Life in the no-Trump zone

Here’s the weird thing. Whenever I’m way from Oregon, even for just a few days, even if I’m just up in Seattle, I get heart-sick. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean I really get sick. I get a pain in my chest and a lump in my throat. It’s a love-ache, like when you pine for somebody who’s not there.

But on the other hand, whenever I’m away from the United States, as I have been for the past week and a half, I feel joy and a lightness of being. I am exhilarated. And I am desperate to stay away, to distance myself from the madness, to make someplace else my home. A few days ago, strolling down a several-mile lane that cuts through the leafy length of The Prater (an extraordinary park in the heart of Vienna), breathing the sweet spring air, humming off-key, it suddenly occurred to me that I was not bludgeoning myself with thoughts about the sociopath in the White House and his lily-livered and unprincipled henchmen/women, or agonizing over school shootings, cop shootings, the NRA, or which new cowardly piece of shit had been called out for his cowardly piece of shit aggression toward a woman or, more likely, multiple women. You know, the new normal back in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

It wasn’t that I was ignorant of the goings-on state-side. I wasn’t on a news fast. The New York Times is delivered to my phone every morning, and I read it. I knew. But I had apparently entered into some meditative state where I acknowledged the information but achieved detachment from it. That’s what being 9 time zones away will do. That’s what being in a country with national health care and virtually free higher education and thirty paid days of vacation every year will do. That’s what being in a country with an incarceration rate ten percent of ours will do. What being in a country with a 98 percent literacy rate where the average amount of time spent READING A NEWSPAPER is 57 minutes will do. This alternate reality has Zenned me out.

And so, I will forgive this country its fat, white, soggy, cheese sauce-smothered asparagus and its Pay to Pee (few and far between) toilets. I will even forgive it for coining
Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft, a single, 79-letter word that means Association for subordinate officials of the head office management of the Danube steamboat electrical services. Because this a no-Trump zone. Almost. This morning’s der Standard had a (small) front-page story (no photo!) about our fine and thoughtful president and the Iran nuclear deal. It also included the photo that illustrates today’s blog, featuring two sane, well-spoken world leaders who appear to actually like each other. What a concept.

If it were not for Oregon, my Oregon, I would never return.