As usual, I woke up at seven in the morning, which happens weather I like it or not these days. I had gone to bed at four, drunk, but jet lag is unaffected by the need for hibernation.
My head groggy, but more pert than I liked, I went into the living room and turned on an episode of Ramsays’s Kitchen nightmares, a European show where Scottish chef Gordon Ramsay berates the kitchen staffs of failing restraints into getting their shit together, which some do and some don’t. His brogue is comforting to me and I wanted this on as I made my breakfast, an over-stuffed burrito in a flour wrap with my unusually good guacamole. (I would have preferred something a little more Parisian, but I only remembered too late that I liked the slice of hard-boiled egg on everything and mayo really doesn’t go well with a burrito). I ate and ate until my stomach was full and reveled in being a glutton, with a yelling Scottish man in the background. Somewhere in the back of my head I remembered I had calls to make and plans to execute but those all seemed to fade into a cloudy haze as I took my first bite.
Since coming back from Europe I can’t seem to be motivated to do anything. Working seems voluntary. I am growing a methadone-clinic style beard, and my commitment to no particular thing is great. I loaf about and drink white wine during the day and eat and eat until my stomach gets big shelving concerns that a life needs maintenance. I want to become ex-patriot in America. I’ll have an admirable work ethic and be on vacation at the same time, all the time. The order isn’t important.
In Europe I saw four cities in just about two weeks and while moving from place to place was lonely and cumbersome my mind was unusually clear during it. I didn’t worry all the time, didn’t sink into a funk if I thought I felt an itch or pain somewhere, didn’t rank my current position in life against all the people living around me, didn’t obsess over if I’d “made-it” yet and if not how long would it be until I did, didn’t sit on a web-browser all-day refreshing innate news pages at regular intervals learning nothing. Because my here-ness is so habitual, my not-here-ness was a breath of fresh air. It was a whole new me. There’s a lot to be said for being a drifter.
Back in the USA, I need to import that lightness of no particular place into my normal everyday life. I don’t need to be in Paris or Spain or the Netherlands (which sounds like a place from the Lord of the Rings if you say it real slow), I just have to extend that mental breathability to the corner of Hollywood and Western. I’ve been back less than a week and what I went on vacation to forget, persists. I’m feeling the pains and comparing myself to my friends and all of a sudden I’m worrying about money because dollars are real and Euros might as well be edible.
So energize me America. Fill me with your infectious need to do, and not just be. I don’t miss the Tesco macaroni, the shitty exchange rate, the lack of any reasonable place to get preparation H, I miss the gentle idleness of it all. I want the hand through the barley at the end of Gladiator forgetting that he had to see his wife and son hung like ducks in a Chinese-food window. When I was on vacation my soul was adequate. My career, or lack of career, caused me as much worry as a touch of food on a shirt. Which might have very well been ketchup because fries come with fucking everything over there.
So I’ll let this wash off me as my internal gyroscope re calibrates itself in the really-not-so-shitty-truth that I live in California again. I can hear Gordon Ramsay in my head saying “find your bollocks and stop taking the piss!” which I’ve already begun doing as I’ve got my bollocks right here. The scraps from the Louvre, Sagura Familia and even the Gay Disco will be filed away as the memories are beginning to be, and I will move on with them as insulation in my attic of the head. I am back in Los Angeles again, the Thai food restaurant across the street has a hot dog on it, the crazy people blather in English, and I have a voice over audition due in about an hour that I will record from my living room.
And it’s those things, I think, that make me proud to be an American.
