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diff --git a/published/2006-06-09-homeward.txt b/published/2006-06-09-homeward.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..62548fc --- /dev/null +++ b/published/2006-06-09-homeward.txt @@ -0,0 +1,28 @@ +--- +template: single +point: 33.975160060264834,-118.42903373977045 +location: Los Angeles,California,United States +image: 2008/trappedmoth.jpg +desc: How do you come home after traveling the world? You don't. So what's it like to be home? I don't know, I'll tell you when I get there. By Scott Gilbertson +dek: New York, New York. John F Kennedy airport 1 am date unknown, sleepy looking customs guard stamps a passport without hardly looking at, without even checking to see where I had been. A light drizzle is falling outside and the subways extension to the terminal never looked so good. What is it like to be home? I don't know, I'll tell you when I get there. +pub_date: 2006-06-09T11:05:34 +slug: homeward +title: Homeward +--- + +<span class="drop">N</span>ew York, New York. John F Kennedy airport 1 am date unknown, sleepy looking customs guard stamps a passport without hardly looking at, without even checking to see where I had been. A light drizzle is falling outside and the subways extension to the terminal never looked so good. Concrete hiss of tires, parabolic freeway ramps, a moth trapped inside an airport bus, the sodium yellow glow of subway lights, the gentle rocking of a train car, the green boarded fronts of a sixth avenue newsstand, shoes still leaking, still tired and still not looking back. + +Just off Bleeker, around the corner from Minetta where I once lived for a few weeks, there is a small coffee shop totally unremarkable in nearly every way save one distinguishing characteristic that drew me to it initially and draws me to it still — it doesn't close. Faced with a thirty six hour layover and nowhere near the cash to pay for a hotel (don't even ask about the credit cards) I figured good old Esperanta cafe was the ideal sort of place to spend the night. + +I would like to say that I got off the plane ready to kiss the ground and mumble something about home at last, thank god home at last, but that isn't how I felt and isn't what I did. soon after I arrived in Los Angeles to see my family, friends started to email and call, which was wonderful, except that nearly everyone asked what it was like to be back. + +I've had three months to ponder that question now and I still don't have a definitive answer, which is at least partly my own fault because I've never asked exactly what you mean when you ask that question. Sometimes people ask that as a sort of loaded question, some people seemed to be waiting for me to bad mouth America. + +So let's start there. I could say a million bad things about America, but the truth is people, things are no better anywhere else, like Tom Wait's said “I know I know, things is tough all over.” There are things America does better than the rest of the world and there are things we could do so much better. + +I could be critical of America's corrupt, inept and lying politicians, but I could just as easily be critical of France's politicians, Cambodia's politicians, India's politicians, Laos, Thailand ad nauseam. We are no better and no worse. + +Then there's the other side of that coin, some seem to expect that I would be overjoyed to finally be back in the U.S., but the truth is I didn't miss it. I missed a lot of people here in the States, but the country itself never much crossed my mind. + +So what is it like to be home? I don't know, I'll tell you when I get there. + |