag economics and the header “worldwide trade economy collapse/change.” You might consider that, as international experience demonstrates, USians are typically exceptionally helpless and all too often admire an idiocracy, especially when it comes to insisting social support is for only weaklings and imposing shame for it. But the US is going to need social support badly; and, the US won’t be able to provide enough of it from within. For more on this, and other topics such as the international implications of US federal FATCA law (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act), see my blog’s Leaving the US tag.

Verdict? Yeah, we’re seeing the worldwide trade economy collapse/change come to pass, even if arriving in a strange, slow-mo, lumbering Frankenstein’s monster sort of way.

Here’s the second thing to watch for from Marsh’s “The catalyst effect of COVID-19”:

Two, in accordance with the law of the last circle, also explained in The Creation of Me, Them and Us, places like the US, and China are going to try to fall back to old real or imagined endogroups such as those around states, religions, etc. as the economic endogroups weaken. We have already seen this in the global reversion to various forms of endogroups producing widespread nationalism, sexism, racism, religious cults and every other form of endosocial extremism. This will continue in some regions, and we are still at risk of civil wars and other endogroup atrocities from this.

The retreat to far-right demagoguery playing out in many countries currently is an example of Marsh’s law of the last circle; think fascist Jair Bolsarano in Brazil, for instance, or the likely return of Trump in November 2024. Revivals of authoritarian, patriarchal religion would be another example, as in the “Christian America” antagonists in science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s 1990s Parable novels, who decades before Trump, chanted “Make America Great Again.” Another example would be Steve Bannon allying with Moonie cults that literally worship assault rifles and are setting up compounds in Tennessee and Texas. A lighthearted and non-harmful example would be my reading the recent autobiographies of the heavy metal rock star men I grew up idolizing, when I’m tired, depleted, and want to turn my brain off before bed. We all employ various endosocial strategies from time to time, but endosocial extremism threatens atrocities, already existent or forthcoming, and threatens to block exosocial expansion.

Verdict? Yes, the law of the last circle is increasingly observable, with people retreating from the possibility of evolution by fleeing, in greater numbers than just prior, toward their former (real or imagined) endogroups.

The third and final thing to watch for from Marsh’s post is the global mono-empire, and how to resist it. The global mono-empire can be seen, for example, in Mark Zuckerberg’s October 28 announcement—in response to revelations, of the manipulation and misery of Facebook and Instagram users, that whistleblower Frances Haugen provided to the Wall Street Journal and the Facebook Consortium—that Facebook will rebrand to Meta. The prefix meta- means “transcending”; it’s seen in terms such as metaverse, metacognition, and metafiction. Facebook’s new brand identity, Meta, suggests transcendental improvement, but will mean only transcendence above that Cold War binary of capitalism or communism, into the global mono-empire of knowledge hoarding and manipulation (propaganda), permanent personal data storage (no privacy), reputation economy, and so on. Note that Facebook, and any future Meta, will (continue to) have users who think of themselves as small biz capitalist, state communist, corporate capitalist, anarcho-communist, or as humans equal to some other ideology, but it doesn’t matter, with surveilled fixed identities, they will all answer to these tech corporations … unless,

Thankfully, the public can also scale up with its pan- connections to each other, with regional communities interconnecting for mutual benefit while retaining insofar as possible, their own autonomy, self-governance, and cultures. The public can resist the global mono-empire, while supporting, or revoking support for, international, transparent, peer-promoting epistemic communities providing expertise with the help of knowledge bridges (decode that mouthful here). In her post, Marsh provides a 14-point list of opportunities activists can pursue to take advantage of the pandemic to achieve worthy goals. The COVID crisis is not only an opportunity for the global mono-empire, but also for us. For instance, one of her suggestions is, since public transit was becoming free of charge in many places, not to let it become unfree ever again. Seattle failed to accomplish that goal. During the early phases of the pandemic, the City of Seattle made bus rides free; then in later phases, the transit authorities said, time to return to paying bus fare. As far as I’ve been able to make out from my high castle, Seattleites hearing news of the upcoming change explained to each other they just knew that doing anything to stop it would be unrealistic, so the transit authorities said Wow that was easy and resumed charging money for bus rides, unhindered. And Seattle conservatives don’t care if bus rides cost money because they hate the idea of anybody (beyond families, churches, and other masculinist endogroups) providing or using goods and services for sheer fun, like basking in the sunlight that funds Earth life for free. (All of life is literally free; ultimately, the sun is paying for all this.) I don’t know what the status of the free public transit goal is outside the United States. Imagine if there had been just 14 journ-activists available, each one tracking a single of the 14 goals worldwide; then we’d know, and maybe more people would have been persuaded to understand and pursue the 14 aims! It can still happen, there’s some word that starts with d and rhymes with phonate that may be relevant. Regarding resisting the mono-empire, Marsh writes about the importance of her proposed global commons for public data (GetGee) and suggests using the news of supply chain problems to encourage, not development of evermore hierarchical forced trade dependency, but development of collaboration through networked fostering of strength and support. Check out her ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’ post for the other fascinating points on her list of 14 goals, which might call to mind, somewhat, how Marx and Engels created a 10-point plan in the Communist Manifesto (recommending for instance the abolition of all rights of inheritance) or the Black Panther Party put forth their 10-point plan in 1966 (demanding among other things an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people).

All of the above in one encounter

Driving back to Seattle, I parked along the way—somewhere off Highway 38 in southwest Oregon—to buy a cap for the air inflation valve of one of my tires. As the commercial jingle has it, I got in the zone: AutoZone! Therein I had a single encounter that encompasses all three points Marsh’s post recommends watching for.

A heavily tatted clerk rung up my tiny plastic bag of four tire air valve caps at the register and grumbled aloud about how AutoZone store staff (trade) is supposed to be a family (families are fine but converting workplaces to one hints of the law of the last circle) and how the other employees were letting him down by not coming in and working overtime (economic trade collapse/change, as r/antiwork posts from this month also suggest). Forgetting I was apparently the only dude in the store, and perhaps the whole rural red area, with long hair and an anti-COVID19 face mask on, I tried to make a joke about how the forthcoming zombie apocalypse might be filmed by Tarantino, you know, Quarantine Tarantino. The tatted clerk ignored me entirely, instead initiating a new conversation with an employee in the back (sticking with his workplace trade endogroup dominance battles rather than experiencing an emotional conduit with an outsider offering something punny). The tatted guy beseeched the second employee to come in as soon as possible for overtime. That other employee refused. The heavily tatted clerk began loudly bemoaning the general state of things. “I want to rejoin the Army,” he said bluntly. “I want to go back to Afghanistan!” Since his trade economy endogroup is collapsing, then it’s law of the last circle, at least in his imagination, reverting or regressing back to his former cherished endogroup, the hierarchical militia of Pentagon mercenaries he’d belonged to before. I punched in my payment card’s PIN and did the remaining button-presses, thereby entering my transaction and other personal data into permanent ledgers for manipulation use by the global mono-empire, regardless of whether the bureaus of that mono-empire advertise themselves to their populations as capitalist, communist, or perhaps someday soon, neither. When I left O̶m̶e̶l̶a̶s̶ AutoZone, I enjoyed the cool night weather (primary euphoria / exosocial joy), reminded myself to be grateful for the valve cap as I installed it and for my knowing how to install it in the first place, i.e. not being afraid of car maintenance as many are (gratitude, another emotion associated with exosocial interactions, in this case with older siblings who taught me car stuff), and finally, plain ol’ smiling and feeling good from this great trip I’d just enjoyed (rather than, as I know some do, including Western thinkers amplified by academia, arguing that happy nature hikes should be permanently off the table since the trails eventually come to a end, causing nihilistic sadness). Were the public having a blast sharing free essentials (among the recommended goals in Marsh’s post), providing for one another, as Food Not Bombs does (it’s real! it’s realistic!), I and others would be freed from unwanted paid-employment, and could more often enjoy examples, small or big, of expansive exosocial life.

Timelessness and chaos

Visiting the redwoods, you inevitably think of how these giant trees, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands of years old, were here long before you were, and will be here long after you’re gone. A thought that might feel scary in an extreme endosocial headspace/environment, becomes natural and good in the exosocial great outdoors. Your time is part of, not some stupid endogroup cult, but the greater timelessness of Mother Nature.

In the United States, it can be common for activists to brag that any proposed change is unrealistic, especially if the origin of the proposal is not the usual vaunted Angry Intellectual Men. People telling each other (due to propaganda) that they just know of good change, that’ll never happen, is actually the only real obstacle. If people went out by the truckloads to catch invisible Pokemon a few years back, they can be convinced in truckloads to read books. Well, maybe. Among many other reasons, as a result of such US-specific barriers to activism (at least among my generation), I’m leaving the country, eventually, an aim of mine fans of this blog will be familiar with. It might take a while, and I worry over leaving people I care about in a metaphorical sinkhole they or those around them might not be able to see, but …

Elsewhere in the world, the COVID-19 catalyst effect might mean many people going outside and rediscovering efforts like Food Not Bombs, sharing food with each other in new and joyous ways. In the United States, movements afoot to ban dual citizenship, lock down borders permanently, and deprive residents even further of quality knowledge and trust might eventually mean something horrifying countrywide. Myanmar, and the open air prison of Palestine, a stage-setting for security forces training and live weapons industry advertising expo, come to mind.

Philip K. Dick also comes to mind, one of my favorite science fiction authors, whose stories have been popularized by Hollywood movies that strip out almost all his philosophical content and replace it with action heroes and fight scenes. PKD’s stories deal with questions around defining reality and acting authentically. Ultimately, he banked on the courage of the public and his “secret love of chaos.” Instead of picking identities demanded by the mono-empire’s drop-down menus, we can choose to change daily, or even moment to moment, in our chaotic world. You see a lot of that in the forest or on the beach. Crashing waves, bickering birds, falling trees. Slowly erranding slugs. Happily climbing humans.

I’ll give PKD the last word:

I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

This blog post, Reading ‘The catalyst effect of COVID-19’, a year and a half later, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/11/07/reading-catalyst-effect-covid19-year-half-later/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 44 of 52. I skipped entry 43 due to travel in the last week...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 41 of 52. I took all the photographs during the past workweek. The shots show (variants of) Southern Magnolia trees in West Seattle near the Chelan Cafe.

Circa 2009, when I lived in North Texas, I enjoyed learning about trees with a field guide. I taught myself to distinguish between sycamores, oaks, and so on. That might not seem a big deal to those who grew up taught such things. But for those who grew up in front of glowing screens, stuck in their heads, identifying components of Nature can be a pleasant bridge toward actual reality.

One kind of tree that has stood out to me ever since has been the magnolia. You might have heard of the moonlight and magnolia myth, based on a line from the 1939 Gone with the Wind film. The myth refers to unjust romanticization of the antebellum South, likely alluding to the sweet smell of the tree’s blooming white flower, since the magnolia grows especially in the Southern portions of the US.

Perhaps the best known type of magnolia is the evergreen Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora), native to the US South. In 2009, I wrote a blog post about the biggest Southern Magnolia in Dallas / Fort Worth, which lives at what was then called the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. This summer, I revisited the towering tree and wrote about how sadly, via a sweetheart deal, the City of Fort Worth took the 109-acre park out of the commons (well, city government-controlled commons) and handed it to the BRIT nonprofit, its private management, and its board of directors, who as of a 2019 tax filing included local billionaire Ed Bass. In addition to charging admissions fees, BRIT told the public to stay away from the region’s biggest magnolia by putting up chains and Do not enter, Do not climb signs. But are humans and magnolia trees free to touch elsewhere, possibly in the Pacific Northwest?

To my surprise, I recently noticed that along one of my jogging routes in West Seattle, multiple accessible magnolias grow. My 2008 copy of the National Wildlife Federation’s Field Guide to Trees of North America says that various types of magnolia are native to the United States and Canada. The entire book unfairly leaves Mexico out of North America; I don’t know if Southern Magnolias are native there. The book’s maps (showing US and Canada only) suggest that for the most part, magnolias are local to the US South. That includes the Southern Magnolia species, as you might expect from its name. So what are magnolias doing in Seattle?

The field guide explains that the Southern Magnolia is grown worldwide as an ornamental species. The only West Seattle magnolias I’ve come across so far are on the property of the Chelan Cafe, obscured from some angles by columnar maples. The long-standing restaurant, open since 1938, offers highly tempting but very non-vegan chicken fried steaks and other Southern cuisine, which maybe explains why decorative Southern Magnolias are around the property: to fit the theme.

In the last workweek, I asked a Chelan Cafe employee for more information, and while he didn’t know when and why these particular trees were planted, he said he believes they’re actually dwarf magnolias. Dwarf magnolias are variants of the Southern Magnolia that grow shorter, and are thus easier to plant ornamentally in rigid urban settings. The City of Seattle’s remarkable tree inventory map agrees that the Chelan Cafe magnolias are Southern Magnolias, but doesn’t say if they are or aren’t dwarf magnolias, or any other variant. Meanwhile, Lou Stubecki, who manages Trees for Seattle, the umbrella for the City of Seattle’s urban forestry efforts, told me by email today—I showed Stubecki the same photos you’re seeing on this post—that the plants look like the Southern Magnolia cultivar called “Little Gem.” They’re shorter in stature and have smaller leaves than the regular Southern Magnolia species. Plot twist: Little Gem and Dwarf Magnolia mean the same thing. Two names for the same variant of the Southern Magnolia.

So in a sentence: Southern Magnolias (at least the dwarf/little gem subtype of them) live in Seattle because in addition to growing natively in the US South (and perhaps elsewhere), they’re also planted decoratively worldwide.

I think two lessons can be drawn from this everyday life Q&A.

First, the public shouldn’t risk taking the commons for granted, whether city- or genuinely public-managed, as the City of Fort Worth’s giveaway of the Botanic Garden shows. Many in the United States who wake up to horrifying “political” realities eventually choose to push them out of mind, limiting themselves to “toxic positivity,” lighthearted conversations, funny memes that are (apparently) apolitical, corporate entertainment, and the like. Rest and recreation are crucial, lighthearted conversations can be lifesavers, and resistance doesn’t have to mean sorting through terrifying data all day every day. However, I don’t think just putting scary topics on permanent ignore is a solution either, despite what the latest ’60s-esque quotes might claim about personal comfort. Injustice crops up in our neighborhoods already and will continue to do so, possibly taking our favorite trees down with it.

Second, states internationally employ a startlingly high degree of complexity and violence (or threats thereof) to control how such entities as plants are moved around worldwide. In my own efforts to emigrate, I’ve read through a lot of bureaucratic Canadian documents to try to determine if bringing my houseplants across the border by car would be permissible. The closest I got to an answer was that it would depend on the whims of the particular CBSA border guard, who would most likely wave my little green friends through as typical houseplants; but, that wasn’t certain, since the plants I take care of, while quotidian, nevertheless aren’t on Canada’s list of “automatically approved” species. (I’m now thinking I’ll go to the Netherlands anyway.) I can’t find anything intrinsically wrong with the concept of societies knowledgeably monitoring their geographic borders and responsibly regulating the movement of plants, which after all could qualify as invasive species or carry contagious pests. But like the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, understandings of why and how plants should be spread or constrained was stolen from the public over centuries and placed into the hands of states regulating ultimately on behalf of corporate supranational power. Consider this astonishing excerpt from human rights activist Heather Marsh’s 2016 blog post The supranational empire:

For almost one hundred percent of human history, people lived in autonomous, networked tribes. Their feats of exploration and the knowledge handed down over generations were equal to or greater than more complex societies, even in highly specialized areas. The medicinal knowledge of the Kallawaya in pre and post Inca society included brain surgery in 700 CE and using quinine to cure malaria before anyone else. The navigation and seafaring skill of the Polynesians brought them to over 25 million square kilometres of territory between Easter Island, New Zealand and Hawaii and also took them to America and possibly close to Antarctica. Polynesians and probably many others were not following or seeking food. They explored even when their survival needs were all met. Kallawaya still travel great distances to share their knowledge and skill, not because they need to but because it is their accepted social responsibility to do so. Kallawaya traditional knowledge includes uses for almost a thousand plant species and Polynesian traditional knowledge allows them to navigate using 220 stars. All of this knowledge was preserved in oral tradition for hundreds or thousands of years and was shared by the tribe, held by those with the interest and aptitude to learn it.

Try explaining public sovereignty/knowledge (when it exists) to a CBSA border guard giving you grief about the safe snake plant rising from your floorboard. Some ministries and bureaucrats do excellent work, of course, but ultimately, states and especially corporations have snatched knowledge away from members of the public, who often no longer know that they don’t know the details of, say, trade or FATCA agreements controlling cross-country shipments of currency or plants. That leaves us stuck with semi-opaque bureaucratic rules, the caprices of individual enforcers, and worse. Self-governance is violated or impaired. Thankfully, in many cases, our understandings and power have changed for the better across the last decade due to journactivists (journalist + activist) spreading quality information, human rights defenders putting their lives on the line, and other forces.

Finally, I’ve visited the Washington Park Arboretum only once, but readers interested in Seattle trees might find it a great place to go. I hope to check out the arboretum again soon. Below, let’s branch out to other items:

News blasts: Just some hyperlinks…

In the interest of time and brevity, I’m omitting important items from the past workweek regarding the United States, tech updates, and the worldwide trade economy collapse/change.

For next weekend, I aim to post about Belarus. But if you want a head start, check out these two writings from Charter97.org, editor in chief Natalya Radina. Amnesty International named Radina a prisoner of conscience after her 2010 arrest for “organizing mass disorder” (reporting favorably on pro-democracy protests by the opposition to Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko). She’s now an exile in Poland and said in 2011, when the Committee to Protect Journalists gave her an award, that “all of Belarus today is a big prison” because of, among other reasons, “foreign indifference.”

I’ll leaf it at that!

This blog post, Why are Southern Magnolia trees in Seattle? by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/17/why-southern-magnolia-trees-seattle/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is entry 41 of 52. I took all the photographs during the past workweek. The shots...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 40 of 52. I skipped weeks 37, 38, and 39.

Note: My two entries in August providing sleep tips (Part 1 and Part 2) recommended sleep lab founder Matt Walker’s book Why We Sleep. But it turns out the book is sketchy. In November 2019, Moscow-based independent researcher Alexey Guzey, who has a background in economics and math, posted a devastating critique of Walker’s bestseller, which Guzey put together across two months (and updated most recently in April 2021). I updated my two sleep tips posts with this information. I regret the blunder and suggest checking out Guzey’s critique.

When confronting a challenge, I often throw myself into it, paying attention to educational materials on the subject only concurrently, not in advance. It was this way with substitute-teaching or volunteering with Food Not Bombs. “Take these to the dish pit,” a Seattle FNB non-leader leader said during the last decade, handing me dirty trays as we cleaned a Thai buffet in exchange for surplus food to redirect to the dispossessed, including some of our own number. “What’s a dish pit?” I asked. Looking back, such incidents are amusing moments, but at the time, they can be embarrassing, painful. It’s what happens when you throw yourself into things. Thankfully, if a person sticks with something—and has an inquisitive, adaptable mind that stays out of ruts—improvement also happens.

For leaving the United States, I knew if I continued comparing countries via watching youtube videos, and kept on musing endlessly about possibilities, I’d never get anywhere (literally). That’s why, while messing around with Canada’s Express Entry eligibility estimator, I decided to, among other actions, just go take the computer-based IELTS General exam in San Diego to prove English proficiency as required of non-students seeking permanent residency in the northern nation. I crammed for two days and, as expected, aced the reading and speaking sections, but made a sole mistake in the listening part (you hear audio texts only once, so no wandering attention nor confusion with the test format allowed!) and—I bungled the writing component. Despite a summa cum laude bachelor’s—a double-major in philosophy and, wait for it, writing—and despite years and years of paid freelance writing, including multiple news media publications, standardized writing tests and I simply don’t get along. Long ago, I similarly bombed the GRE’s writing section, repeatedly! Yeah, shove it, standardized tests.

I took the IELTS General on September 9 (see previous post); my test report form, dated September 11, eventually arrived in my PO Box showing the following scores: 8.5 overall, 9 reading, 9 speaking, 8.5 listening, and 7.5 writing. Since higher IELTS General scores help a non-student migrant gain admission to Canada and a handful of other Anglosphere countries, I got grumpy about that last grade, and looked to see what my options were for vengeance.

Turns out, there’s a procedure called Enquiry on Results, or equivalently, for the sake of SEO keyword stuffing, Inquiry on Results or simply EoR. Within six weeks of a test report form’s date, an IELTS test-taker can get a section(s) re-marked, for, of course, a fee.

Anecdotal reports suggest EoR cannot lower your score; however, I couldn’t find official documentation from IELTS authorities proving that’s the policy. Google-savvy and forum participants suggested official documentation doesn’t exist, at least not online. I thought briefly about phoning the IELTS authorities overseas, but then decided, whatever, it fits my general knowledge of academia that it’s unlikely for EoR to lower my score, only keep it the same or raise it. Make no mistake, these myriad migration paperwork hurdles have the distinctive reek of academia/intelligentsia. Well, my destination thoughts were shifting from Canada to the Netherlands anyway. Better just to wing it, to purchase an Enquiry on Results for my writing section. YOLO!

I called the testing center and was asked to email the director with EoR in the subject line. I did. After some back-and-forth, my EoR request was officially in and paid for on October 4. Pretty ironic: the first task on the IELTS General’s writing section tells candidates to type an everyday letter, say to a newspaper or in order to complain to a company—and here I was, asking for that task to be re-graded, by means of me writing email letters with the testing center staff, communicating with perfect competence.

The higher-up graders re-marked my writing section and by email I received the new, or rather, not new, score in a PDF on October 6. You can see the outcome in the screenshot starting this post. My score didn’t change a smidge. Blegh. Vengeance denied. Had I prepared better, I would have spent more time with official practice materials or free/low cost courses specifically on the IELTS General writing section available on MOOC platforms such as edX, Udemy, Coursera, etc. Because as we all know, exams don’t evaluate your writing or English proficiency. They test how well you take the test. But the point was to throw myself into the actual emigration process. Psychology score, A+. Home economics score…F.

Well Canada, you and I had a few flirty dates, but it looks like there won’t be any more nights out on the town for the two of us. I don’t have enough points to meet your high standards. That’s okay, I have gray—oops, grey…er, grijs—in my stubble now; I’m no teen who can’t handle rejection. Besides, you have mining companies with active licenses for profiteering off the genocide in Ethiopia’s Tigray region. And your money-laundering transnational criminals in Vancouver are protected by Chinese spies. *Hangs up*

Personal update: Pfthird Pfizer Pfjab Pfgoing Pfine

This past workweek in West Seattle, antivaxx and antimask protesters waved signs during five o’clock traffic in my neighborhood. Aside from the bald dude in the, what’s that Dutch word, *scrolls up*, grijs hoodie, who, though he lacks camo pants, sorta resembles a typical contractor you’d find working for a company like Craft International (a merk firm and friend of spy biz Stratfor with a mysterious habit of hanging around events like the Boston Bombing)—I have no idea who the grijs dude is, just sayin’ he looks a bit creepy—it seemed a fairly ordinary group of Seattle rightwingers of the new school. I stopped my car in the parking lot behind these vaccine hesitant folks to get a photo for the blog entry you’re reading now.

Giving their respiration a wide berth, I walked to a suitable site to hold my phone up at ’em. Seemingly in unison, the women chorused, “Are you going to write about us?!?!” The ;) ;) @}->– @}->– flattery in their voices twisted this writer’s face into an involuntary smile. Like thundering storm clouds above a parched man in a desert dropping rain: acid rain. I told them Yes and continued thumbing my phone. Then one protester lady asked: “Are you going to write ill of us?” Interesting choice of words, there. They asked where to read, so above the noisy traffic I shouted: “DouglasLucas dot com!” Maybe they’ll comment and tell us more about Mister Grijs Hoodie.

A satisfactory photo achieved, I headed back to my car by the same circuitous route in reverse. I crossed the street. Suddenly I was passed by Mister Grijs Hoodie! He had his bald head down, his face sternly focused, and he was powerfully striding alone, whither I know not. I should specify, relative to being a Craft International employee (which I’m including almost entirely for joke and to link readers to stuff), it’s far more likely he’s a complete nobody, for instance a run-of-the-mill bargain bin patriarchy boss of some local Kik group for definitely-not-advisable hookups (read: loss-leads), which, as #OpDeathEaters has been pointing out since 2014, is, like, same diff, or can be, you know, more precisely, the everyday consequences of supranational pedo propaganda from above swamping populations with dolla dolla bill masculinist ideology rebranded to sound like freedom. Not to mention human trafficking. [Hey! Are you an editor or other potential payor reading my blog? Find academics vouching for #OpDeathEaters in that same diff link. That’s the completely contingent order of things—for now!]

A surprisingly high portion of the cars passing the protest were repeatedly honked in favor. Not surprisingly, those one-note vehicles tended to be jacked-up pickups with needless stickers of an out-of-character Calvin urinating. I saw only one person indicate disapproval: a driver doing their daily grind, gripping the steering wheel with one hand and with the other, like a time-warped Roman emperor, presenting an unmistakable thumbs-down.

The wild hyperlocal antivaxx advertising blitz appearing in my neighborhood did not detain me from getting my third Pfizer (booster) jab Friday, courtesy of my public education employment. Although I follow news on twitter, email lists, and elsewhere too much from my own good, even I almost missed last Monday’s study in The Lancet, among the globe’s most prestigious medical journals—a study written up by The Hill. To oversimplify, the research indicates Pfizer-BioNTech protection against novel coronavirus infection drops significantly—approximately in half!—four to six months after the second jab, with the specifics varying depending on the scenario, mutation, etc. Thus, boosters. As with, say, the tetanus shot. According to the CDC and FDA in September, certain Team Pfizer folks can get the third jab once a minimum of six months since their second jabs has elapsed. Hopefully better vaccines (here’s looking at you, University of Washington) will be approved soon and become widely accessible for all, so we can be done with these less than ideal, but still very helpful, interim measures.

I embed an image from the exam room not to boast, but to model good behavior, to encourage people to get vaccinated. Of course I know Pfizer and other Big Pharma companies have horrifying histories of wrongdoing (an easy peasy first stop, Wikipedia criticism section footnotes, when they exist), but the risks thereof are, in my case, far less than the risks of suffering COVID-19. The Pfizer press release about the third jab has the expected advertising but also a lot of interesting links for people who might want to dig.

I’m too exhausted by the coronavirus vaccination debate to go into more detail, but the big picture might be helpful: if you don’t experience something firsthand (while knowing what you’re looking at, too), you have to decide whether to trust information from others. Documents may be more reliable than most people, but even with documents, you have to trust they’re real and not forgeries. How do we accomplish this as humans?

Like we always have: with trust networks. As far as I know, that’s a term that kinda originated with cryptography, but the phrase intuitively makes sense, right? My unfairly overworked primary care physician, whose performance is usually stellar, recommended the bestseller Why We Sleep to me (see note above starting this entry). I assumed she had read it closely, when probably—I’ll ask next time I see her, because mapping trust networks, even for oneself, is of life-and-death importance—she heard about it on a podcast or something, while HIIT sprinting or Wim Hof breathing. I presume she then passed the recommendation from the podcast (or whatever) to me, and despite the intuitive misgivings I initially felt about Matt Walker’s marketing image, I got swept-up a bit in his glitz. I mostly listened to Why We Sleep, while driving or exercising, meaning I didn’t read individual sentences in print, a way of reading that makes it easier to be careful and critical. I just had it on in the background to learn by osmosis. So I got fooled.

From what I’ve read so far, Walker’s never directly acknowledged his critic, the Moscow-based independent researcher Alexey Guzey.

https://twitter.com/TheBoobla/status/1425379218171457541

Having read most of the devastating critique by Guzey, who ended up on international news himself to tear apart Walker, I lowered the glitzy guy’s reliability score as a science source in my personal trust network, and updated my blog entries accordingly. Actually, early on, I emailed Walker’s press person once or twice with various questions—on twitter, Walker goes by @sleepdiplomat, and says he wants to spread his message everywhere—and never got a reply; he could have been occupied, of course, but sometimes, mentioning my news publications gets me at least a politer version of He’s too busy for you (e.g., I’ll ask him!! <3 <3 <3 and then they never do). Based on how my primary care physician reacts when I ask her about this, I’ll adjust her trust network reliability score (especially on the topic of book recommendations) down, up, or not at all. Same for whatever podcast (or other source) she got her Why We Sleep info from. Unlike cryptographers, I don’t have actual numbers scoring people in my head (each person would have multiple scores, one per topic). It’s just something I think humans do all the time, semi-automatically, unless they’re effectively brain dead. (Oops, that’s rude to actual brain-dead people, who, uh, won’t be reading this.)

Imagine if IELTS and academia tested people, not on avoiding typos during unrealistic, one-shot English exams, but on the everyday life-and-death practice of adjusting trust networks. You know, critical reasoning and media literacy classes. In fact, spy agencies (public or private) use trust networks too. For a few years, I read thousands of Stratfor emails, and their staff was expected, when relaying to internal email lists the insights they heard from their sources, to give each source a letter grade to indicate their reliability (as well as other information about the source, the reliability of the particular insight, timeliness, and so on). There were similar trust network instances in the zillions of State Department cables and additional public, classified, or otherwise restricted documents I’ve read. We all do this when evaluating information. It’s just that the spies’ goals are antisocial, and mine, and hopefully yours, are prosocial. BTW, spying these days doesn’t merely mean cloak-and-dagger stuff, like car-bombing journalists critical of Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, as in this April 2012 conversation: a 24-minute excerpt of the bugged recording of Lukashenko’s then-spymaster was published by EUobserver in January 2021 here (see also the 12-page English transcript or the 8-page Russian transcript; this related DW article in English too). Spying also means high-level marketing crap like Stratfor employees writing the majority of this or that article released by your favorite corporate media outlets. That’s an observation still true yet a bit past its sell-by date, since now the Dems openly run CIA and military spy candidates; heck, might as well openly put them on mainstream media mastheads while they’re at it. (If your bar is lesser evil, explain it not to me, but imagine how you’d get ratio’d for explaining it to actual torture victims who use twitter.)

I’ll close this section with three more observations. First, I know wonderful people who are far too busy (perhaps a single mother or a prisoner with limited or no computer access) to do the countless hours of reading required to really evaluate, say, scientific papers. So they often have to go by, for instance, their affinity for a rando shiny podcaster, because again, we all use trust networks. What else are we going to do, not look up information, not sift through reading options by some means? I understand, but get slightly annoyed, when twitter radicals call these people fascists; in a remote-controlled (autogenocide) way they are, but that’s like shooting fish in a barrel, when radicals could try instead to save them from the peril (by aiming at the top authoritarians cuz else, regrowing hydra heads). Similarly for academics who’ve lived their whole lives in the ivory tower and have never stepped foot in a prison, long-term psychiatric lockup facility, non-Western country (me!), and on and on. We’re all in this sort of boat, just for different topics.

Second, a few short years ago it was fashionable in the hacktivism/transparency realm to fund vaporware websites with a Great Man on top supposedly to change things, but these vaporware projects didn’t employ trust networks (among other problems), just glitzy marketing. We were supposed to trust our emergency-based need to get wrapped up in trusting their machismo. GetGee, the global commons for public data, allows users to employ trust networks when looking at research.

Third, if disinfo feels hopeless, remember it’s startling how effective a) history and b) reframing things can be. For instance, if someone’s para about vaccine passports, you can show them international smallpox vaccination records for US citizens from more than fifty years ago, or reframe the concept by saying, hey, to go into a bar serving alcohol, or to pilot a two-ton metal box powered by explosions down the freeway, we have to show age passports. And yes, I know both the conventional and alternative medical industries can be untrustworthy (see links on my blogroll), everything around ‘securitized’ border enforcement too, and that COVID-19’s origins deserve more investigation; but, uninformed speculation is cheap and funding investigative journalism (which sometimes requires travel to do well) is expensive.

So yeah, I got my third Pfizer jab Friday, and Sunday, 48 hours later, pfno pfside pfeffects pfso pfar.

Blog update

Recently I received a donation for my blog from a reader—thank you! (Hic haec hoc, huius huius huius!) The donation encourages me to keep blogging. For anyone else who might be interested in donating, here are the donation options, to which I just added snailmail.

This past month I made tinkery updates across the website, mostly under the hood; some, though, you might notice. Do tell if you spot any problems or have any suggestions. I overhauled the blogroll (see right sidebar, up) for the first time in years and years. I replaced http:// links across my site with absolute https:// links. Digitizing my belongings to prepare for emigration, I came across a nice print ad for the 2017 bookstore talk I did, and added that to the in the media section, where it looks, um, good! I grumble about the monkey see, monkey do requirement of social proof in marketing (completely contingent social order…for now!), but, whatever, it’s good to have more, how shall I say, self-esteem or something like that, and enjoy these sorts of thingymaboppers, at least while I’m still a loudmouth resident of the loudmouth United States!

By the way, the bookstore I spoke at is called Burning Books; it’s in Buffalo, New York. After over ten years, they’re now expanding, more than tripling their floor plan and adding designated event space, all without leaving their location. Everything will be fully accessible, too. Below, their fundraising video and gofundme link.

Reminds me, YAC.News has a fundraiser going also, as well as a community Discord currently open to new users.

Because these blog posts usually take more than a day to write when they’re lengthy, and because offline readers have advised me that shorter posts would be easier for them to take in (time-wise), I need to figure out how to change this blog, and how to modify my time and energy investments in my overall writing more generally. A few weeks ago, I was working on a very long post about Beto O’Rourke and realized I really need to rethink my efforts. Diverting huge chunks of my time and energy away from my longform fiction- and nonfiction-writing goals to pin down, by skimming seemingly identical NPR articles at 3 a.m., the exact date the Del Rio international bridge closed during the ongoing refugee crisis, and who actually issued the order to close it (various local/regional mini-authorities stumbled over each other trying implausibly to claim the ugly credit in the media spotlight), is fascinating, but maybe not the best sort of time-sink every single weekend. I do enjoy writing journalism (especially were I able to do more investigative work uncovering as-yet-unknown ‘revelations’). And summarizing/analyzing other journalists’ work in reframed language weekly is, to borrow from Pokémon Go, super effective, biz-wise and persuasion-wise, in terms of staying in readers’ minds on a regular basis. For example, these posts not infrequently convert into incoming messages from people I haven’t heard from in awhile, asking me what’s up and what do I think of xyz popular issue. Yet such posts should just be a sole theater of war among several, not my only battlefield.

Then there’s the damage to psychophysical health from end-gaining (sacrificing healthy means to ensure ends are achieved, which might compare with emergency-based structures). To write something called lengthy, like this blog post, it helps the writer tremendously to keep the material in short-term memory (RAM for computerheads) while working. Especially if the content’s not strictly outlined (this piece is pretty outlined). The more creative, the more the creator needs to have all the data (even imaginative data) for the piece readily accessible in their minds, even to the point of boiling, such that the energy must be discharged (mixing my engineering metaphors). Taking breaks to tend to houseplants, do the dishes, or complete other sanity- and health-maintaining tasks risks losing the data’s salience. So you find yourself with a hacker hunch, crooked over the laptop, flies circling the sink, and Dutch roommates, if you have those, perhaps eyeing you suspiciously. Good luck with the 9-5 schedule, too. While potentially liberating, such pedal-to-the-metal practices can be risky, especially if an inexperienced and/or broke person doesn’t intersperse them with rest and/or has insufficient social support.

The problem is particularly acute for me in terms of creating a freelance/entrepreneurial business plan to meet migration requirements of the Dutch American Friendship Treaty. I haven’t picked the Netherlands for certain yet, but I imagine I will have in roughly two or three weeks, at which point I’ll buy a one-way overseas plane ticket months ahead of schedule to give me salient countdown timer motivation. (Psychology score, A+; home economics…) The business plan for writing in the Netherlands is mandatory. That’s why, despite frequent exercise and cooking super-healthy veggie-rich meals at home, I’ve been suffering moodiness and lethargy lately: much of it revolves around my fear that I’ll soon have to devote most of my time and energy, i.e. my life, to content-marketing, not the reading and writing I’d rather do. Though it’d perhaps be fun to run a content-marketing business in the Netherlands for vegan restaurants, free software firms, and antipsychiatry / critical psychiatry service providers called something like, Idealistic Content Marketing (how do you say that in Dutch?). With long-term substitute-teaching assignments and CELTA training, I was able to squeze some blog posts and fiction-writing in, but it wasn’t easy, and I found that eventually the employment system—at least in the United States—beats avocational activities out of overworked employees. Optimizing routines, honing goals + plans, and the like can help tremendously, and cutting costs through, say, miraculously finding good roommates, but, also, let’s not kid ourselves.

To close off this section, let’s consider how I’ll blog for this year’s remaining 12 weeks. The last post will of course sum up my 2021 year of blogging. The penultimate entry will explain with bullet points how I made it through a full calendar year, for the first time since 2013, without a manic episode or psych lockup. That leaves 10 weeks. Then there are three series I started in 2021 with a single post and never finished: Meet new president Joe Biden, part 1 of 2; Views of happiness: Journey versus destination, part one of two (this should actually be three parts); and Review of education books, part one of two (this should actually be four parts). That’s six posts needed to conclude those series. Leaving four weeks. I want to post about trees in Seattle, and maybe finish the Beto O’Rourke URL-as-tome. That would leave two weeks … I also wanted to do news blasts for Colombia, and I never finished with the Haitian presidential assassination news blasts, but no one has solved that murder yet, so nobody else finished the story, either.

Division of labor makes an interesting way to look at this business plan, life plan challenge. The titles change, but in the forms of media-writing I know, including print-only fiction and journalism, there are usually four roles in my experience (call them what you want): researcher at the most granular level, then writer, then editor, then producer at the most birds eye-view level. I need better self-production skills, so I imagine there’s, if not an app for that, then quality courses I could check out on the various MOOC platforms, and book recommendations I could ask friends/mentors for. Just not any books by disgraced sleep diplomat Matt Walker.

Maybe the best plan for my blog in 2022 would be the following formula, to which there could be occasional exceptions: one observation from daily life, one philosophical/political/whatever lesson drawn from it, and then an international news blast or two. Heck, maybe even a music and fiction section after the news blasts! (See, I keep adding stuff…) If anyone has thoughts, suggestions, or requests for this blog, I’d love to hear them!

News blasts: US, China, Worldwide Trade Collapse/Change

Get ready, because these are a doozy.

United States. On September 23, the Washington Post published a lengthy op-ed by influential neocon Robert Kagan, cofounder of the notorious warmonger thinktank Project for the New American Century. Kagan’s op-ed is titled “Our constitutional crisis is already here” (full text at Cryptome) and argues that, unless his health fails entirely, Trump will be the next Republican presidential candidate. Kagan says come November 2024, the United States will reach its biggest crisis since 1861, with widespread mass violence and a federal system breaking completely. He blames the cults of personality surrounding demagogues for the impending doom, and just like the Washington Post itself, he makes the evergreen claim that democracy will die, though Kagan prefers November 2024 as the date to put on the coroner’s report.

While we’re still forced to work, in some senses, alongside liberal states against outright fascism because innovative alternatives to the liberal order need greater amplification and effort and funding (and uh, commissions from editors) and knowledge of self, health, and wealth—the sneak attack, the edutainment style returns like that, my philosophy keeps it plain and simple, the kingdom of hip-hop is within you—it might be a worthy endeavor to introduce some rigor upon these sales slogans about democracies dying and failed states. Nation-state is an incoherent package-deal concept, but to roll with it for a while, the idea of an international order of liberal nation-states is typically traced back to 1648’s Peace of Westphalia. The Peace of Whatphalia? I must have been roaming the hallways that day in AP European History. What criteria must such liberal nation-state countries meet to count as successful or failed, alive or dead? There are of course readable scholarly books on such subjects, for those with time, i.e., not salaried at the Washington Post or Idealistic Content Marketing.

China.

Youtube offers plenty of videos from US individuals who’ve relocated to China as obedient reflectors, playing by the rules and keeping their mouths shut. Footage from these moneymaking individuals suggest they have a pretty good life in China, happy but helpless. Well, good for them. Now let’s talk about the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, and the propaganda war around it in the United States. Trump, who tweeted in April 2013 that China owns DC, won reactionary hearts by telling his followers he would resist the Chinese government’s encroachments on the United States, but he himself has been a bigly CCP beneficiary. In October 2020, Forbes put together a helpful guide to The Donald’s debt, which astonishingly totaled at least a billion dollars. (And you thought your student loan debt was bad!) The Forbes guide looks at multiple Trump properties, but let’s just consider the 1290 Avenue of the Americas location. More than two hundred million dollars for that New York City property came from the CCP-owned Bank of China. That bank says the debt was sold to Vornado Realty Trust. Maybe so. But without transparency, maybe Bank of China is still a creditor on the building, if say, after the sale, Vornado sold it right back. Opaque transactions we can’t audit don’t help explain. Whoever the current creditors are, guess when the debt comes due: November 2022, the mid-term elections. There are more connections between Trump and China, such as his pledge- and likely constitution-violating hiring of firms with majority CCP ownership in early 2017, and the eighteen trademarks granted to Donald and Ivanka Trump in late 2018 by guess who, the Chinese government. That’s the reality, while they’re telling their fans they hate China. As the top predators block their constituents on social media, they party together and laugh about you wearing their T-shirts, didn’t you know? Meanwhile the US left is misled by garbage-news from channels loyal to the CCP and Putin (see here and especially threads here and here). Note it’s both obviously bad Trump and wrongly beloved Obama who sided with Putin to bring us to this brickbat BRICS point. A busy and hardworking activist asked me the other day to explain what the problem with fake news website The Grayzone is. “Red-brown alliance,” I started off succinctly, meaning the longstanding and continuing pattern of Commies allying with Nazis (see news blast above regarding the thankless duty of grumbling anarchists, when forced to pick between the two, to support the liberal order over the outright fascists, while still shoving reframing, truth-bombs, and nonviolent/self-defense other bom—nevermind, into faces). Grayzone founder and head honcho, your local Assad apologist Max Blumenthal, successfully pressured the Southern Poverty Law Center to take down this article. I dare him to try my website, I’ve shielded myself with lengthy paragraphs! The article explains, on the Internet Archive at least, how presently, fascist propagandists like Steve Bannon use intermediatry hops to convert left-wing resentment (paging Nietzsche, or better, The Creation of Me, Them, and Us on the struggle between reflectors and negative images in Hegelian setups) into unwitting support for Putin-, CCP-, Assad-, etc. aligned talking points. As the first track of Lupe Fiasco’s Birth of the Cool album propounds, check your ingredients before you overdose on the cool. Might be a bit Tatmadaw when those discussing the CCP’s horrifying Uyghur genocide find themselves told by USians that it’s a “Karen” move to feel cross-border, cross-sect empathy: “Yeah, tell us again Karen, how the Uyghur genocide actually affects you” and the like. Nope, empathy across distances is a good thing. Finally, whataboutism is increasingly not accepted online, so I don’t have to put a long disclaimer in here about multiple awful genocides caused by the US.

Well, if there’s anyone still reading after that giga-paragraph, such was my understanding prior to this blast, so now we crank the volume! I’m basing the below largely on the September 28 YAC.news article, “Prelude to war: China’s plot for world domination,” and the links therein. Heather Marsh’s 2014 post “World War III: Pillage and plunder” provides some helpful historical background about power shifting from the British empire / Five Eyes / etc. to the Chinese empire, and then her 2020 post “The catalyst effect of COVID-19,” offers more crucial background, regarding the present attempt at a planetary mono-empire, transcending the Cold War binary and dangerously trying to sublate us all into obedient nothing-humans. Back to the YAC.news post.

The excellent article explains “China’s goal is global ideological and economic domination. To achieve that, it is spreading propaganda, expanding information operations, amassing economic and social influence, and sabotaging democratic political systems.” The article gives backstory and context such as “The CCP has had a monopoly on power in China since Mao Zedong first obtained control in 1949 after a grueling civil war. The CCP currently has more than ninety million members, not including non-Chinese loyalists scattered worldwide. Over 70 percent of the CCP’s members are men” but in 2019, more than 42% of new members are women, contemporary gender parity in joining authoritarian destruction. Here’s a key paragraph from YAC.news:

The CCP does not seek ideological conformity but rather power, security, and global influence. President Xi promotes China’s authoritarian governance as being superior to democratic political systems and seeks to spread “Chinese wisdom” throughout the world as a “contribution to mankind.” Xi speaks of China’s prosperity as proof that the path to prosperity does not lead through democracy. Unlike the United States and the fallen Soviet Union, China is currently not spreading its ideology through the installment of authoritarian strongmen or through military conquest. Instead, it promotes itself as “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence”. Chinese officials commonly speak of the “right” of nations to choose their political systems, often advocating the right of countries to be ruled by nondemocratic regimes. When paired with China’s economic and political measures China’s policy reinforces authoritarian regimes and weakens democratic systems around the world.

There’s much more to the YAC.news article. Chinese spies protecting Vancouver money launderers, CCP (and Russian) support for Assad and the Myanmar junta [also Lukashenko in Belarus, noted by YAC elsewhere], and People’s Liberation Army strategy—the PLA recently allied with the Taliban as the Chinese have been taking possession of abandoned US armament in Afghanistan, where resistance continues (now hear this and consider). In July, China threatened to nuke Japan. If you think you’ve heard bellicose rhetoric from Texans, watch the CCP video embedded below that went out to two million subscribers (source one, source two):

Speaking of war, note that like the physically unfit Trump, China is campaigning against effeminate men and other non-machismo experiments with beauty. China’s TV regulator this month banned the “abnormal aesthetics” of “sissy men”; in February, Wang Hailin, the screenwriter vice president of China’s National Film Literature Association, ranted in moronic binary form: “If a man pays too much attention to his outfits and his makeup, it means that he is trying to avoid responsibility and our society is going backward. …If we have more sporty and manly men, it means that our society is moving forward and improving.” Gee, so simple even authoritarians can understand it, unlike, say, cutting their toenails.

The Chinese government harasses Chinese nationals on Canadian soil. The Toronto Star reported last month that a Chinese student located in Canada retweeted three posts critical of the CCP or against its interests, from his fake-name twitter account with only two followers. That was all it took for the Chinese authorities to contact him (in Canada) and his family (in China) with threats. They told him to delete the posts or “face trouble.”

In November 2019, the Toronto Sun detailed how dozens of Chinese in the Vancouver area are getting in person visits on Canadian soil from “Chinese officials” due to their anti-CCP online posts. “When we meet in my office, they want the blinds closed,” Brad West, mayor of Port Coquitlam (just outside Vancouver), told the paper. “They’re that fearful.” He said the Canadian “government has been doubling down on the same approach [to this problem] for decades now and the proof is in the pudding. There hasn’t been a change and things have gotten worse.” The article concludes with the mayor saying, “Maybe I’m being too simplistic in thinking, but when dealing with a bully, there does come a point where you just have to stand up for yourself.”

Where else is the CCP harassing Chinese nationals? In the United States. In July 2020, Reuters reported on FBI director Christopher Wray’s explanation of China’s “Fox Hunt” program in an hour-long presentation to the conservative militarists at the Hudson Institute. The program sees Chinese citizens, some also US green card holders or US citizens, who are anti-CCP dissidents, finding themselves blackmailed on US soil—told “return to China promptly or commit suicide” for example—by CCP “emissaries” suddenly showing up and using the Fox Hunt targets’ family members back in China and even in the United States “for leverage.” At the Hudson Institute, Wray said there are “hundreds of [Fox Hunt] victims” in the United States, and the CCP forces use “a variety of means of coercion” against them. “If you use your imagination,” Wray said, “you’re not going to be far off.”

The FBI director points out that any Chinese company is required to give the CCP any information its requests on anything. That includes data of USians using Tik Tok, owned by a Chinese firm that tries to censor mention of the Xinjiang concentration camps where Uyghur and other minorities are incarcerated by the CCP for indoctrination, torture, rape, and death. The CCP has also created an international state-sponsored organ trafficking industry.

Canada and the United States aren’t the only places China’s influence activities reach. As linked in the YAC.news article, intelligentsia guy Larry Diamond and other intelligentsia guy Orville Schell, wrote a November 2018 report at the influential conservative Hoover Institution think tank, on the Stanford campus, about China reaching beyond its borders in nefarious ways. The report’s 48-page second appendix, titled Chinese influence activities in select countries, draws on typical intelligentsia sources (journalists, academics, bureaucrats, yadda) to list example after example of CCP influence and harassment operations in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. Quoting from the second appendix:

China seeks to make itself more palatable to democratic societies by using many of the customary vehicles of soft power—such as state-funded research centers, media outlets, university ties, and people-to-people exchange programs […] In conjunction with the dramatic expansion of Chinese economic interests abroad, the Chinese government has focused its influence initiatives on obscuring its policies and suppressing, to the extent possible, voices beyond China’s borders that are critical of the CCP. Targeting the media, academia, and the policy community, Beijing seeks to penetrate institutions in democratic states that might draw attention or raise obstacles to CCP interests, creating disincentives for any such resistance. Chinese economic activity is another important tool in this effort. Beijing is particularly skilled at using economic leverage to advance political goals in the realm of ideas […]

[For Australia, for instance:] In June 2017, a joint investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Fairfax Media revealed that the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) had warned the major political parties that two of Australia’s most generous political donors had “strong connections to the Chinese Communisty Party” and that their “donations might come with strings attached.”

YAC.news published a separate article on September 21, “China’s war on global education,” which says: “The Chinese government is actively working towards undermining academic freedom globally. Currently the CCP is influencing academic discussions, monitoring Chinese students abroad, and censoring scholarly inquiry. Chinese nationals have reportedly had to alter their behavior and self-censor to avoid threats, harassment, and authoritative backlash. Individuals who show interest in democracy, pro-democracy movements, or criticize the ruling class are monitored and reported on by CCP informants and spies.” To help combat such CCP coercion on university campuses, Human Rights Watch in March 2019 issued a 12-point code of conduct (3-page PDF). It advises measures such as speaking out in defense of academic freedom, recording instances of CCP infrigements on same, disclosing Chinese funding, and more.

The September 28 YAC.news “Prelude to war” article concludes:

China is not only on the warpath to subvert democracy but also pervert our global social contract built around human rights which was designed to in theory protect us from the blood lust of tyrants after the second world war. While the weakening of the human rights charter has been underway for more than half a century by despots that go unchallenged or democratic countries such as the United States that violate it with impunity, China’s plot for power aims to outright erase it. […]

Any effort to combat the CCP’s growing influence and reach must start with cracking down on transnational organized crime, especially that originating from the Golden Triangle and being spearheaded by China-linked Triads. Aggressive anti-money laundering measures need to be put in place across North America and Europe to cut off CCP funding. Anti-money laundering measures must include an international crackdown on illicit or suspicious real-estate and luxury asset acquisition across major metropolitan cities such as Vancouver, Canada, San Francisco, U.S., and London, U.K, among many others. A serious inquiry and crackdown on the vast network of Triad linked – Chinese diaspora based businesses used as fronts for human trafficking, such as spas, beauty salons, and general stores is also necessary. Any effort to curb China’s dark money should avoid arousing xenophobic sentiments, which would only serve to distance potential allies and disenfranchised Chinese in diaspora leading them back to the grip of the CCP. Legislation must also be amended to hold politicians and officials found to be colluding with the CCP judicially accountable. Those actively receiving funds from CCP linked organizations while promoting the party’s interest also need to be subject to transparency measures and held judicially accountable if found complicit […]

In order to secure democracy journalism across democratic countries must regain independence from CCP complicit media moguls and sponsors. Civil society must also be given the tools and training to allow complete transparency on the whereabouts of its funding and any CCP linked connections of its most vocal members. In order to circumvent China’s financial grip, with the Belt and Road Initiative, on financially strained countries, wealthy democratic countries must provide, corruption free, infrastructure development. Accountability and an end to impunity for officials, royals, and wealthy individuals residing in democratic countries must also gain priority to counter China’s narrative of western hypocrisy and instability […]

Currently some democratic states have sent naval assets to the Pacific to curtail CCP expansionist actions however without serious moves at home China grows bolder and stronger. Ultimately if China’s plot is not stopped and democracy is not reinforced the countdown to military confrontation at a global scale is underway.

Go read the whole thing at YAC.news and follow the links, including those in that appendix, so that you remember not to forget.

Worldwide trade economy collapse/change

A year and a half ago, in her post “The catalyst effect of COVID-19,” philosopher Heather Marsh wrote: “We are, or will be, going through the most radical transformation the world has ever seen; people are justly terrified, excited, depressed, heartbroken and hopeful, all at once. […] the [trade] economy is not going to be nearly as important as it was before. This may be unimaginable to people who have been accustomed to framing all of our problems in terms of economics, but think of how religions and states faded as the dominant endogroups [cults, to oversimplify] when new transcendental endogroups appeared. Things that appear essential to society can fade into irrelevance if they are based only on endoreality [cult mindsets, to oversimplify], as economics is. The crash we started the year off with will not simply produce a depression and then recovery. Instead, it will illustrate the fact that economics now is simply an abstracted [consider] power structure with no underlying support in universal reality (like all endoreality). Economics as we know it, is dead. This does not mean it will disappear completely overnight, or that it will not remain in some form in some places, but, like religions, states, families, and other formerly dominant endogroups, it will no longer be the dominant or authoritative power structure in our lives. This is explained in great detail in The Approval Economy which will be published one day.” She then goes on to supply a list of specific opportunities that activists could pursue during the pandemic to establish/defend a world that’s much more exosocial [based on balanced, euphoric interactions rather than predatory, draining transactions].

In Seattle, when I stop by grocery store news-stands for a few moments, the papers are full of the latest headlines about the ongoing implosion of the trade economy. Maybe your area news-stands are similar. Even booksellers are affected, as Quartz reported on September 16: “Publishers are warning sellers and consumers that supply chain issues have forced a major slowdown in book production and threaten a shortage of certain titles for the rest of the year. Supply chain problems have touched almost every aspect of book production, storage, and delivery, mostly as a result of Covid-related bottlenecks. […] because many books are printed in China, the route from printer to the bookstore is currently fraught with bottlenecks. Port congestion, lack of shipping containers, a shortage of dockworkers, and trucking staffing problems are impeding the movement of books from warehouses to store […] publishing delays are likely to hit independent booksellers harder.” On September 13, Tubby & Boo’s, a New Orleans independent bookstore focusing on science fiction and fantasy along with titles of interest to queer communities, put together a 15-tweet thread detailing problems with raw materials, costs of production, distribution/circulation of commodities, and so on.

System collapse — that’s the warning from global supply chain workers according to a September 29 article posted by CNN Business. The piece centers on the joint open letter from International Chamber of Shipping and other shipping industry groups to heads of state attending the United Nations General Assembly last month. The industry organizations asked the UN “that our transport workers are given priority to receive [World Health Organization] recognised vaccines and heads of government work together to create globally harmonised, digital, mutually recognised vaccination certificate and processes for demonstrating health credentials (including vaccination status and COVID-19 test results), which are paramount to ensure transport workers can cross international borders. We also call on the WHO to take our message to health ministries.” The supply chains are expected to buckle further toward the end of the year when employment contracts come up for renewal.

What does trade’s downward spiral mean for how we organize ourselves? Today, wage slavery is compulsory: the completely contingent order of things—for now—is that almost everyone must pick between Employer A or Employer B or Employer C to toil for moneytokens, or feel shame for begging in a world where free essentials aren’t cheerfully shared, or die. Sometimes the authoritarians describe this wage slavery as freedom; other times, they admit it’s compulsory, as in late September, when Gary D. Cohn, chief economic adviser to Donald Trump, also an IBM vice president, told Yahoo Finance that “we need to force people, in many respects, to reenter the workforce.” For more on IBM’s witting complicity with fascists, read investigative journalist Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust: How America’s Most Powerful Corporation Helped Nazi Germany Count the Jews.

I’ll try to make the worldwide trade economy collapse/change a recurring feature of my news blasts. If you feel dismay, remember, as John Donne (sorta) said in other words centuries ago, don’t respond by building emotional walls and blaming yourself for the corporate destruction making our lives difficult. I think I’m taking a little liberty with Mr Donne. Point is, reach out, talk about shame to throw it out the airlock, strengthen yourself, build bridges, and stick up for yourself and others!

Art Blasts: Theodore Sturgeon, Wanda Landowska

Since from now on it might be fun to include blasts, timely and untimely, about all forms of art, let’s look at some fiction and music real quick. Like trying to get a cranky vehicle started, I’ve been having trouble getting my own fiction-writing going as much as I’d like (although it is going, just slowly), so someone (Hoi!) recommend a while back that I do stuff about fiction to build up enthusiasm. Art blasts may help with that. This weekend’s are apropos of nothing; most aren’t timely at all!

Fiction, other) I have a friend who just published a poetry book, and another friend who just sold two fiction tales, but I haven’t read them yet. Sorry for the delay, y’all. I’ll get to your work soon!

Fiction, Theodore Sturgeon) One of my favorite writers is the late Theodore Sturgeon, mostly known for his stories of science fiction and fantasy. His work might be described as a bridge between the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction (circa 1938 – 1946), in which scientists like Isaac Asimov portrayed cerebral, familyless men exploring the universe and saving it nearly singlehandedly with hard rationality, and the New Wave of Science Fiction (1960s and 1970s), in which anti-authoritarian authors, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick, focused on soft sciences (anthropology, sociology, etc.) and promoted/debated counterculture ideals. Sturgeon’s ponderings on love and his lyrical style, seen for instance in his screenplay for the famous Star Trek: TOS Amok Time episode, was a huge influence on the far more famous Ray Bradbury.

This two-minute, 2013 video from Open Road Media, which has been digitizing Sturgeon’s backlist, will vibe you with the author quickly:

The above Sturgeon video and facts have been familiar to me for a long time, but this past week I was delighted to stumble, for the first time, on the last issue of the Steam Engine Time fanzine, from March 2012, which contains a lengthy, well-sourced biographic and analytical essay on Sturgeon’s work by Matthew Davis, and ruminations on Sturgeon’s 1953 story “The World Well Lost” by Dick Jenssen aka Ditmar. Jenssen explores how “The World Well Lost,” written at a time when in the United States homosexuality was still voted by psychiatrists into being a diagnosable mental illness, shows bigoted homophobes as objectifiers obsessed with superficial appearances, while love is shown as a connection between what people have on the inside, regardless of the anatomy of their naughty bits. Before reading Davis’s essay, I already knew a lot about Sturgeon, but his piece told me things even I didn’t know. For instance, Sturgeon wrote for the black-and-white TV show Tales of Tomorrow (1951-1953), which predated The Twilight Zone. I love the latter, but have never seen the former, so I was startled to learn from Davis that Sturgeon wrote the very first Tales of Tomorrow episode, “Verdict from Space.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the full 28 minutes are on youtube, giving me something to watch asap!

Music, Wanda Landowska) At the end of Sturgeon’s best known novel, 1953’s More Than Human, he describes ethereal post-humans inspiring humanity, and one result of the inspiration is “a child Landowska listening to a harpsichord.” He means Wanda Landowska, Polish pianist and harpsichordist, born 1879, died 1959. If you enjoy Bach, as I do, you might be more familiar with the widely available interpretations of his music by eccentric and deceased Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Yet Landowska was very famous in her day, and still is among those knowledgeable on the musical era. Both keyboardists performed Bach’s 1735 Italian Concerto. We can use Gould’s popular interpretations as a sort of baseline to compare Landowska’s earlier interpretations against.

Same thing for Bach’s two- and three-part inventions from 1723, pieces I used to annoy my family with by playing them on the piano over and over. Both Gould and Landowska recorded the inventions, Gould in 1963-64 and Landowska in 1959. Hers are all up at the Internet Archive; his are all on youtube here. We might compare Landowska and Gould’s performances of a single piece from that set of compositions, the 13th two-part invention, in A minor:

Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t have anything to say about Gould, Landowska, and JS Bach right now—I was just sharing. In future posts, I hope to share music by Debussy, Grimes, Queensrÿche, Savant, and others. It’s been a weekend of typing; now I’m at last spent of words. Until next time!

This blog post, IELTS Enquiry on Results, Pfizer + blog updates, and news blasts for US, China, and the worldwide trade economy collapse/change … plus music and fiction! by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/10/10/ielts-enquiry-on-results-pfizer-blog-newsblasts-china/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 40 of 52. I skipped weeks 37, 38, and 39. Note: My two entries...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 36 of 52.

In last week’s post, I broached the subject of emigrating from the United States. I mentioned two bureaucratic hurdles for obtaining permanent residency in Canada via Express Entry: the Educational Credential Assessment and the General version of the International English Language Testing System. (I’ve been researching other possible destinations as well, such as Costa Rica.)

Since that blog entry, I received my ECA results and flew to and from San Diego — a short trip I arranged just two nights prior to departure — to take the IELTS exam, not offered here in Washington state. Below, after giving three additional reasons for emigration, I discuss how my ECA and IELTS went. In fact, I just got my IELTS scores in while writing this post. The information herein is from my perspective, that of a single guy in middle age; emigration requirements assuredly vary to some extent for families, etc.

But first, a telling experience at the Seattle airport on my way south. My flight was delayed, so I wandered from the gate to a shop. Package of salty cashews in hand, I approached the register. All at once I realized I’d accidentally cut in front of a mother tending to her toddler. With my palm, I acknowledged my error and gestured mildly for the pair to resume their rightful place in line. As I stepped back, the mother, visibly startled at the unusual turn of events, inched forward and purchased her items. Then, leaving the shop, she profusely thanked me, even though it was I who had made the mistake. This latest little example of the systemic injustice of masculinism felt dismaying. As a traveler, just some lone, middle-age guy with a big backpack, I was on easy street, yet here she was, tiredly laboring to create and nurture the next generation of humanity, but compelled to behave a bit as if she’d done something wrong and I’d done something stellar. My dismay quickly turned to optimism, however. After all, I was actually seeing this unfair and ancient imbalance — which I didn’t perceive as a young Texan — and so are increasing millions of others daily, through human rights news, brilliant analyses, and brave actions. The flood will continue to crash down the barriers.

Now some music to set the tone as the main of this post gets underway.

Three more reasons for social-emotional treason

First, the United States is a gigantic bubble where quality knowledge is difficult to discover. Just look at the emoji menu on your virtual keyboards. In the U.S., it’s rare for even educated people (formally or autodidactically educated) to be able to match more than a very few flags with the correct countries. Elsewhere, it’s a quite common skill for literate people. Besides that example, think of how important it is to have good information. If you want to quit smoking, for instance, excellent advice will lead you to success. Poor advice won’t. If you’re surrounded by misinformation and disinformation, it’s no wonder things are going downhill. Extend that to the quality of knowledge you access on any topic, such as child soldiers. Breaking out of the US prison of anti-info at this point in my life simply feels mandatory.

Second, consider the exceptionality of the United States with regards to worldwide taxation systems, not just for the powerful, but as it applies to everyday individuals. A helpful Wikipedia list shows that, with some tiny exceptions, only four countries tax their citizens residing abroad on their foreign income: Hungary, Eritrea, Myanmar, and the self-proclaimed greatest place on the globe, the United States. The other 190-ish countries don’t; perhaps some think if a citizen isn’t using the domestic roads or hospitals or other public services, they shouldn’t owe tax. Thus, if you’re a Spaniard living in South America selling stories to magazines, you don’t owe taxes back home to Spain. But, if you’re a US citizen and business executive in Ho Chi Minh City, then you do owe money not just to Vietnam, but also to Uncle Sam, on your Vietnamese pay every year, if your income exceeds $108,700 USD (as of this writing). Owing back taxes puts your passport at risk. While the $108,700 threshold is much higher than typical US citizen English teachers or writers ever need to worry about — they can claim the foreign earned income exclusion — simply failing to file a tax return annually will jeopardize half your undeclared assets in civil court. In some circumstances, there may even be criminal penalties. Just as a cop following a car in the United States can find plenty of reasons to pull the driver over after merely a minute or two, aided by the existence of complicated driving laws, so the complicated tax requirements ensure any USian anywhere on the planet is arrestable at any time: it’s likely anyone’s tax returns (or lack thereof) can be read in such a way as to find a (so-called) crime or excuse for inflicting civil pains. (That’s not even bringing up global surveillance and assassinations of US citizens and anyone else by the US.) Meanwhile, taxation for many non-US citizens is much simpler, a half-hour affair once a year rather than days or weeks of trying to decipher snarls like “Go to Part IV of Schedule I to figure line 52 if the estate or trust has qualified dividends or has a gain on lines 18a and 19 of column (2) of Schedule D (Form 1041) (as refigured for the AMT, if necessary).” Switching from US citizenship to another country’s is a way to escape such time-consuming, stressful insanity while getting the hell out of a failed, rogue state. Though there’s a potential irony: What if you switch citizenship to a country that doesn’t tax non-resident citizens on foreign income … until they do, shortly after you become one of their nationals? I suppose countries without a history of doing it would be a safer bet. In short, just like most “developed” countries do not link health insurance to employment, but rather provide it as a right (a better idea especially in a pandemic), most countries do not link taxation to citizenship, but rather to residency. The United States “excels” at yoking health insurance to employment and yoking taxation to citizenship.

Lastly, if you haven’t already, meet the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which became US law in March 2010. In the words of the IRS (accessed today), besides the impositions on individuals (sorta covered by my paragraph above but see also here and elsewhere), FATCA “generally requires that foreign financial institutions and certain other non-financial foreign entities report on the foreign assets held by their U.S. account holders or be subject to withholding on withholdable payments.” DLA Piper, a global firm of business attorneys, explains in an 11-page PDF FAQ that FATCA’s “direct and profound” impact on foreign financial institutions means that in participating countries, all non-US banks — all of them — with customers born in the United States must search out, identify, and disclose information about those customers’ accounts for reports to Uncle Sam, including details on interest, dividends, and other income. And at the non-US countries’ own expense. In other words, FATCA is a measure to force non-US banks to report to Uncle Sam on their US customers — and foot the bill for it. The individual FATCA agreements between the United States and the many participating countries can be found at the Treasury Department website here. For example, fearing “catastrophic effects” on its financial sector, Canada hands to the US authorities private bank account information of average Canadians, even sometimes for accounts with balances under the $50,000 USD threshold. As another example, the Colombian bank Grupo Bancolombia says it must comply with FATCA by “permanent monitoring” of account holders and by supplying annual FATCA reports to the United States. That again shows how the US-centric law “imposes expansive compliance obligations” (as DLA Piper puts it) on foreign financial institutions. Which is a big reason why, while banks in some countries — Luxembourg and Georgia among them — welcome US citizen customers, some banks in others simply refuse to do business with US persons. Germany’s large Augsburger Aktienbank bank, for instance, announced in January 2021 that, due to FATCA burdens, it would no longer serve US individuals; gauging from social media, it seems to have stopped doing so. They’re not the only ones. News sites catering to US persons living abroad say they’ve received many reports from their readers who have suddenly found their bank accounts closed. Even people with tenuous connections to the United States, such as those who receive citizenship due to birth here but leave as infants never to return, can suddenly find themselves owing a lifetime of tax to Uncle Sam. In sum, FATCA is yet another reason to switch away from US citizenship. A tax consultancy to US citizens abroad says in 2020, a record number of them renounced their citizenship (continuing a multi-year trend that’s easy to find news articles about online); FATCA was often a top reason they cited. People dumping US citizenship over FATCA even include average teachers of English to speakers of other languages. The former US citizens can then provide a Certificate of Loss of Nationality in hopes of keeping their foreign banking service.

Another day, another account closure for law abiding American citizens in Germany.. #AugsburgerAktienbank deciding that they don’t want to deal with the hassle of dealing with US customers @JanetYellen where are US citizens abroad supposed to bank? #endCBT @wallyadeyemo pic.twitter.com/CxLT5PccU1

— Jen (@dkjen) January 27, 2021

Hello, unfortunately Raisin UK is unable to provide financial products to dual UK-US nationals due to FATCA. We apologise for any inconvenience.

— @Raisin_UK (@Raisin_UK) January 7, 2021

The infamous Trump wall we keep hearing about is not only to keep supposed “undesirables” out…it’s also to keep US citizens in.

To renounce US citizenship, a process that takes about a year, US citizens must undergo interviews with consular officials (which must be nerve-wracking!), perhaps have the last several years of their tax returns audited, and pay the world’s heftiest fee for dumping a so-called nation-state: $2,350 USD. Every year, the US Treasury Department publishes a list of people who break up with the United States — here’s 2021’s. But have no fear. According to an article on the subject at The Conversation, by the year 1796, the sailor James L. Cathcart, aiming to improve his fortunes, changed identities/citizenships/allegiances eight times all before age 30!

Outside the practical difficulties, what about the social-emotional ones? As the link above about child soldiers mentions, growing up in the highly polarized United States resembles growing up in a country at civil war. Some kinda weird, slow-mo, nonstop civil war. A perpetual low-intensity conflict, an unacknowledged counterinsurgency homeland. So maybe it’s no surprise that working on leaving rips a person up. Like long threads inside, representing relationships, turning twisted, dry, dead, and finally disintegrating into mere memories, even as other threads, like spider silk, shoot out into the wider world, expanding, seeking purchase. Or, maybe growing up in a civil war-like country is akin to being in an abusive relationship: trauma bonding and all that.

Sometimes it seems never to change, sometimes it seems inevitable that the United States completely collapses. US reactionaries — those laughably believing they conveniently just happened to be born into the most godly country, most godly religion, most godly everything, despite lacking experience beyond heavily curated bubble excursions, where foreign tour guides put on performances for their wealthy customers by flattering the United States — will say, If you don’t like it leave, and then when you do, tell you you’re a traitor. Meanwhile, US liberals and far left are typically unreachable. Liberals seem convinced the Powers That Be have no idea who Rachel Maddow or Bernie Sanders are, so liberals anticipate Maddow and Sanders will any moment now pull off an unsurveilled sneak campaign to successfully remedy all the problems described above in time for board games this weekend. Finally, the US far left too often uses “systemic forces” as code for “nobody can do anything about anything, so inaction is justified.” Sometimes it seems if you’re going to emigrate, you’re on your own, offline I mean, with those who can relate consisting of glowing text that vanishes once you turn off your device. But in truth, offliners have helped from time to time, and don’t get me wrong, I’ve met some amazing activists in the US who do amazing things!

Despite online encouragement, emigration still feels like a thoughtcrime. I’ve been told I owe it to the United States to stay, since the country “let me” be a teacher, and that I owe it to the US not to throw up my hands at the problems by leaving. It’s strange the grip the US civic religion has on people. As a commenter on last week’s post suggested, compare the US stigma against living elsewhere with the attitude of the British — probably due to their history as a former imperial power (the world is transitioning from British rule to Chinese rule, or maybe already has). Many British haven’t hesitated to live their whole lives in another country (or multiple), and are respected by their fellow British for doing so. That can be seen in Alan Turing’s family, for instance; his father was a member of the Imperial Service for the British Raj.

Let’s emigrate from these unpleasant thoughts with some music, and migrate toward jumping the ECA and IELTS hurdles.

Education: a most powerful weapon you can use to complete paperwork

As I explained last week, Canada uses something fancily called Educational Credential Assessment (ECA) to see if non-Canadian academic degrees are equivalent to those provided by Canadian universities. And for the sake of dolla dolla bill, maybe. Those seeking permanent residency through Express Entry will need to have the transcript from their degree-awarding uni evaluated by one of five designated organizations. In my case, I went to more than one university, but I had to provide the transcript only from the final awarding school. Out of the five options, I picked World Education Services because they apparently have the fastest turnaround time. The other four orgs are Canadian gub’ment entities.

I found the process fairly straightforward. Like you’d expect, I had to carefully work my way through a few bureaucratic websites, but nothing insurmountable. I got TCU (my alma mater), the National Student Clearinghouse, and World Education Services lined up, three ducks in a row, and paid the ridiculous fee of about $240 USD. After a few days, the World Education Services app notified me their review of my academic records was complete and I̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ my records were found satisfactory. The WES report is good for five years from date of issue; an important fact, since people can apply for Canadian permanent residency multiple times, and often do. WES (everybody’s an acronym these days, even DAL) forwarded the report on to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. I assume at some point in the application process I’ll need to give Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada my WES reference number. Paperwork, paperwork. However, it’s a hurdle jumped!

Instead of all the paperwork and injustices, we could refuse to cooperate and instead cross borders sans permission, erasing them under our feet as we go. It might seem absurd to envision that as a goal, but huge numbers of people follow unusual goals at a moment’s notice very often, whether it’s something safe like in 2016 when thousands installed an app to go outside and hunt invisible Pokémon because they saw advertising, or something dangerous like in 2014 when thousands in Burkina Faso burned their parliament buildings and chased out oligarchs because that public has created a culture where such actions are not mocked as pipe dreams but appreciated, as I understand it.

Cross borders. Citizenship is state ownership of people. Dismantle states so we can communicate as nations and humans. #NoBorders #refugees

— Heather Marsh (@GeorgieBC) August 17, 2014

IELTS: Testing our sanity and patience

My last blog entry explained how Canada, and a few other countries, require aspiring immigrants to take the General version of the IELTS test to prove English proficiency, regardless of, say, being a native English speaker with a summa cum laude humanities degree and lots of news media publications. Since the test isn’t available in Washington state, and because I’m in a hurry, I booked my computer-based exam for Thursday September 9 in San Diego.

The IELTS General has four sections: Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking. You get an overall score, and separate scores for each of the four sections. Higher scores mean more points for meeting immigration thresholds (which assess points for other things, including academic degrees and favorable employment history), so I really wanted to do well. For both the individual sections and the overall grade, scores range from 1 (lowest) to 9 (highest), and come in point-five increments: 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, and so on.

There’s a lot of nitpicks on the IELTS. Audio texts are played just once, so if your attention wanders, you’re toast. Spelling has to be perfect. I was particularly worried about typing dates and other numbers/quasi-numbers in acceptable styles. Some words, such as occasionally, I seem to misspell no matter how many times I look them up. Using The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS for Academic & General Training (a paperback or PDF from 2014 but apparently not out of date), I crammed for two days and hoped for the best.

I had to arrive at the testing center at 8:00 a.m. At 7:55 a.m., I yanked the door handle, reminded myself occasionally has one s, and went in. I ascended the mini-labyrinth of staircases and discovered it was just me and one other test-taker, a bright young woman from Ghana aiming to move to Canada to become a behavioral health technician, that is, a psych ward orderly. Strange coincidence, right?

After our pockets were emptied, and our passports examined, and our faces photographed, and our COVID-19 waivers scrutinized, she and I were shepharded into the computer-packed testing room. The staff read us a long list of rules, including a stricture about leaving our passports out on our desks. Then the ordeal began. Even though the testing center was nearly empty, staffmembers, several times throughout the test, approached and picked up our passports for close inspection.

The listening section was easy, except my version of the test — test-takers receive different questions — had the dreaded map. While some test-takers don’t get a map at all, getting it means the computer shows you a crummy drawing of a location, such as a zoo, with nondescript boxes representing sublocations marked with letters. You have to match those letters to the correct place on a table of places. For instance, a box might be the zoo’s aquarium, where whales named George and Gracie are swimming around, or the zoo’s theatre, where tickets to educational movies are on sale, or the zoo’s testing center, where it’s determined to which cages the mistreated animals may migrate. The map stuff made a somewhat complicated setup visually, and much to my chagrin, I hadn’t practiced map questions, so by the time I got the hang of the visual arrangement, the audio text (complete with “distractors”) had already begun: “… after that, turn right, no excuse me, turn left, and find at the end of the path the exhibit of enormous venomous snakes.” So I think I blew one of the map questions.

The reading section was extremely easy. I don’t think the average English-speaking humanities graduate should sweat it.

The writing section, well, I mentioned a week ago how I bombed the writing section every time I took the GRE. Standardized writing tests and I don’t get along, so no high hopes for my performance on the two IELTS General writing tasks. But, I got them done.

The speaking section came last. This took place across a table from an interviewer, who recorded the three-part conversation with a little digital device. I was pretty nervous. A test-taker’s speech is marked, among other things, for successful use of a variety of sentence types (compound, compound complex, etc). I worried I’d bungle that, plus fail to make enough eye contact. At one point the interviewer asked me a prompt about why employees are or aren’t important to a business. I replied something akin to Although we might think of businesses as abstract entities configured on Secretary of State documents, in truth they exist concretely as human beings, the staff, whose well-being most certainly translates into good customer service and thus increased capital accumulation for the firm, speaking generally of course. The bemused interviewer gave me a look like You gotta be kidding me and ended the interview early. (Or so it seemed to me.)

Outside the Oxford International center, I discovered the other test-taker was a really cool person and gave her my card after writing a bunch of critical psychiatry resources on the back. Then I waited for my results.

My scores just came in:

I aced the reading and speaking sections (hah!), nearly aced the listening section (8.5), and got an overall score of 8.5 — but as predicted, the writing section was my minor downfall: I received a 7.5. Still, those scores are high enough for, say, entering any graduate program at the University of British Columbia (a uni known in Canadian court for its use of Proctorio academic surveillance software).

Test-takers can pay to have their IELTS re-marked, even just a single section of it, in a procedure called Enquiry on Results, but you have to make the request within six weeks of the date shown on the test report form. Numerous posts online suggest it’s quite common to get a small score increase this way. Internet commenters also suggest an enquiry on results will only keep your score the same or raise it; there’s no way for it to lower your score, they say, so it just costs money/time/effort. If I can confirm that with official IELTS documentation or a phone call — so far I haven’t been able to — I may ask for my writing section to be re-marked.

Anyway, another hurdle out of the way, or mostly.

San Diego stuff

A funny thing happened on my flight to California: the passenger to my left was an Air Force veteran, and one of his sons was a mathematician creating those bizarre financial instruments at Goldman Sachs. Another reason to leave the US: seems everywhere you go, if you really ask and look, someone’s a private spy, or unrepentant soldier, or confidential informant, or bankster, or other unsavory character.

I didn’t have much free time in San Diego. Before the IELTS I had to cram, and after the test — it takes several hours, especially once you add in the waiting and formalities — I was exhausted, and crashed. Friday was free.

I considered going on foot to Mexico and back, via the San Ysidro border station (roughly sixteen miles south of San Diego but accessible by the Blue Line light rail). Non-essential pedestrian travel to/from Mexico/US, such as for tourism, is banned binationally at the federal level, at least until September 21, but according to San Diego locals I spoke with, the border station basically doesn’t enforce the ban, at least not for US citizens. Numerous online posts at various sites focusing on such topics agree. There are even USians blithely uploading footage of their touristy visits to Tijuana, pandemic or no pandemic. This guy’s 25-minute youtube video from last May shows a back-and-forth from San Diego/Tijuana, so I was able to at least visit virtually. His video includes ad placement, so I wonder if he declared business as the purpose of his trip, or if the San Ysidro station (with the pedestrian bridges frequently shown in news footage) even requires US citizens, or any people, to justify their cross-border walks. I concluded that because Mexico’s entry stamp includes a date, a trip during the ban would be a bad thing to have on my passport, especially while trying to emigrate. So I stayed domestic and read this reddit post from two weeks ago instead. It describes adventurous travel from San Diego to Tijuana and suits me a bit better than the 25-minute video. If you want to vicariously go to Baja California, it’s worth a down-time read or skim.

Aside from my meeting an amazing young vegan who quit caffeine to help with her sleep — an unusual and admirable display of responsibility and effort, restoring faith in humanity and maybe, dare I say, even in the United States to some small degree — that pretty much covers my past week in San Diego.

Until next time…

This blog post, Leaving the United States: more reasons why, and jumping the ECA, IELTS hurdles by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/09/13/leaving-unitedstates-reasons-jumping-eca-ielts-hurdles/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 36 of 52. Gates to Another World! The Might & Magic RPGs, known for...

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 35 of 52. It’s Labor Day Weekend, so a Monday entry still counts! I skipped weeks 33 and 34 due to finishing up an intensive six-week course to (successfully!) become CELTA certified in teaching English to speakers of other languages.

Note: I have a post in progress about Afghanistan and radical mental health in the United States, connecting the two by discussing cognitive dissonance. As a result of my recent and current workload and that entry’s length, I haven’t been able to complete it, and now need to put together something simpler (this post) instead. I’ll get the Afghanistan and mental health writing up eventually, but in the meantime, I urge you to read the timely story of Cindi Fisher and her struggle to free her son Siddharta from Washington state’s notorious Western State Hospital. See here, here, here, and here.

I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and moved to Seattle in 2016. That relocation was one of the best things for my life. Over the years, others from afar have encouraged me to migrate. Without their stimuli and the Internet, I’d have stayed in the Lone Star State, never participating in the Hearing Voices Network, never overcoming myriad challenges and increasing my autonomy, such as upping my cooking skill, substitute teaching for multi-month assignments in a huge city with a stressful crack-of-dawn commute, and dealing with painful social/emotional obstacles while interacting/transacting with people of wildly different demographics in a major urban environment. I’d have simply stayed a native Texan, brought up by prep school to belong to academia, isolated and not knowing it, locked in tunnel vision and praising the tunnel.

As I near six full years in Seattle, the time has come to move again — moreover, the time has come to leave the United States, even to get citizenship elsewhere someday. It’s a strange thing to do as a USian. In this country, no matter how much catastrophic medical debt piles up, no matter how many schools get shot up, no matter how often unemployment benefits cruelly expire, making a very specific plan for emigrating — as opposed to Just move to Canada! fantasies — is something you simply don’t hear about. Who does that? USians feel they’re already the most important country: not only the pro-Trump or neocon reactionaries, but also the faux rebels, who insist that if there’s a problem on the world stage, the US must always be the country most at fault. In other words, whether USians love the country or hate it, both agree that, regardless of topic, no other country can possibly be as important. Ever. In their eyes, history has come to an end. But most of the planet’s people live elsewhere, along with their changing cultures, changing languages, and the rest. It’s time to experience that; time for my own history to start a new chapter, while it’s still legal to leave.

But why, and how? On computer-y activist-y twitter, there are occasionally declamations by USians of how persecuted they are, and how special they are, and how they’ll soon leave the country for the better pastures they so richly deserve as rugged swashbuckling heroes and so forth. You’ll find that while I see terrifying political problems here too, my perspective is quite different! I see that for USians, who as a whole including me are to some extent quite tranquilized and emotionally + intellectually stunted (see arguments below), the idea of emigrating generally feels anxiety-producing, even downright scary — just try to talk someone here into renewing their passport, for instance. So I’ve decided to document my strange journey on my blog, full of specifics so maybe someone else will be able to figure out their own path to achieving the same thing someday.

This post is structured into why and how: First two little reasons why to emigrate, next two big reasons why, and finally two hows: a discussion of destinations I’m looking at, and then a discussion of practical steps I’m currently taking. Pertinent music before getting underway:

Little reason for leaving 1 of 2: across-the-board life improvement

In summer 2019, shortly before COVID-19 showed up, I visited Victoria BC (and a little of Vancouver) alone, and later wrote blog posts about it. One thing I discussed is how moving to a place that’s better or worse in whichever ways can dramatically improve or worsen your life across the board, as opposed to the individualization of social problems, also known as the fundamental attribution error. Or more plainly, as @debihope put it in 2010: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” Or, I’ll add, smog, sprawl, and so on. Imagine a bunch of variables:

a: safety of air (lack of air pollution)
b: savings on cost of living (lower prices and so on)
c: rarity of mass shootings
d: education level of the population
e: prosocial or antisocial behavior of the population
And whichever additional variables.

Then imagine each location as a combination of those variables. Fort Worth is the sum of its ratings for air safety, cost of living, frequency of mass shootings, education level, social or antisocial behavior patterns, etc. Seattle is the sum of its ratings for the same variables. Victoria, Vancouver, and more, identical. This is all very straightforward and logical; it might seem strange to USians only because every day the corporate propaganda is screaming that we’re the best, that evidence is what nerdy losers consider, and that problems are almost always congenital rather than almost always environmental (even one’s bodily host, full of microorganisms, can be considered part of your mind or soul’s environment, as this thought-provoking book discusses).

So that’s why moving to a better place can improve your life across the board, but even moving to a place with a lower sum rating can be an improvement in that it can strengthen a person if they’re up to the challenge — and the lower-sum place might have hidden gem aspects to it as well.

Little reason for leaving 2 of 2: recent news revealing the United States as a sinkhole

“It’s really heartbreaking to see children intubated by COVID,” a Texas pediatrician working in hospitals said last week, and the country has just surpassed 2/3 million novel coronavirus deaths with over 160,000 new cases daily largely due to the Delta mutation, but all the same, in southwest Washington state on Friday September 3, the fascist Proud Boys, all-male enforcers for Trump reminscent of Hitler’s Youth, were riled up by false social media posts by another far right group, Patriot Prayer, that wrongly claimed a student faced arrest for not masking. Skyview High School, Alki Middle School, and Chinook Elementary all locked down as Proud Boys tried to gain entry to school grounds. Teachers and faculty guarded doors to keep the Proud Boys out as school security addressed them (I don’t know the details of what exactly school security did). Among the work I do is teaching, including in secondary schools, and fighting off Proud Boys is not really how I want to spend my time as a teacher, a factor in my emigration goal. The eight-second video below (source) is from outside Skyview High School on Friday.

Saturday, September 4, 50+ armed Proud Boys were on the hunt in Olympia, the Washington state capital. Gunshots were fired (I’m not sure of the specifics), and a female independent journalist, Alissa Azar, was assaulted by the Proud Boys. Details are still emerging.

Hiding in a bar in Olympia. I turned a corner to 50+ proud boys who said there’s Alissa and ran on me completely alone. I ran as fast as I could. They caught me and pulled my hair and shoved me to the ground then bear maced me. People af the bad pull me in hiding here now.

— alissa azar (@AlissaAzar) September 4, 2021

Here’s a bit of an account on what happened yesterday…

I ended up alone and trying to leave the area. I had a group and safety… & just a block and a half away is where I needed to be. I was at an intersection about to cross but when I looked to my right I saw that large group https://t.co/uIopctCB87

— alissa azar (@AlissaAzar) September 6, 2021

Labor Day Weekend’s not over yet; there may well be more craziness from the Proud Boys forthcoming in the Pacific Northwest.

Turning to Texas, a pro-snitching, anti-reproductive rights law — the most restrictive in the country — went into effect there on Wednesday September 1 after the Supreme Court upheld it in a 5-4 “shadow docket” ruling. The law bans abortions once cardiac activity can be detected in the fetus, usually six weeks into pregnancy, typically counting from the first day of the last menstrual period (which might not be tracked or trackable, adding confusion and difficulty into the time equation). The Texas law makes no exceptions for rape or incest and relies on private individuals to enforce it; as the New York Times explains, it “deputizes private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or ‘aids and abets’ a procedure. Plaintiffs who have no connection to the patient or the clinic may sue and recover legal fees, as well as $10,000 if they win.” Snitches and bounty hunters. I wasn’t the inseminator, but as a quasi-supporter quasi-bodyguard against protestors decades ago, I accompanied a pregnant friend to a clinic for her abortion arrangements; such activity would now be “aiding and abetting.” As this five-minute Pussy Riot song “Hangerz” explains, “fundamentalist abortion-bans are about hijacking control and ownership of women’s bodies,” though some of the reactionary foot soldiers fighting for such bans may not perceive that frightening truth themselves.

What’s the “shadow docket” component of the Supreme Court ruling? The shadow docket is contrasted with the Supreme Court’s “merits docket.” But wait, what’s a docket?

The docket is the official schedule of proceedings before a court. When I covered multiple federal sentencings of hacktivist/transparency movement defendants (such as whistleblower Reality Winner’s), I’d sign into PACER, the electronic system for accessing federal court documents, and take a look at the docket to see what time the hearing began and in which courtroom. The docket listed not only that info about the sentencing hearing, but also information about and links to each pleading (a written statement a party puts before a court) and much more, which I would read and write about journalistically. “Docket” more generally refers to the workload before a court, as in “the court has fifty zillion cases pending on its docket.”

So that’s docket — how about the merits docket? The Supreme Court’s merits docket is the 60 to 70 or so cases the robed, priestly, and surely heavily surveilled justices will consider each term, hearing oral arguments from lawyers and pondering the pleadings, to make rulings supposedly on the merits. The merits docket cases are usually scrutinized by scholars, sometimes broadcast by media, and so forth, hopefully aiming for an ideal of transparency, because thankfully some refuse to lose their curiosity about what the ruling class is up to.

The shadow docket, on the other hand, is a catch-all term for Supreme Court rulings that, with some variation, are typically accompanied by no oral arguments from lawyers, no reasoning from judges, no identification of which justices voted what, and are released with unpredictable timing. That unpredictable timing makes informing the public about them difficult. For example, not of the Supreme Court shadow docket but of something similar, in Reality Winner’s case, her exceptionally restrictive plea agreement — remember, her leak was a huge component in the story of how the United States was smashed (partly) by Russia, sometimes called the battering ram of China in this global transition from the British Empire to the Chinese one, and thus, her leak helped decloak Putin’s ally Trump, so her punishment has been unusually severe — wasn’t filed until the day of her sentencing, which made reporting on her exceptionally restrictive conditions impossible for the many members of the media attending the hearing: we were given no time to read the plea agreement closely before the news cycle moved on. The Supreme Court’s shadow docket is likewise difficult for scholars and journalists to review. There’s no time for amicus briefs or activists to arrange protests (or sabotage!).

Though the term shadow docket was coined in 2015, something of a shadow docket has existed ever since the Supreme Court has. For a long time, shadow docket rulings were primarily minor, anodyne matters, like granting a side an additional two weeks to file a motion because the top lawyer came down with pneumonia. Over the past four years — during both the obviously awful Trump and wrongly beloved Biden administrations — there’s been a dramatic uptick in shadow docket rulings from the Supreme Court, another sign of the law vanishing. Shadow docket rulings are used now even for controversial cases, such as the new Texas abortion law. (Read more about the recent use of the shadow docket, a major loss for accountability and transparency, in this February 2021 testimony to Congress.)

A two-minute Anonymous video uploaded Friday September 3 points out that the Texas tactic of circumventing the federal protection of reproductive rights by shifting anti-abortion enforcement from the state government to private individuals could be expanded to circumvent any federal protection, such that private individuals are allowed to enforce any new state law regardless of what federal law might say on the matter. Do you realize what an end-times move that is? No more constitutional protections from federal law; your neighbors enforce the local law, to collect bounties. The Anonymous video also announces Operation Jane, named after the Chicago underground abortion service started in 1969, to either take down online systems for snitching/bounty-hunting on Texas women getting abortions, or to poison the data collection by flooding the online systems with garbage information. Indeed, a website seeking snitch reports of people violating the new Texas law has already been spammed thanks to a viral digital protest, including one programmer creating a shortcut for iPhone users to easily submit worthless data repeatedly.

I could offer examples of the sinkhole United States forever, but let’s look at just a few things more, quickly.

Remember the coup attempt on January 6? “A failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Yale historian of fascism Timothy Snyder said this summer, referring to history and the very possible, perhaps even likely, scenario of Trump returning in 2022 or 2024, maybe by force. I recently came across a two-part interview with Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who’s given harrowing firsthand accounts of the coup attempt. The interview from July — part one and part two — is really worth listening to, because though our feelings on cops may be closer to this, Dunn seems a very straight-up dude, easy to empathize with, and his retelling of the insurrection is very expressive and evocative. (The Dworkin Report also interviewed lawyer Alison Grinter last month regarding Reality Winner’s commutation and pardon efforts.)

Remember, in this connection, the words of multiple Holocaust survivors in 2019 (Rene Lichtman, Ruth Bloch, Bernard Marks): ICE is equivalent to the Gestapo, and their current ‘detention centers’ really are concentration camps where genocidaires crush minorities. Replace “the United States” in your head with “Nazi Germany” and ask yourself if living in such a place makes sense. Even if privileged USians think themselves exempt from such matters, recall that in May 2020, during Black Lives Matter protests sparked by George Floyd’s death, the National Guard in Minneapolis swept affluent streets, yelled Light ’em up! and shot paint canisters at non-minorities for the “crime” of standing on their porches, as in this 20-second video (source) that the mainstream media later followed up on:

Big reason for leaving 1 of 2: Unreachable USians and their counterarguments

The above establishes there’s no way for USians to opt-out of having the increasing fascism arrive on their own doorsteps. But plenty of people have legit reasons for staying in the country. Maybe they’re the sole caregiver for a dear dying relative. Maybe they’re dedicated to a project such as cleaning up the Duwamish River by Seattle. I even read a curious story about a monk in his fifties, a psychiatric survivor, who, protesting the rush of technology, took a “vow of stability” never to ride in a vehicle or leave his city (save rarely and on foot), though the story of his (nonsexual) relationship with a 23-year-old woman is a bit odd; in the U.S., twenty-three is typically not the age to take such a vow, and the story treats her as his mere sidekick. Anyway, there are all sorts of understandable reasons a person might decide not to leave the United States. And other countries aren’t automatically perfect — for good or ill, there are coup attempts and actual coups all over the place presently: see yesterday in Guinea on September 5, or the likely Steve Bannon-facilitated one in Brazil tomorrow on September 7 for fascist Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro. Whatever the case, each person’s life is their own to find their own path.

Still, there are common fallacious arguments against emigrating that I’ve heard repeatedly from USians and would like to address. These arguments arise in USian conversation when I bring up my goal of emigrating. The arguments make me feel like the majority of USians are unreachable on this topic, though judging from the programmer video above, the kids are all right; maybe I’m just getting old.

The most frequent anti-emigrating argument I hear in the United States is that it’s only a possibility for those with financial privilege. To be fair, this is not my best subject; nevertheless, there are certain awkward truths to be said. Since there are many who have willfully changed countries — including leaving the U.S. — while in poverty, the argument that emigration is only for the privileged is untrue, and speaks more to typical USian myopia. I don’t have the link handy, but I remember reading on r/IWantOut, a subreddit for emigration advice, of a USian in their late teens who sold everything and took a huge risk to just drop themselves into an Eastern European country, I think, and figure it out on the go. Lots of r/IWantOut posts share such stories. There are also many easy-to-find youtube videos of USians telling their stories of how they emigrated while similarly in poverty. Counterexamples, boom! With only $1000-$2000 USD in savings, which she calls a “pretty significant” amount, the woman in the video below moved from Chicago to cheaper Madrid to work as a teacher assistant, receiving a meager income (about $1200 USD per month). “It was one of the most amazing years of my life,” she says. “I’d recommend the experience to everyone.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38BcPsjLdJ0

I was stateless in your dumbass country and I left, what privilege did I have?

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2020

Millions have left, undocumented working class too, maybe your privileged working class simply doesn't have the backbone to do it. A lot of US ex-pats I've met live paycheck to paycheck but are much happier out of that hell hole.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2020

They have $ in capital, the number can be increased through the selling of assets; I've lived there long enough and around enough impoverished people to know most "working class" have access to move if they manage it correctly.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) March 1, 2020

Volunteering and hanging out with US activists has taught me that many of them are simply pretending to be poor (even to themselves); maybe they don’t have a lot of cash daily, but they come from highly professional families who deliver money to them regularly, or would in emergencies or if asked. “Emigrating is a privilege” often means rather “I don’t want to have a confrontational conversation with my family/friends on this topic” or “I must follow a bizarre Kantian imperative to never lie, so when my family asks, I can’t tell them I sold my guitar to get $300 for something they approve of, when I actually sold it to pay an Education Credential Assessment fee they don’t approve of; not lying to my family is more important than my life and dreams going permanently down the drain.” People, especially women, are constantly shamed for being bold and taking risks, and socially ‘rewarded’ — She is just so sweet! — for staying in servitude and remaining meek. So the “money privilege” arguments about emigrating are actually about those paralyzing emotions under the surface, I think, not about actual budget questions.

Further, as I experienced myself, those from upper class families in the U.S. are very often lacking in skills (paid caregivers did the domestic tasks when they grew up; parents or paid accountants did their taxes and paperwork; and so on). This sort of thing hits Reddit regularly, such as these stories of nightmare roommates not doing their dishes ever. It’s pretty inhibiting to grow up in a U.S. golden cage, especially since such families tend to endorse conventional psychiatry. Pedosadist Jeffrey Epstein arranged for psychiatrists to give his victims Lithium and Xanax for their tranquilizing/sedating effect; psychopharmaceuticals are a weapon of control that dull the moxie required to emigrate.

To counter these various discouragements, including the shaming, ressentiment-style crab mentality around emigration — if you can emigrate, it must be because you are bad since you have money, whereas I can’t do it, because I am good since I don’t have money — I’ve lately been thinking of inspirational friends and reading inspirational books. One friend I know simply refuses to pay her student debt (my heroine!). I also just finished reading the autobiography of guitarist, philosopher, and Paganini/Liszt-style showoff Yngwie Malmsteen (who could really use some intervallic additions to his playing such as fourths, sixths, sevenths, ninths, elevenths). In Relentless, Malmsteen writes about riding his motorcycle up and down the stairs of his Swedish high school as a teen. I was a bit like that as a teen, too. In Texas, such energy often means (at least for white kids in prep schools) getting psychiatrized, but for him in Sweden, he got away with it, then later, upon receiving an offer to play in a Los Angeles band, flew across the planet for the first time to this city he’d never heard of (pre-Internet days), bringing with him nothing but his guitar case with an extra pair of jeans crammed inside. He ended up living in a run-down warehouse for a while in a violent neighborhood, playing for cheesy Steeler and getting his bearings; it got him to where he needed to go next. And only yesterday, a world-traveller friend recommended to me Mark Ehrman’s book Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America, which I haven’t read yet, but it looks great.

Even disability may not be an insurmountable obstacle to leaving. People who have been intensely psychiatrized may legitimately worry about family/friends calling the police and having them hospitalized if their plan to leave the country seems grandiose or otherwise insane. Breaking things down into plausible step-by-steps may help persuade policers, or another option is simply outwitting one’s opponents. It can be done. Witness the amazing book Bipolar 1 Disorder: How to Survive and Thrive by Molly McHugh, originally from the United States. Despite a history of manic psychosis, she slowly, after much trial and error, managed to get off her psychopharmaceuticals and travel the world with her son.

I had a creative writing teacher once who told the class he kept hearing explanations from us for why ideas put forth wouldn’t work; he then said, why not give explanations why they will work?

https://twitter.com/SpartaZC/status/1427163651576897539

The other counterargument I hear frequently is that, in the face of collapsing supply chains and rising fascism, a USian should stay here and fight. I hear it so often that I wonder where the phrase originates; USians never say they want to remain here and fight or stay here and battle. It’s always stay here and fight. The collocation appears in translations of the Iliad and the stage play Death of a Salesman. Vivid, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon words like “stay” and “fight” are usually preferred by English speakers over Latinate clunkers like “remain” and “battle.” But I still wonder if there’s something more to the phrase’s frequency.

Anyway, let’s say I agree to remain here and bat — I mean, stay here and fight. What’s step one? The very first page of Sun Tzu’s millennia-old book The Art of War, studied by US generals, the KGB, and the Vietcong alike, says warriors must “determine the conditions obtaining in the field.” He asks fighters to consider, among other questions, “Which army is stronger?” and “On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?” I’ve never heard a USian, who insists we must stay here and fight, address such questions of Sun Tzu’s. At a glance, the Pentagon is stronger than antifa, since antifa lacks aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks, and so on. USians generally lack discipline, too, since every day almost all down corporate soda and other junk food along with countless hours of corporate entertainment (eating healthy is disciplining and strengthening).

In short, if this is a US activist battle, where are our battle plans? Were I to spit the above paragraph at a stay-here-and-fight advocate, they might say, as if dismissing the entire subject, “antifa is morally stronger,” but Sun Tzu lists moral force as just one factor among others. Verily verily, a serious fight requires serious observation, planning, and effort. My observation is, in terms of a US football metaphor, the idealists and radicals in the United States are way behind in the fourth quarter, too far behind to rack up enough points on the scoreboard to win against supply chain collapse and fascism. Enough evidence of that for me is that Seattle activists I know refuse to factually assess the battlefield in the first place and rely on subtly insulting each other into agreeing that everything will be fine and those who disagree are simply being negative or uncool.

Lots of antifa and other activists in the United States are working hard, as social media sometimes shows, and I don’t mean to denigrate that effort. Maybe I just have a bad taste in my mouth from particular experiences. But there’s definitely an unacknowledged deer-in-the-headlights thing going on with many of us here. And that naive attitude is part and parcel of how USians typically view life. In this amazing article for the New York Times, novelist Brian Morton writes:

Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price. But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.

Try explaining to the Proud Boys or the National Guard that antifa will win simply because your fabulous bumper sticker slogan says so — you may find their disagreeing force overpowering.

One last thing. We know reactionaries, whether of the neocon or Trumper flavor, believe all must be made equal: equally subject to their rule that Only he with enough moneytokens deserves to eat; all others must starve or hope for shameful charity. The US left also tends to believe all must be equal. When I tried to explain to a Seattle leftist in person that whereas in the World War II era, the country incentivized very cerebral people (physicists, etc.) to immigrate here, now it’s the opposite, it’s what’s called a “brain drain” where some of the country’s brightest, seeing the sinkhole, are fleeing to other countries where their abilities will be welcomed and rewarded. That has long-term negative consequences for the United States, y’know? But the USian I was explaining this to got mad at me: they said it was offensive to suggest that some people are smarter in some areas than others: the phrase “brain drain” alone was offensive. So it’d be hard to convince such a person to divide up an antifa army to put some on intelligence work (researching opponents’ street addresses and supply chains), others on street brawls, and some on both, because on the US left, everyone has to be as equal as the rightwingers insist everyone must be under the dollar sign. With that differences-denying kind of mentality widespread in the country, nobody can honestly evaluate the conditions on the field and win.

Big reason for leaving 2 of 2: growth through adventure

All the news, arguments, counterarguments, and counter-counterarguments can stack up like a gloomy list of gloomy factoids, some of them debatable or personal, but they ultimately matter little in comparison with my biggest reason for aiming to leave the United States and get citizenship elsewhere. That’s simply the drive to embark on a challenging adventure, to get out of my comfort zone, to stop metaphorically hiding under the bed, and grow/develop as a person. I’ve written about that in many places on my blog, and will in the future, so I won’t talk about it here much.

I will say, however, three things.

First, notice how many USians will downplay the importance of this cross-border adventure thing, yet play video games where they’re flying airships to new lands to have virtual adventures (or perhaps they’re reading or watching fiction with the same journeying tropes). So, it seems adventure, etc., is necessary in life, and hiding under the bed, perhaps as a good psychiatric patient, is a downward spiral that will be met with more pills and pats on the head from the authorities.

Second, psychologists have an interesting concept called flexibility of thought, or cognitive flexibility. Regardless of his brave youthful journey across the globe to Los Angeles, Yngwie Malmsteen nowadays continues to play the same tricks on guitar (c’mon, man, that trademark descending ostinato lick of yours? why not play it ascending at least once in your plentiful recordings? or try inspiration from a different classical musical genre such as impressionism?). Similarly, people everywhere keep hiding under the bed. This is a huge topic, but the idea is to have enough adaptibility to meet unfamiliar challenges. I’ve heard cutting away the safety net, having no Plan B, can really help, so that you devote all your time to your goal, but on the other hand, poor risk-assessment and foolhardiness don’t work, either. Just something I think about regarding emigration; I’m no expert. But I’ve long seen chest-pounding USians call themselves adults because they remuneratively serve corporations or their ancillaries on salary, yet be literally too terrifed to walk off a sidewalk or climb an enticing tree and sit in it. Hello, we’re losing our childhood birthright of curiosity and courage because of how we came to be ruled by Death Eaters.

Third, as USian leftists debate who is or isn’t privileged in this country, and typically prefer to hear the perspective of a union organizer down the street rather than indigenous people on the other side of the planet, the real tragedy is that USian comforts are provided by multinational corporations benefitting from destruction that turns people into refugees who must cross countries without any choice in the matter over whether they’re privileged or ready enough to leave their homes or not. USians seeing refugees on boats somehow still remain convinced they themselves are of a special, exceptional sort when it comes to emigration. Perhaps USians are different, at least in terms of our unadmitted social and emotional crippling…

https://twitter.com/AliMayyu/status/1423946781646200842

Salvation destinations

Enough of the why. Now for how.

Initially USians tend to approach the topic of foreign destinations as a fantasy and actually enjoy talking about it — for pretend. The stressful details of renewing a passport or taking an IELTS test go out the window and everybody daydreams aloud about which country they’d go to and why.

I’m thinking about going to a country where I can gain citizenship, but that might not be a linear process. Some countries are very difficult to earn citizenship in, for instance many European countries. So I might have to go to Country B first, perhaps to improve at a required language or improve employment history, before going to Country C and getting citizenship there.

Let’s indulge the make-believe a little, yet spiced with facts. Here are my current preferences/thoughts. Bear in mind that different places within a country are, you know, different. In the service of brevity, the below kind of commits the Star Trek fallacy of one p̶l̶a̶n̶e̶t̶ country, one culture.

Canada: This would be ideal for me in many ways. In British Columbia at least, I could visit Seattle easily and easily research northeast Oregon in person for my fiction project, too. The electrical outlets are the same, the bioregion, at least in British Columbia, is the same — same trees, same weather. Hearing Voices Network chapters exist in Vancouver and Quebec City. Sort of an easy, beginner way to leave the United States. I’ve heard rumors of an upcoming lottery draw of permanent residency Express Entry applicants, maybe as soon as late September, requiring far fewer points than the usual threshold. You get points by, for instance, having post-secondary education credentials, higher IELTS scores, or good full-time employment history. Frequently in the United States nowadays, paid-jobs that actually take more or far more than 40 hours a week are classified on paperwork as part-time, but the USian emigrant can (try to) provide a letter from the employer that the work was tantamount to a full-time job; I’ve heard from a recently successful permanent residency applicant that such letters can often pass muster. Full-time job offers from Canadian employers especially boost points. However, Canada, or parts of Canada, can be expensive, so I’d probably have to pour a lot of time into teaching, which might be a good idea for a few years as I continue to improve my health via a compounding pharmacy. It’s also a decent place to be vegan, I’ve heard.

The Netherlands. Rising sea levels aside, the advantages of this country and its Amsterdam capital city are fairly well known, belonging to the European Union being just one of them. It’s also where the Hearing Voices Network began, so — pending further research — I assume it’s a great place to continue escaping conventional psychiatry’s grip. However, I’ve heard the Netherlands is expensive, or parts of it are, and to become a citizen, you have to learn Dutch, which to me looks like long strange strings of letters, but who knows, maybe I’d change my Dutch-ignorant mind someday. Most importantly, there’s a Dutch-American[USian] Friendship Treaty that eases the path for self-employed US entreprenuers to live in the Netherlands long term. I’ll look into that, see what the possibilities might be for various types of online writing and/or tutoring businesses. It’s another decent place to be vegan, I understand.

Spain. Another European Union member, and currently tied with Germany for the strongest passport in the world (measured in terms of mobility), at least on this index. A big draw for me would be improving my Spanish from slow and clunky to fast and fluent. I assume (haven’t checked yet) that Spanish skill is a requirement for citizenship. There’s of course a history of radical politics in Spain (and dictatorship). I’ve heard it’s an okay enough place to be vegan, at least in certain cities. And it just seems really cool to me. I like making big decisions based mostly on intuition — like James McMurtry’s we mostly go where we have to go — not laundry lists of pros and cons, and somehow Spain just feels really exciting. It’s a challenge to get EU citizenship, though…but things happen? Spain may be expensive, and there are no Hearing Voices Network chapters there on this international list, but perhaps by savvy emailing I could find a chapter that does exist and just isn’t on the radar yet.

México. The US news claims there are many problems in México, maybe to scare USians off (I mean really, who the hell wrote this? I didn’t write the “scary” subhead tho…that was an editor). But even if there are some bigly problems — like, say, Proud Boys trying to bust into schools? — well, like I suggested above, regardless of the across-the-board life improvement idea, there may be hidden gems where not expected, and life isn’t about greedily grabbing comfort anyway. Plus, despite a narco-state, amazing social movements (see also the Mexican Supreme Court ruling unanimously to decriminalize abortion on Tuesday September 7). I could improve my Spanish and live cheaply, perhaps teaching English language leaners for a while at an established school (there are some interesting job listings presently that I think I qualify for). My Spanish would skyrocket, and so would my employment history, as a teacher I mean (what about writing?). It’s a little hilarious that despite USian chest-thumping about the strength of its almighty trade economy, and the supposed evilness of so-called Mexican illegals heading north, it’s perhaps more practical for some college-educated USians to get certain good jobs by heading south. With such an improved employment history, I could maybe go to Europe later. Sadly, there’s no Mexican Hearing Voices Network chapter on the international list, but the same emailing savvy might turn something up. I don’t know what veganism is like in Mexico, but hey, with all the corn-based chips and tortillas, at least it would be easy to avoid gluten! I think…

Some country in South America, esp. Argentina or maybe Uruguay. The ideas here would be to improve my Spanish, see different stars and a vertically inverted moon, and live cheaply thanks to the US dollar. I have a friend who moved from the US to Argentina and supports herself fully with online content marketing writing and some tutoring side jobs, in the US a pretty hopeless way to try to support oneself longterm except maybe in rural areas, perhaps with nontraditional housing (e.g., an RV), though maybe I’m unaware. I briefly met a Seattleite, big into queer community stuff, who moved to progressive Uruguay and seems to be doing well there. I’ve heard it’s hard to be vegan in South America, and that I might find it hard to make friends there, though of course there’s a lot of variety on a whole continent! Unfortunately, the international list of Hearing Voices Network chapters lists not a single one there. However, the aforementioned Molly McHugh, author of Bipolar 1 Disorder: How to Survive and Thrive, also wrote a book about living in South America, so I’ll have to read it asap!

Those are the places I’m chiefly considering. Two more quick resources. Nomad List provides dossiers on various worldwide destinations, detailing things like cost of living or Internet connectivity quality, and I’ve heard it’s a pretty accurate site. Then, Totalism lists unusual places to live, especially for Europe. Hackerspaces, intentional communities, punk houses, artist spaces, zones like that. I might be wrong, but I imagine doing well in such money-saving environments, as opposed to one’s own apartment, would require cut-throat social skills.

Practical, specific, actual, real-life, not-kidding steps

Like I said at the start, it’s time for me to get going, to emigrate. Hell, in the hours and hours it took to write this post, I could have already become a European citizen! That’s a joke, but…

I decided to just throw myself into the process, to complete some practical, specific, actual, real-life, not-kidding steps even if I don’t have a full picture. Besides what you might expect — looking at job postings, sites like Nomad List, and playing with Canada’s Express Entry points estimator tool — there are three things I’m doing.

First, I’m digitizing, discarding, donating, or selling belongings. The fewer objects I have, the easier it is to move. It’s taking surprisingly long, maybe because the items are laden with emotional meaning. I’m having to grab records from Texas, too. I have about half of the records I want from Texas so far.

Second, I’m having my Bachelor of Arts degree evaluated for Canada. It’s called Educational Credential Assessment. Canada wants to ensure non-Canadian academic records are truly equivalent to Canadian degrees, so applicants have to pay a fee to one of five designated organizations to have them assess the transcripts. I went with World Education Services, because they’re apparently the fastest, and I’m hoping to get an Express Entry application in before the next draw for permanent residency, which as noted above, may come later this month.

Third, I’m taking the IELTS general exam on Thursday. That acronym stands for the International English Language Testing System, and it’s pronounced EYE-ults. Even if an applicant is a native English speaker who’s putting together the next installment of the Oxford English Dictionary, Canada (and some other countries) want the person tested for English proficiency. IELTS is the predominant way to go about it. The higher the IELTS score, the more immigration points when your application is considered. I just booked the exam two nights ago. Since the IELTS isn’t offered in Washington state, and not nearby any time extremely soon, I’m suddenly going to the border town of San Diego to take it. So, now I have to cram. Maybe very little study time was a bad idea; when I took the GRE test trying to get into grad school, I flunked the writing section, multiple times! (Probably a blessing in disguise, because I don’t want academia to steal from me the joy of working on my fiction, nonfiction, etc.)

Anyway, it’s time; and on Wednesday, it’s off to San Diego, the border town!

… Maybe while there, I’ll just head south, never to return. ;)

This blog post, On leaving the United States by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/09/06/on-leaving-the-united-states/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest reading this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post one on one? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021, I’m writing a new blog post every weekend or so. This is number 35 of 52. It’s Labor Day Weekend, so a Monday entry still counts! I...

Note: In 2021 I’ll publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays, but more practically, whichever day I get to it. Here’s entry 7 of 52.

Note: I haven’t forgotten about Biden! I’ll post about him next week.

Note: You should probably skip this review if you want zero spoilers.

On Monday I finally finished reading the 2003 novel Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. The semi-autobiographical bestseller came to my attention because Putingate whistleblower Reality Winner, whose August 2018 sentencing I reported on in person, included it in her art from the FMC Carswell prison in Fort Worth Texas, specifically in the piece reproduced below. The book is 933 large pages in the paperback edition I have (pictured left), so it took me quite a while to finish. Here’s what I gained from it, what I didn’t like, and my thoughts on whether you should consider reading Shantaram, if you haven’t already.

First, a quick summary. The story revolves around the main character Lin, who, after escaping imprisonment in his home country of Australia, where he’d robbed banks to maintain a drug habit, arrives in India with a false passport to live as a fugitive. There he participates in many areas of life unfamiliar to many Westerners or non-travelers, among them a restaurant-and-bar where fairly well-off migrants from Western countries reflect, as Lin sits at their table, on the ups and downs of their shifting fortunes and gossip about Mumbai. Lin meets the goofy and basically nonstop-happy Prabaker, an Indian taxi driver whose characterization is an offensive Sambo caricature, not a careful depiction of a fully realized individual. Prabaker becomes a sidekick for Lin and invites him, when the fugitive’s chips are down, to live in the city’s friendly Colaba slum. The Australian accepts, and then provides improvised medical services to the slum dwellers, an endearing (but also borderline stereotyped) section of the novel that shows the inhabitants of Colaba owning little, yet helping each other tremendously with little to none of the war of all against all common in the so-called civilized world. In other news, Lin somewhat randomly meets an elder statesman of a large gang/mafia, the oddly philosophical Abdel Khader Khan. Lin’s in love, too, with one of the restaurant-and-bar crowd, a Swiss woman named Karla who’s in the habit of offering purplish one-liners about life. The fugitive assists her in liberating her friend Lisa from the vile Madame Zhou’s prostitution/slavery den. Zhou retaliates by getting Lin thrown into a wretched prison once more, this time in India. After the Australian suffers much behind these new bars, Khader bribes the authorities to free him. In gratitude, and to learn skills for revenge, Lin goes to work for Khader in Mumbai’s criminal underworld, swapping out currency and trading passports on the black market, plus physical training and fistfighting members of a rival gang. This dark side of Lin increasingly comes to dominate over the slum doctor side, culminating in the fugitive travelling to Afghanistan as a gun-runner for Khader. Due to battling in that country, he barely makes it back to India, where he soon heads to Zhou’s for revenge. At the novel’s climax, he finds Zhou already a wreck, and, changing his mind, chooses to let her live. Lin muses that the cheerful slum dwellers, not the macho criminals, are the truly heroic ones — which doesn’t stop him a single inch, for another 100-or-so gratuitous pages after the climax, from continuing to fistfight members of rival gangs and promising those men in his particular gang that he’ll go on future missions beyond Mumbai with them, presumably a setup for the sequel I haven’t read, The Mountain Shadow.

As many reviews have noted, the best aspect of the novel is its vivid, lively depictions of various places. These off-the-beaten-path settings include Prabaker’s native village of Sunder, the Colaba slum, Zhou’s slave den, the Australian prison (in flashback), the prison in India, Bollywood sets, Afghanistan mountains and caves, a temporary settlement built atop a skyscraper, and more. The author’s personal experience of the environments enrich his portrayal of them, as when you stumble upon a Reddit post by a stranger who’s not dedicated to writing, but who’s suddenly putting together gorgeous, moving prose because they’re talking about something they’re profoundly invested in personally and know all the fascinating details of. For audiences starved of adventures, Shantaram seems as good a way as any, short of actual travel, to experience unfamiliar locations. But, then again, I unfortunately haven’t read many realist stories set outside Britain, Europe, and the United States. To read about India in English, there are probably many worthy alternatives to Shantaram out there; it’s simply a matter of finding them.

The novel is also enjoyable when it focuses on a bank-robbing druggie gone wrong changing for the better, into a compassionate doctor living and practicing among the friendly dwellers of the largely ignored, but massive, slum village in Mumbai. At these points, the book seems, or did to me, spiritually uplifting, and it really piqued my curiosity about this slum and similar parts of the planet, not that I know how accurately Gregory David Roberts depicts Colaba. In these portions, the novel reads like a modern-day Les Misérables, the 1862 French novel (and mainstay Broadway musical) about the ex-convict Jean Valjean who similarly improves his lot and turns to helping others. (I don’t know, but given reporting about Reality Winner’s numerous altruistic endeavors throughout her life, I imagine this component of the novel might appeal to her especially.)

Sadly, the Les Mis-esque portions of Shantaram don’t win out. As the pages mount up, Lin becomes heavily invested in the drug lord Abdel Khader Khan, treating him as a father figure godsend. Now that he’s in thrall to Khader, Lin’s altruistic side fades away, leaving readers to wade through seemingly endless tough-guy scenes of macho dialogue and beat ’em up. The book gives the impression that each twist and turn of these rival gangs scheming and warring against each other are of utmost importance to Roberts, but readers more interested in thoughtful humanity will probably lose sympathy with the suddenly swaggering Lin, as I did, and hang on only for the descriptions of the unusual Afghanistan setting, where the Australian’s warlike side emerges full blown, without any real apology. Toward the end of Shantaram, I was reminded of author Peter Straub’s Blue Rose crime novels from 1988-1993, in which again, labyrinthine complexities of plot are supposed to be gripping, yet really, reading, trying to keep track of the reversals and revelations, having my patience and memorization capacity taxed, I was just hoping for Straub to go rogue from corporate expectations and write something that simply interests or amuses him, as he did in his 1999 novel Mr. X, namely the fun scene, wholly unnecessary to the plot no one remembers anyway, of a college kid on amphetamine, sleeplessly blazing through tests and causing assorted humorous troubles (as best I can recall from having read that book a decade or so ago, anyway. Also, still waiting for a Peter Straub comedy of manners novel.) It isn’t really required for fiction to be a Rube Goldberg machine of cloaks, daggers, and derring-do to maintain audience interest, but living in a world of easily digestible intellectual abstractions and unnoticed emotional hypervigilance, that’s what audiences today are trained to look for from corporate entertainment: whether it’s the banging jolts and high-pitched shrieking of the ubiquitous cartoons everyone from toddler to adult seems to watch nowadays, or the action-heavy, fatal exploits of weapon-toting superheroes in blockbuster movies, characters in film will switch sides, chase MacGuffins, navigate ridiculous plot twists, and try to kill each other for hours and hours, and since all this is usually folks’ starting point with art, other options aren’t always readily salient. Anyway, to sum up Shantaram along with its reliance on needless hyperstimulating plot machinations, Lin first gains reader sympathy, going from gun-waving druggie to altruistic slum doctor, then loses it, dwindling into a cardboard gangster character working his studly way through the forgettable mazes of noir plot. The fugitive’s climactic forgiveness bestowed upon Madame Zhou, as predictable as a million other Christian-esque forgiveness stories (see for instance the Star Wars movies, where blowing up inhabited planets, committing mass genocide, is no significant obstacle to redemption: no trials, no reparations, no transformations, no nothing), makes little lasting impact on Lin after quick passages of him standing before her musing yet more aphorisms before returning to beat ’em up (where sure, he sometimes muses additionally, but he keeps on in the gang, doesn’t he). Among other things, Lin blames his second imprisonment for his downfall, but as I’ll conclude below, I think there’s more to his dark side coming out on top than the novel openly expresses.

The poor characterizations are another problem with Shantaram. Lin’s sidekick, Prabaker with the never-ending flashbulb smiles, was already mentioned briefly; he’s largely a troubling Sambo caricature, the offensive stereotype that paints people who aren’t white and are classed far below the colonial rulers and their offspring as happy and loyal and stupid untermensch. The women, Karla and Lisa among them, are routinely described in terms of their attractive physical appearances, and their roles are mostly delimited to how they impact the Australian and his sex drive. I suppose both these flaws were regrettably par for the course in 2003, prior to the widespread adoption of social media, but I’m glad white male authors can’t so easily escape with this sort of unaware, compulsive thing anymore.

Finally, I want to talk about how Lin seems, to me, unreal, depersonalized. I’d imagine someone who robs banks, busts out of prison, and travels the world to be a person of great strength, for good or ill. Maybe I’m wrong, and there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in my philosophy, but I’d expect such a fugitive to have bold opinions, disciplined willpower, and definite preferences. Yet Lin floats, without much volition, as if pushed by undescribed waves, from healing doctor to warlike gun-runner, to someone listening to music on a beach or drinking in a bar, to many other roles, with little explanation of his zigzagging path beyond obvious observations in his first-person narration to the effect that, say, strutting gangsters want attention and aren’t happy in themselves. Duh. Papering over this depersonalized way Lin comes across are corny aphorisms from Karla and the-author-speaking-through-Lin. Many reviews have mocked these purple groaners, but just to give one example, I’ll open to a random page in the middle of my copy. Page 451: “there’s an innocence, essential and unblinking, in the heart of every determination to serve.” Huh? Essential and unblinking? Well, maybe? After reading hundreds of these easy-on-the-ears, yet ultimately cryptic, assertions, one or three every few pages, I lost my hopeful tolerance that I might learn from them something profound, and began to grow exhausted with them and the book overall. The one-liners seem to cover for the lack of a real Lin — Why did he gain that doctoring ability in the first place? Why India, or Karla for that matter? — so Roberts shoehorns the aphorisms into just about every available spot, apparently trying to create the illusion that meaningful things are happening. Lin turns to Khaled as a father figure, hoping the drug lord (who himself spouts paragraphs of undergraduate-sounding metaphysical theories into the eager ears of the fugitive) will provide something of substance, perhaps an understanding of life that Lin lacks. But Khaled is himself just some puffed-up mob boss, impressive only because the author repeatedly insists through Lin that it is so. The understandings never really come — except as more charlatan’s aphorisms. It isn’t just that Lin was pissed off to get imprisoned again, and so became a gangster when he should have remained with the friendly folks at the slum. It’s more crucially that, despite what we’re told of the prison-break and doctoring abilities and other superhuman attributes, there isn’t actually much of a Lin to begin or end with; referring himself to the ignoble Khaled for answers is just one dead end he tries of several. So in the absence of a more real, perhaps more determined individual to follow, the author instead fills too much of the novel with the supposedly cool scenes of rival gang fights. With all his anxious musings and flailing, flip-flopping soul-searches, Lin certainly doesn’t know himself truly, not even by the end of the novel, which to be fair is the first released in a planned quartet — if readers have the patience for whatever the grand total page count and grand total aphorism count end up at.

For all its problems, the novel does cohere quite well, and Roberts’ evocative, vibrant descriptions of the unfamiliar-to-me settings are worth the price of admission. They make me want to visit India even, and might be very enjoyable for you as well. The book includes a sampling of fun curios, from dancing bears to commentary on the challenging and sometimes dangerous peculiarities of Mumbai transportation. However, given all the complaints against the book described above, including the automatic turn-offs of weak/caricature characterization, there are probably better works about India and Afghanistan in English out there, more deserving of 900 pages’ worth of reading time. I definitely decided against reading the sequel (The Mountain Shadow), which racks up nearly another 900 pages. Reviews of the sequel say that with the autobiographical material burnt through and thus unavailable to him after Shantaram, Roberts piles on the aphorisms even worse in The Mountain Shadow, as the crime plots continue their needless complexities that don’t even titillate successfully. Beyond the setting descriptions, expressed sufficiently in Shantaram, I don’t think there’s more to learn from Roberts. So as 2021 gets underway, I’m now turning to read all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea fiction. There’s only so much time.

This blog post, Review of the novel Shantaram, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/02/19/review-novel-shantaram/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post otherwise? Please email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2021 I’ll publish at least one blog post per week, ideally on Wednesdays, but more practically, whichever day I get to it. Here’s entry 7 of 52. Note:...

Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Here’s this week’s post, the one for Week 7…a few days late—try asking for a refund?

Note: This post obviously belongs, as Part 3, to a series of posts about my trip from Seattle, where I reside, to British Columbia in Summer 2019. Here’s the completed series, a USian escapes the bubble: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and (forthcoming) Part 4.

When I was preparing for my adventure, my acquaintances, much like the border g̶o̶d̶ guard, asked me what I was planning to do. Would I visit the Butchart Gardens? “It is so lovely, and it looks much better during the day than at night, and [on and on].” Years ago, planning for a different adventure, a road trip across half the United States, I was asked my take on whether the route should have us see Nature or cities. “Neither,” I said. “We should see people.”

To learn what likely simpatico people in Victoria were thinking and feeling and doing, and to bring that psychic samizdat back to Seattle, I primarily had in mind, even from the early planning phases, three missions: 1) check out the anarchist bookstore Camas Books & Infoshop; 2) check out and participate with Food Not Bombs Victoria; and 3) check out and participate with whatever alternative mental health stuff might be springing up in the city. Much of my offline activism my first few years in Seattle involved Seattle Food Not Bombs (especially as a driver!) and working with folks in or around, uh, the Seattle chapter of the, uh, Hearing Voices Network, which as you know is the oldest academic honor society in the United States complete with secret handshake, engraved golden key, and notable members including US presidents and Supreme Court justices, Ursula K. Le Guin, Henry Kissinger, and me. Aiming to improve my irl understanding of subject matters like (radical) education, food security, and replacing dumbass psychiatry, I hoped to gain a bit bigger view of the world, to escape the typically reactionary USian default me me me dolla dolla bill lol unrealistic fake news lol me me me dolla dolla bill — and also, to just interact with everyday Victoria people hanging out, the ordinary Victoria public transit system, and so on. That seemed far more valuable to me than tourist traps. In Seattle my hands have been nicely dirty with real life, so why would I not want that elsewhere?

So, this post covers those three — successful! — missions, each of which took place on a different day of my adventure. I didn’t take any photos of the missions, however, so throughout this Part 3, I’ll rely on others’ photos or funny images.

Mission one: Camas, anarchist bookstore in Victoria (Wikipedia). They recently sent out this communiqué regarding supporting Unist’ot’en and Gidimt’en camps’ resistance against proposed pipelines in the area, (Amnesty; blockades shut railways across Canada), which I unfortunately know little about. I walked to Camas from my hostel, something of a 1̶.̶2̶5̶-̶m̶i̶l̶e̶ 2̶.̶1̶-̶k̶i̶l̶o̶m̶e̶t̶e̶r̶ 2.1-kilometre hike one way. I arrived, looked around inside at several of the same books that already existed on my bookshelves back home, and got into a great conversation with a staffperson there. I told him about the drop in ambient anxiety in Victoria relative to the United States, and how I assumed that was due in part to the universal health insurance and the lack of mass shootings. He said he understood how I would perceive Victoria that way, but from his vantage point, everything seemed too calm. “Unrest,” he said, “is best.”

Camas is really cool. Relative to other anarchist bookstores I’ve been to in the United States, Camas much more strongly emphasized First Nations or indigenous related material. Were I living in Victoria, or staying for a longer duration, I’d go back to get some different books, meet people, find out about projects, etc. Camas is open daily. Fantastic. Just typing this, I miss it, and wish I were there chilling out in those chairs, reading a book, waiting for an intriguing passerby to inevitably come in and strike up conversation far more interesting than what I usually hear offline.

(In middle school, I drew anarchy signs into my handwritten name and drew them into the steam on the shower door at home. Maybe I saw them first on nineties electric guitars, or maybe on the ANSI art of bulletin board systems. That kid and this adult would get along well.)

Mission two: Food Not Bombs Victoria. Part of the global conspiracy to feed people. Gathering surplus food leftover from restaurants, distributors, and other sources, then cooking it and bringing it to a downtown park, on a shoestring budget, and sharing it with everyone, particularly people who might really need it. All the world has chapters, so if you’re looking to help someone yourself, instead of voting for someone to instruct someone to instruct someone to consider another vote or two or thousand about paying someone to instruct someone to pay someone to instruct someone to pay someone to pay someone to pay someone to maybe help someone someday — or not — and plus you can make friends and participate in your community…why then, go find a Food Not Bombs in your area or start one.

Having FNB-ed quite a while in Seattle, I got in touch with the amazingly welcoming Food Not Bombs Victoria folks, because I was curious how FNB would compare/contrast up there. And I was hungry!

At an apartment, I joined a handful of cooks. Really cool, right, here I am in another country a few days, and already I’m in an apartment with a bunch of friendly local strangers, working on a common cause. And yes, as you might remember from Part 2, everything in this apartment was likewise smaller than the objects would be in the counterpart US apartment. As I recall, even the sink water handles were smaller! The donated food was gathered, I think, primarily from a co-op grocery. With what was then my usual klutzy difficulty, I helped make a salad with sliced cucumber, carrots, a little kale, some sprouts, etc., and another person made a dressing for it with vinegar and various oils. The rest of the food made was similarly standard FNB-style cuisine. We then transported the food from the apartment to the downtown square/park, Centennial Square on the Douglas(!) street side, where the sharing is held every Sunday ⁠— also where, years ago, Occupy Victoria encamped.

At the park, the meal was held under a large tree, upon whose branches an FNBer hung an impressively large Food Not Bombs Victoria sign. The black sign had a lot of colorful graphics and words on it (sorry, no photo!). If I recall correctly, Food Not Bombs Victoria also supplied some local literature, zines, etc. About 20 individuals dined on this most scrumptious meal. That included random businesspeople passing by, various park denizens (such as skateboarders), multiple homeless or traveler or otherwise off the radar humans, plus some FNBers who hadn’t cooked with us but wanted to hang out.

FNB Victoria implemented two good ideas others might want to pick up. First, not only did FNB Victoria bring to the park a box of clean, re-usable mugs, cups, bowls, and cutlery, but also, many, perhaps most, of those sharing generally already knew to use those implements and then place them back in the box after eating. These bowls, pieces of cutlery, etc. would later be washed by FNB Victoria and used the next week. Second, the sharers mostly arranged themselves in a lazy circle around the tree. As opposed to FNBers on one side of a table and non-FNBers on the table’s opposing side, FNB Victoria’s organically emerged quasi-circle seating/standing arrangement felt very not us vs. them to me.

Mission three: Alternative mental health. Before ferrying to Victoria, I pinged my contacts involved in that movement, seeking suggestions for my trip. To my knowledge, Victoria has no Hearing Voices Network chapter, then or now, but someone did point me to Movie Monday. It’s a weekly series of eclectic and thoughtful films, often with presentations and discussions. Free admission, donations encouraged. The 100-seat theater is in the same building as a (now closed down, I believe) psychiatric ward. In 1993, Movie Monday coordinator Bruce Saunders was held at that ward, diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Stuck there, he got the idea to show movies at the unused theater, because quality education and entertainment and conversation are as needed as food in life. He continues to coordinate Movie Monday, and it has been going for more than 25 years (listen to this seven-minute MP3 interview with him). The movies aren’t always about mental health topics and aren’t just for audiences interested in that subject. Movie Monday started that way, but has since expanded to other subject matters. When I went, we watched Six Primrose, about a food security project in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

After the movie, a short discussion took place among the audience. I learned about some resources, people, etc. for alternative mental health interests in Vancouver BC. Those I can pursue on my next adventure to British Columbia!

Waiting at the bus stop to return from Movie Monday to the hostel, I got into a conversation with a random Canadian woman also waiting for the transit ride. I tried to ask her questions about Canada, but she easily and repeatedly diverted the conversation back to the United States.

“Why,” she wanted to know, “won’t they fix their country? Or, why don’t they just leave?” (Apparently I myself had temporarily become a nomad, resident of nowhere.)

Although I don’t know all the answers to her questions, perhaps you reading know some of them for yourself. The best I can do for motivation at the moment is to compare my whole adventure to the excitement expressed in the amazing 2015 song “Go!” by the band Public Service Broadcasting, about the spaceflight that put the first humans on the Moon. Listen, and I’ll keep trying to talk USians into traveling with Part 4 of this series next week!

This blog post, A USian escapes the bubble: Summer 2019 adventure to British Columbia, Part 3, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2020/02/20/summer-2019-adventure-british-columbia-part-3. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post otherwise? Please email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays or so. Here’s this week’s post, the one for Week 7…a few days late—try asking for...

Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays — or two days late when I’m busy talking into a microphone at federal Congresspeople and switching from cooking with Pacific Foods coconut milk to cooking with Aroy-D coconut milk, each of those matters more complex than they might initially seem. Anyway, here’s today’s post, the one for Week 5.

Note: My first two blog posts this year, and last week’s, have all been updated a tiny bit. You might want to check out particularly the updates to my post about Russiagate whistleblower Reality Winner’s clemency petition.

Note: This post obviously belongs, as Part 2, to a series of posts about my trip from Seattle, where I reside, to British Columbia in Summer 2019. Here’s the completed series, a USian escapes the bubble: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and (forthcoming) Part 4.

After leaving the border station and entering Victoria, I was amazed at how calm everyone was around me, at the immediate drop in ambient anxiety relative to the United States. I wondered if this was perhaps due to my current location in a touristy area, right by the border station and downtown attractions such as the British Columbia parliament buildings and the surrounding fancy statues. Or if the presence of universal health insurance coverage, next to no mass shootings, and a pervasive metric system might deserve the credit. Before leaving in earnest the area just around the border station — much like putting your shoes back on once through the TSA pornoscope — I took some time to fiddle with my backpack and figure out my OpenStreetMap.

Yeah, my time in Canada began with tinkering with OpenStreetMap, a significantly helpful component of this adventure. Directions without Google is a thing. OpenStreetMap somehow reminded me of science fiction and fantasy maps. If you originally hail from Texas, as I gloriously do, you might remember those old Mapsco books allowing travelers to find streets on a printed grid to explore their hometowns. Maybe we’ve been mapping ever since we first figured out how, real and fictional worlds alike.

Backpack secured, map in hand, I headed for the hostel. Along the way, drivers moved their cars with infinitesimal slowness, stopping for anyone within kilometers who might be pondering crossing a street someday in their lives. I kept looking around, bewildered. Where was, where was… was… something? Something was missing. No edginess anywhere. I was looking around for the absent anxiety like it might have been an overshadowed tree or lost ballcap, as some think God or envy should be objects, and if you can’t spot them in a (tele/micro)scope, they can’t exist. All this made me smile. I continued forward. Along the way, I saw an officialdom building for tourists and went in. I asked to convert some of my US dollars to Canadian dollars and stared at the result in my palm. What, exactly, is a loonie, what is a toonie, why are prices typically rounded to .05 increments, what coins will the hostel laundry machines expect, and why aren’t there any cops anywhere?

Little details differed constantly from the United States, keeping me wide awake and very alive. Canadian bills are super thin, and all week, I thought I was going to accidentally tear one removing it from my wallet. During World War II, creeping toward a full century ago, my grandfather, a highly capable man who ‘did a thing’ (or ten), like operate a bulldozer and repair septic tanks and run a gas station and supervise a school, wrote to his local print newspaper in East Texas explaining in terms possibly considered offensive today what people on the other side of the planet looked like. Makes sense, right, what else were they going to do eighty-odd years ago in that Deep South pocket of Texas to determine how tall or short these mysterious faraway strangers were, besides communicate with traveling human beings about it, including those travelers who might at times use words considered in some lonely ZIP code to be noncompliant, or even worse, unfamiliar? Heck, maybe (hopefully?) things I’m saying in this post will strike knowledgeable others in the far future as backward.

Time marches on, and new challenges keep humans constantly adapting and growing stronger — plenty of people don’t want that. We USians proudly know we can ask corporate Alexa/Siri about, say, Canadian bills and come across information regarding their thinness and maintain the superiority complex we USians all seem trained to have about being very stable geniuses (as most of us hide under our beds afflicted with chronic helplessness). And yet that mild fear, all week, of accidentally ripping the Canadian bills made me, perhaps like Mary the Color Scientist, amazed at how much there is in this gigantic world, 190-odd countries and seven billion non-USians, that most of my offline acquaintances and I do not know, in any meaningful sense, sometimes not even at the googling, pixels-on-screens level, since to learn about something unfamiliar usually requires first hearing about something unfamiliar, and then not snarling: “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS.” If you have friends who will ask for the definition of an unfamiliar word when you use it, hang on to them…

Entering the hostel, I was met with a hilarious employee behind the desk, who was blasting Al Jazeera. In 2001 two US bombs destroyed an Al Jazeera office in Kabul, in 2003 a US missile attack hit an Al Jazeera office in Baghdad and killed a reporter, plus a leaked memo from a 2004 Blair-Bush II discussion, re: how about doing some more of that, was subjected to media gagging in the UK that looks to still be ongoing (source, source). Besides the moneychanger and the border g̶o̶d̶ guard, this was pretty much the first Canadian I would speak with at any length on this trip. And my country had bombed his favorite news network repeatedly. He was from another country originally and was eventually headed for yet another — migration that, while rarely spoken of or even imagined by hordes of USians (tons of exceptions), seemed a common feature of many I spoke with in British Columbia — and he’d passed through Los Angeles a while back. After I made my appreciation for Al Jazeera known, he passed on to me his conclusion from L.A.: “The United States has two types of people: the terrifying, and the terrified.” Nodding, I said, “And neither knows it.”

The hostel was really cool. I hadn’t quite known what to expect from online reviews and threads, as I’d never stayed in a hostel before, but everything went straightforwardly.

A desktop computer offered easy Internet access, a lending library supplied books for half-asleep travelers to rest on their bellies while dozing on the couches, the few laundry machines were constantly in use by everyone, the kitchen had ample refrigerator space, cooking gear, and conversation, and there was a television room — I basically never watch TV, except maybe some downloaded Star Trek or Twilight Zone now and then, but I thought briefly watching Canadian news might be interesting. It was. The hosts discussed their differences with excessive politeness and grammatically correct, syntactically complex sentences. Changing channels at random, I finally understood why my decades-long Internet friend in the Canadian Prairies region had an email address ending in @shaw.ca. I mean, I knew Shaw Communications was a giant Canadian telecommunications company, but there it was, right there, a few y̶a̶r̶d̶s̶ m̶e̶t̶e̶r̶s̶ metres in front of me on an everyday Canadian television screen. While stereotypes of the dumb USian might come to mind, and I’m writing a bit like that for humor, during none of this trip did I actually feel stupid, not because of a superiority complex, but because everything seemed really fun and exciting to experience, to learn about.

One practical tip regarding sleeping. At night, my backpack was locked up in a locker, right? With a padlock and key. So where would I put the key while sleeping? I didn’t want to give it to anyone or hide it. My only remaining option, seemingly, was putting it in my shorts pocket — which had no zipper. As I rolled around in my sleep, the key came out of my pocket a few nights, and once or twice almost slipped down into the crack between my bed and the wall. Tip? From now on, shorts with zipper pockets.

Early on, I checked out Green Cuisine Vegetarian Restaurant, where I finally experienced one of the most common observations about the United Status versus other countries, an observation that does actually penetrate the USian hive mind somewhat. Yes, I’m talking about portion sizes. At the Green Cuisine buffet restaurant and everywhere else in Victoria, the plates, the bowls, the booths, the bar stool cushions, and the derrières atop those bar stool cushions, were smaller than their USian counterparts. I think the degree to which I had packed my bowls (see photo) drew some startled looks from the polite staff! And it wasn’t just restaurants and derrières. Victoria’s office buildings were shorter, the bus stop benches were narrower, and the tiny lots of the very few car dealerships I walked past were rather apologetic for existing at all. Whereas North Texas is one sprawling mass of enormous strip malls and totalitarian car dealerships. Prices (adjusting for conversion) were smaller too. In Seattle, the equivalent of the pictured meal might run you up toward $20 USD or above, easy. In Victoria, around $10 USD. (Tack on an .05 for Canadian dollars…kidding.) And of course, I grew up where this $21 USD meal is normal (from Allen Texas, 2019):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoMMAlIll4A

I hasten to add that while definitely preferring Seattle to Texas, after moving to the US Pacific Northwest, I’ve come to appreciate many things about Texas that I didn’t appreciate while living there — but that’s a whole ‘nother k̶e̶t̶t̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶i̶s̶h̶ blog post, I reckon, y’hear?

Think about migrating, or just traveling, like algebra, where your geographic location is the term outside the parentheses, and it distributes to each term inside the parentheses, affecting each one. Since we’re living our best lives already, and we aren’t just daily growing stupider as we age confined in cubicles and helplessly hiding under our beds all day watching Frasier in the same ZIP code we were born in, certainly we all remember the distributive property in algebra:

5(a + b + c + d) = 5a + 5b + 5c + 5d

Similarly, geographic locations, starting with Fort Worth Texas:

Ft. Worth(a + b + c + d) = Ft. Worth(a) + Ft. Worth(b) + Ft. Worth(c) + Ft. Worth(d)

Seattle(a + b + c + d) = Seattle(a) + Seattle(b) + Seattle(c) + Seattle(d)

Victoria(a + b + c + d) = Victoria(a) + Victoria(b) + Victoria(c) + Victoria(d)

Now replace the variables a, b, c, and d with various conditions affecting your life, day to day and throughout your life span:

a: safety of air (lack of air pollution)
b: savings on cost of living (lower prices and so on)
c: rarity of mass shootings
d: education level of the public, of professionals, etc.
And whichever additional variables.

Which of course gives us:

Ft. Worth(air safety + savings on cost of living + rarity of mass shootings + education) = Ft. Worth(air safety) + Ft. Worth(savings on cost of living) + Ft. Worth(rarity of mass shootings) + Ft. Worth(education) + etc.

Seattle(air safety + savings on cost of living + rarity of mass shootings + education) = Seattle(air safety) + Seattle(savings on cost of living) + Seattle(rarity of mass shootings) + Seattle(education) + etc.

Victoria(air safety + savings on cost of living + rarity of mass shootings + education) = Victoria(air safety) + Victoria(savings on cost of living) + Victoria(rarity of mass shootings) + Victoria(education) + etc.

Surely you get the idea: while it’s great, in truth mandatory, to improve yourself in this or that regard as an individual, it can upgrade multiple factors impacting your life a lot faster by just picking up and migrating to a better place. As opposed to, say, the individualization of social problems or what’s sometimes called the fundamental attribution error. More simply, from the originator herself of a recent but already well-known quotation:

https://twitter.com/debihope/status/8154179378?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Obviously, life and locations can be a lot more complicated, and even those with a lot of say in the matter choose to live in certain places only for all kinds of reasons. Some of the most amazing people I’ve met so far have lived in the same house their entire life. Still, I think the above is very worth considering, with far more seriousness than it generally is given.

However, often it’s not logic, like that above, that moves us to make huge leaps in our lives. Instead, it’s our hearts, our dreams, our art… So to conclude this installment, I’ll leave you with the song “I’m Not From Here” from fellow Texan (I’ll always be one) James McMurtry. An excerpt of his lyrics for the song follows. Until next week.

We can’t help it
We just keep moving
It’s been that way since long ago
Since the Stone Age, chasing the great herds
We mostly go where we have to go

This blog post, A USian escapes the bubble: Summer 2019 adventure to British Columbia, Part 2, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (human-readable summary of license). The license is based on a work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2020/02/05/summer-2019-adventure-british-columbia-part-2/. You can view the full license (the legal code aka the legalese) here. For learning more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license, or want to correspond with me about this post otherwise? Please email me: dal@riseup.net.

Note: In 2020, I’m writing 52 blog posts, one per week, released on Mondays — or two days late when I’m busy talking into a microphone at federal Congresspeople and...