Entries Tagged 'Mexico' ↓

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.

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, Dec. 17, 2024 Note: I took all of the photos in this post except the above, taken by Ricardo, and one below, noted...

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...

September 11 in Seattle saw a moderate-size crowd sweating anxiety away in the Eastlake neighborhood before two Lo-Fi nightclub stages, where four local acts supported four bands all the way from Guadalajara for Flower Fest 3. The festival made a nice way to compare and contrast Mexican rock with rock developed from within the Five Eyes states (FVEY: US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). That’s a term a little more specific—this writer pedantically notes—than “the Anglosphere,” which would include states such as Jamaica and South Africa where presumably (please correct in comments if wrong) local bands produce a very different sound than either Guadalajarans or FVEYers.

So how does music from México’s second most populous municipality differ from today’s Emerald City sound? First thing to know, if you’re reading this from outside the Pacific Northwest, is that grunge is basically over here. The four USian groups who played constituted two pop punk bands (one, Secret Superpower, easy on the ears and one, TERMINATor, more challenging), a heartfelt acoustic guitarist-singer with a bassist backing him up (Great Spiders), and a set of very talented, medium-hard rockers (Swamp Meat vs. Killer Ghost).

The highly enjoyable Seattle bands are, in the grand scheme of things, not too different from what you’d likely hear on a college radio station in any U.S. port city. Imagine 4/4 time, some nifty idiosyncracies sprinkled in, familiar instruments to hear for a respite at the bar … and you have the general idea. But what about the sound from south of the border?

Judging from Tuesday evenings’s excellent four viajeros (travelers)—an experimental noise-metal crew (Mortemart); an instrumental group of rockers (Mindhala); and two sets of all-around rockers with vocals (Uay and the all-women Neptuna)—Guadalajara rock is typically infused with more rhythmic variety and no fear of major intervals relative to the more strict FVEY sound.

Now let’s see how that simplistic binary plays out or doesn’t with each individual act. One caveat: I couldn’t make out lyrics of any band, so this is solely judging based on audio. And for extra explicit dorkiness, images of Guadalajarans are aligned right, and Seattleites are aligned left.

Seattle on the left meets Mexico on the right

First up, locals in Secret Superpower (Soundcloud) sounded a bit like Garbage in a good mood, with Daniel Cutting’s steady drumming and Kira Wilson’s distorted bass underpinning guitarist Paige Spicer’s warm chords. The trio’s dreamy songs welcomed the night in well. For those who showed up early, Secret Superpower enjoyably situated the evening in the context of familiar female-fronted rock, with their own almost retro spin—happiness is too often uncool these days, but like yesteryear, Secret Superpower didn’t fear to put a smile on audience faces.

Next came two local bands in one: Swamp Meat (Bandcamp) vs. Killer Ghost (Bandcamp). The first song of this badass conglomerate of bands featured a rumba-like drum beat that really showed off drummer Daniel Onufer’s confident playing. The second started off with a military-style march on his authoritatively cracking snare while Laura Seniow fingerplucked her bass and Lila Burns added sweet guitar melodies. Onufer’s confidence extended to dropping a stick and retrieving it without missing a beat and singing (and singing well) while drumming. The other guitarist, Sharif Ali, let loose with passionate vocals too. If there’s one word for this superband it’s confidence. Their skill breaks my binary already, because they inserted unusual rhythms that ventured outside radio norms.

Third, a loud noise intro said shit was about to get serious with Guadalajaran psychedelic rockers Mortemart (Bandcamp). Synth player Chaka—fittingly dressed in a NASA T-shirt—guitarist Albert and bassist Kiaran constructed a rumbling howl that caused showgoers to instinctively look around at the P.A.—would it hold? Would our eardrums? With the independence viajeros have, Mortemart didn’t worry about audience reaction and kept going. With his bucket cornet, Eric issued plaintive cries over the aural thunder. Then Daniel’s drums kicked in with a driving beat on the floor toms, the horn’s perfect-fourth agonies now almost lost in the rumble. Kiaran’s bass grooved hard with an octave-based pattern and it was clear the rhythm section would put passion into every simple note as the soundscape continued to be built around us. Chaka even inserted some video game-like bloops and beeps into the strange mix. This writer bought Mortemart’s album Overthinking via Bandcamp and you should too—check out the song “The Healing part 2.” The album versions are far less experimental than the live show, which is good for iterated listening. Put the shoe on the other foot, and it’s a hard time imagining notoriously homebound USians traveling to Guadalajara and repeating this show of confidence. But hopefully someday!

Fourth, Lo-Fi gave us Seattle-based TERMINATor’s popping punk (Instagram; got a link to their music? put it in the comments). The three-piece: Veronica Dye on drums and flute, Albie on guitar (with hat), Lauren on guitar also (no hat). Veronica looped her flute in for some songs, which gave the music a psychedelic edge, especially with Kevin Blanquies’ colorful, trippy TV static-ish visuals in the background. TERMINATor is currently filming a visual album, which sounds promising and super cool. We take back what we said about all USians in the preceding paragraph; these musicians, who aren’t afraid of challenging listeners while still delivering pleasing pitches, could totally play with confidence in Guadalajara. The looping flute (a simple three-note phrase) added some rhythmic risk. Not all is stable and predictable in corporate FVEY land.

Fifth, Lo-Fi offered Mindhala (Bandcamp), an instrumental Guadalajaran band. Victor’s Stratocaster described long, tender arcs above the urgent bossa-like grooves of Anton on bajo electrico and Nathalaia on drums. Some of the fastest notes of the night came from Victor, Anton brought skill to his hammer-ons, and Nathalaia, who would go on to drum for Uay and Neptuna later in the evening, was just getting started with her ample abilities. It would be great to hear Seattle-based rock bands experiment with bossa beats and more technical playing.

Antepenultimately, Uay (YouTube; got more links, put them in the comments please!). This Guadalajaran band serves as a cool example of how Guadalajaran rock tends to differ from rock from the FVEY states. Unlike USians in general, Uay has no fear of vocal harmonies, stomping the kick drum every beat, using major intervals to build riffs, and rumbling regularly on the toms. Chaka (in his NASA T-shirt!) laid down powerful bass-playing that matched Nathalia’s hard-hitting drums. Kieran added extra percussion with a second snare; all this rhythm inspired a woman up in the balcony to dance in sexy circles. Vocals came from guitarist Oby and Nathalia (which made two drummers singing that night). This writer is predicting more great music from all these Guadalajaran musicians in the future and wouldn’t hesitate to hear them play again. Gotta make sure the orange boy-king doesn’t actually build a stupid wall, so that can happen.

Penultimately, guitarist-vocalist Omar Shambacher’s Great Spiders (Bandcamp) played some thoughtful pop tunes with a bassist (know her name? leave it in the comments). This pensive music served as a nice breather between the louder UAY and Neptuna. It encouraged this writer sit down and rest for a few minutes, thinking over the night and being glad to live here in this corner-of-the-map city. Heartfelt songs long developed, Great Spiders sounded comfortable for FVEY-raised ears without sounding completely conformist either.

Ultimately, Flower Fest 3 closed with Neptuna (Bandcamp), four women from Guadalajara, all of whom sang as in the image from the balcony. The reliable, powerfully playing Nathalia drummed yet again, but this writer failed to get the names of the bassist, keyboardist, and guitarist (know them? by now you know where to add ’em). Nathalia frequently kicked on each beat in that Mexican style as the women sang in exquisite Spanish. Neptuna also makes use of rests (silent pauses in the music), something FVEY rockers all too often leave out. Go check out their Bandcamp and spring for the album Mar Rojo (Red Sea); this writer just did.

Hasta pronto

All the bands were totally enjoyable, but the Guadalajran music sounded more of a nation, fluxing and changing with vibrato and rhythmic variety…whereas the Seattle music was a bit more square, a bit more predictable, a bit more of uber-state Five Eyes. Travel generally enhances art, so remember, no bad borders, no wrong walls…

Flower Fest 3 at Lo-Fi: Seattle meets Guadalajara by Douglas Lucas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It does not affect your fair use rights or my moral rights. You can view the full license (the legalese) here; you can view a human-readable summary of it here. To learn more about Creative Commons, read this article. License based on a work at www.douglaslucas.com. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license? Email me: dal@riseup.net.

Seattle punks TERMINATor meet Mexican rocker Nathalia September 11 in Seattle saw a moderate-size crowd sweating anxiety away in the Eastlake neighborhood before two Lo-Fi nightclub stages, where four local...