Somwhere in northwest Spain, November 12, 2010 -- I’m back home in Spain, now.
But am I really back home? Is Spain really “home”?
I really don’t know that Spain is, but right now I feel that the U.S.A. is not.
My entire time there, I felt like a guest, which in fact I was. Despite Robert and Jeanette’s gracious hospitality, I never really felt at home there. I never managed to make it to Elaine’s. Perhaps I would have felt at home there. But perhaps not.
Sasha, my former English student and lover in Russia, who was planning to visit me the last few days I was in Rome, Ga., incurred an LCT (ligament cruciate tear) playing hockey in northern Ohio, where he now lives and works, and wasn’t able to visit me; so I don’t know if I’d have felt at home with him.
But living with him really wasn’t an option. He never invited me to. Perhaps he has a girlfriend; perhaps he has a boyfriend; perhaps he just doesn’t feel comfortable living with somebody else. It’s really his business. But for whatever reason, he never invited me to live with him. And I never felt really at home living with Robert and Jeanette, with Ned in WV, or with BB in Seattle. Maybe I’ve simply been on my own too long. Maybe I would never feel at home with somebody else if I wasn’t paying the rent, even though, if I lived in the U.S.A., I would be.
But maybe another reason I never really felt at home in the U.S.A. was the politics. When black Democrat Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I thought that America had at last found itself. But the number of kooks coming out of the closet declaring their anger with the “socialism” of the U.S. government was just too much to take.
The American Empire is, of course, in the early stages of collapse. We have trillion dollar deficits every year. We are spending $ 2 billion a day fighting two wars on credit. I read the other day that Boston Univ. economist Laurence Kotlifoff says the U.S. government debt is not $ 13.5 trillion, some 60% of our gross domestic product (GDP), as is frequently quoted; but rather $ 200 trillion, 840% of GDP, counting what the government is committed to paying over the next few decades.
“Let’s get real,” says Kotlikoff. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”
And Nouriel Roubini, one of the few U.S. economists to predict the current recession, says the U.S. economy is a “fiscal train wreck” waiting to happen.
Of course, this was started by Pres. George Bush the younger. But as I have indicated earlier, Americans have a short memory.
Georgia, the state in which Robert and Jeanette live, is one of the most conservative – and dumbest – states in the nation. So I was awed to see in the letters to the editor of the Rome Journal Tribune, a letter from one Wayne Smoot of Rome noting that despite all the Georgia Republican and Tea Party bitching about the high costs of the Obama presidency, it is the Republican Administrations that “have given us more than 75% of the national debt.”
Not only that, but Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney pooh-poohed growing worries about the national debt being mounted by the Bush Administration to fight the war for oil in Iraq. Cheney said the national debt simply didn’t matter, Smoot reminded.
And it was none other than Democratic President Bill Clinton who gave us a balanced budget for the first time in Lord knows how many years – the last one we have had.
But the American voter has a short memory. They are now blaming the massive debt and shrinking middle class on Obama. Is that really covert racism, as many suspect? Maybe.
I frankly feel much more comfortable in Spain, though its largesse with health care, with pensions, etc., is saddling its government with a huge deficit that is also getting out of control.
When I arrived, the streets were littered with uncollected garbage. It seems the garbagemen had been protesting over some debt reduction measures – probably increasing the age of retirement, which many countries facing overwhelming national debt, including France, have already done.
And I see in the U.S. news that some legislators in the U.S. are beginning to acknowledge that something must be done to prevent the fiscal train wreck that Roubini is predicting. But acknowledging the deficit and doing something about it in the two-year pre-presidential election season that just got underway in the U.S. are two different things.
Can – will – the Republicans actually curtail Social Security and lose the votes of the increasingly numerous over-65s? Doubtful.
At least gay marriage is legal here in Spain, for whatever that’s worth. Not only is it not legal in most American states, but even in those where it is, a gay foreign spouse can be deported by the U.S. because of the Defense of Marriage Act, which legally defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
In the week before I returned to Spain, I watched the baseball World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Texas Rangers, which Bush owned before he ran for President in the year 2000. There he sat, just a “good ole boy” right behind the umpire during the games which San Francisco and Texas played in Texas. I had no choice but to look at the dumb son-of-a-bitch.
Thank gods, as the Russians say, Texas lost and the San Francisco Giants, who have an adorable pitcher, Tim Lincecum -- who looks for all the world like former housemate and occasional lover Sasha (not the Sasha mentioned above) – won.
Maybe there is justice, after all!
I’m finding out just how overpriced American drugs are! In America (North America, as the Spaniards so quaintly say – there is more than one America, after all) I went to the Veterans Administration (VA) for treatment, as I’ve said. Treatment for me, a veteran, is free at the VA, and prescriptions, which are very expensive, only cost $ 8 for a veteran. So I paid $ 8 for the last bottle of Nortriptyline HCL 10 mg capsules I bought in America. That seemed a real bargain, because I had paid $ 108 for Micardis HTC, available in Norteamerica only by prescription, and which, I was told in the local Rome, Ga., drug store, was the same as Nortriptyline.
But when I went to the nearby drug store here in Ourense, I paid only 1-1/2 euros – less than $ 3 -- for 24 tablets of Tryptizol, which, again, I was told was exactly the same as the Nortryptiline I had been taking! I knew that American pharmaceuticals were incredibly overpriced, but 1-1/2 euro – about $ 2 -- for what in the U.S. was 108 dollars?
Give me a f---ing break!
No wonder the American middle class is shrinking! They’re impoverishing themselves by spending all their money on pharmaceuticals prescribed by their local doctors, who are themselves shockingly overpaid, thanks to the American Medical Assn., which monitors the number of physician candidates in med school every year to keep the field from becoming overcrowded, which would force competition to come into play and reduce the prices the average Norteamericano has to pay for medical care!
But the Teapartiers and Republicans are screaming about the “socialistic” Obamacare.
Understandably. They’re, after all, financed by these moguls of capitalism.
I had my first meeting with Pili this morning. Pili, the nickname for Pilar (a Spanish name which has no Norteamericano equivalent), is the 40-something mother of adorable 14-year-old Saul who asked me to bring him an American baseball T-shirt and some American money. She and I have also agreed to meet regularly to practice my Spanish and her English.
When I went to visit Tom Robertson, who had promised me the laptop I am using if I would go get it at his Maryland home on the Chesapeake Bay, I still hadn’t been able to find an Atlanta Braves T-shirt to fit a 14-year-old boy. While shopping with Tom in Fredericksburg, MD, I came across a Baltimore Orioles jacket for $ 20. Since I lived in Baltimore with former lover Jim for two years, during which time we had season Sunday tickets to the Orioles games and I became a big fan of the Orioles, I decided an Orioles jacket would be much more appropriate for him than an Atlanta Braves T-shirt.
And when I began to assemble the American money for Saul, I discovered that a couple of things had happened while I’ve been in Russia and Spain: The U.S. now issues a $ 1 coin, and the 50-cent piece is almost impossible to get hold of. So I asked Robert to get one from his local bank. It seems they are still made, just not distributed for some reason. Quarters are also being issued honoring various states.
So when I gave Pili her gifts for Saul, I explained all this, which she said she would explain to Saul this evening, and which he would discuss in his “show and tell” tomorrow morning. I would much rather have given them to Saul than to his mother, but we must be patient, after all – he is only 14! And Pili explained that Saul has five tests this week, so he had very little time for chatting with an aging American – even if he (the aging American) is ga-ga over him (Saul).
Anyway, Pili and I had a good time over coffee and toast, and agreed to meet every week on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for coffee and conversation in our mutual languages. I also found out that Castillian Spanish, which they speak -- sort of -- here in the North of Spain, is considered a more upper crust Spanish than Andalucian, which I learned.
I’m still having trouble remembering that in Castillian Spanish, “C” followed by an “I” or “E” is pronounced with a “TH” sound, and that “LL” is pronounced like a “J”, and many other quaint little quirks. Eventually, I’ll learn. In the meantime, I must remember to say, “muchas grathias” – not muchas gracias, which I learned to say in junior high and high school Spanish 60 years ago – hace 60 anos (no, it’s hathe sesente anyos).
My new laptop has an interesting history. It was Jack Valenti’s before he died in 2007 – three years ago – at age 85. I remember Jack Valenti when he was Special Assistant to Pres. Lyndon Johnson in 1964, when Johnson flew to Orlando to campaign for the first Presidential election after John Kennedy was assassinated in Novermber, 1963, almost exactly 47 years ago. Before Johnson exited Air Force One, Valenti appeared in the doorway to survey the crowd. He was also at the reception for Johnson in the Cherry Plaza that night.
After Johnson didn’t run again in 1968 because by that time the liberals who had elected him had deserted him because of his shocking escalation of the Vietnam War, Valenti went to work as president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, the behind-the-scenes Mr. Hollywood.
While in this capacity, he hired Tom to help him get up-to-speed with Things Computer. Tom had, in the meantime – in fact, since I first met him in the early ’70s -- been dicking around with the concept of net energy, which is also of great interest to me, since I worked with Wilson Clark on Energy for Survival, published by Doubleday Anchor in 1974. Tom subsequently moved to Washington, D.C., where I lived, and we have been friends and stayed in touch ever since.
He is still working on net energy, and I have promised to edit his stuff for him, using Jack Valenti’s laptop, which Tom fell heir to when Valenti died.
And now I have it!
A long story for a short explanation; reminds me of what I used to accuse
Wilson Clark of doing: “I ask you the time, and you tell me how to make a watch!”
One thing I don’t like about my new laptop is that it’s very slow, and speaks only English. I could install programs that make Russian and Spanish available, but it costs nearly $ 400 in Norteamerica! Too much for a poor English teacher! And I haven’t won the lottery yet – either in Norteamerica or Spain!
Just after I wrote the last few paragraphs, said wondrous computer fell heir to some mysterious computer ailment. To me, all computer ailments are mysterious, since I use computers only as glorified typewriters. But all my right-hand letters started printing numbers instead: The “h” printed “5”; the “j”, “1”; etc. I wrote Tom, telling him my troubles and asking him if he could help me. He promised he would try. For a week, I fretted and stewed, trying to figure out how to connect with someone who could help me without charging me an arm and a leg to do it.
Finally, at the Internet café yesterday, I happened to ask the manager, who is a really nice guy, to keep an eye out for someone who could help me.
“Bring your laptop in tomorrow,” he said – in Spanish, of course – and maybe I can help you. So today I took it in. In 5 minutes he had it working correctly again, and charged me nothing for it.
I told you he was a really nice guy.
You’ve read about my angst over my sexuality – that one time in Georgia, I couldn’t come, and the next time I did. But that was a long time ago, so I was feeling really horny by the time I got back here. I arrived Tuesday morning, and Tuesday evening I jerked off; and Wednesday; and Thursday; and on until Sunday – 6 days in a row; a new personal best. And then I was suddenly jerked out. Only today did I have a yen to jerk off again. So I did.
Need I point out that the world is looking much, much better?
See also related pages:
Chapt. #307 - Things look up for me; but oil problems for everybody in the long term
Chapt. #305 - I'm not dead yet; Eye exam scheduled
