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On Friday morning, my flight to Mexico leaves and I will bid adieu to the U.S. Not until this morning has it actually sunk in that "I'm leaving America", because this was the morning that I began to pack.
This was the morning that I threw out my shoe box filled with old love-letters, photographs and cards from every ex-girlfriend since 1982. And worst of all, this was the morning that I had to decide which 4 gigs of music on my PC I could bring with me on a measly 64MB mp3 player I received for Christmas last year.
On the upside, I have a fancy new job title and get to live in Cancun after having been unemployed since Jan. 31, 2003. I'll be seeing my last of rednecks, freepers and ditto-heads.
So, on this grandest of occasions, I'll post two different (but related) Top Ten Lists (from our Home Office in Fort Worth, Texas). One being my Top 10 Embarrassing Reason to be an American and the other being my Top Ten List of Fond Memories in America (neither one of which is in any particular order)
Top 10 Embarrassing Reason to be an American:
10: Election 2000
9: "Catsup is a vegetable..."
8: Rush Limbaugh
7: We held onto the "ubermenschen" justification for slavery far longer than other western countries.
6: Billy Bob's (the bar in Fort Worth, not my two cousins...)
5: The New Requirement on being a Patriotic 'Muriken (as defined to us by the neo-cons)
4: Newt Gingrich and the 102nd Congress
3: The confederate flag flying on over half of every pick-up I see
2: Roy Cohn/Joseph McCarthy/HUAC
1: the NRA (I have absolutely nothing against the Second Amendment, but the NRA is as much an organization to promote responsible fire-arm ownership as Jerry Falwell is a minister trying to open people's hearts to Christ...)
Top Ten List of Fond Memories in America
10: 1983-84 My senior year in high school which has been up till now, the most exciting, enriching and rewarding time in my life.
9: The 1980 U.S. Hockey Team. Yes, it's been politicized, but it really was a dramatic moment to me and a sense of pride in that team has stayed with me ever since.
8: My first Springsteen concert in 1985. Odd to say that it was Springsteen who opened my eyes to politics for the fist time when he gave a monologue about it as a segue into "Born in the USA"/War".
7: Become Chapter Chairman of Amnesty International for my college campus in 1986.
6: Reading my first strip of Bloom County
5: A July 4th get-together in 1997 where my friends, my girl-friend, the fireworks, the sunset, the beer and the food came in precisely the right amounts and at precisely the right time. It was simply one of those evenings where *everything* seemed wonderful and perfect.
4: Taking in a stray, bedraggled, scrawny, malnourished puppy whining on my porch one wintry morning in 1994 who eventually became my best friend
3: The night in 1996 when I re-dedicated my life to Christ in front of my girlfriend.
2: Taking my best friend's son (who was 11 at the time) to see the very first Star Wars movie when it was re-released on the big screen some years back. He had never seen any of the movies before and I was able to re-live my joy at seeing it the first time through his eyes.
1. The endless evenings of drunken debauchery and small, live bands at a local dive/bar called Skippy's Mistake with my best friends as soon as we turned legal.
I've never been a high-number poster, so this will, in all probability be my last to DU from America and it's "so very strange, though it stand off as gross as black and white" for me to write that. "I won't be living in America anymore" is simply a hard concept for me to fathom, even with the departure date now a matter of days rather than weeks or months as it has been for a while. I'll be on the outside looking in.
Thanks for the good memories, America. Maybe in 2004 we can make some new ones... :hi:
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