#Probably around midday in USA time zones.

[lilliancdoodles]

>:D

[bynkii]

It’s all right there

(originally published on 18 Nov. 2015)

If only you’d look to the side once in a while

Somewhat odd fact: I’ve never been really anywhere outside of the U.S. Not that I’m anti-travel, it just seemed to never work out. I mean, I’ve been to Toronto, spent a summer in Mississauga with my cousin Diane and her family, and technically went near Nassau on a night-time cruise, but I was so obliterated that I don’t know if I left the boat.

I was in the Air Force, but at a B-1B base in the mid-80s to early-90s, and so we didn’t really even start going overseas for air shows and exercises until I was fixing to separate. Then came a marriage and a kid and it kind of just never happened. Which I do think is a shame, but I can’t say I’ve not done anything cool, I just did it all…here.

This came up because I was talking to a good friend of mine, N., who is much smarter and well-traveled than I, (and for a Cali transplant, still understands why Waffle House is amazing.) I was commenting how a mutal acquaintance, who is my age, seems to have just woken up to the reality that non-honkies in the U.S. have very different lives than honkies do. I said I didn’t get how someone could be as well-traveled as he is, (he has literally traveled the globe) and still be so…blind…to the world outside of his somewhat narrow set of interests. This legitimately puzzled me until N. explained it.

She said, (paraphrased) that if you’re traveling on business, to a conference or on a book tour or what have you, that it’s easy. You get off the plane and go to the hotel. Which is probably a Marriot or other chain, and where the club sandwich in Tokyo is exactly like the club sandwich in Des Moines. You are driven to where you need to be when you need to be there, you go out after to a restaurant, maybe a bar that is tourist-friendly, and then back to the hotel. After a few days, home you go. Maybe you take a day for being a tourist, but you’re going to do fairly standard stuff.

You do that enough, and there’s no difference between anywhere.

I can’t argue her point, I literally don’t know, but it struck me as sad. To be somewhere totally different, but wrap yourself in a cocoon of home, like some kind of odd warp bubble.

Because while I’ve never really left the U.S., there’s always been this “walkabout” impulse. I probably got it from my mom, who as a single woman, lived in Tokyo immediately following WWII for some years, (and evidently spent enough time near Hiroshima to come home rather sick for more than a few months), and then in the 50s and 60s, literally traveled everywhere in this country where a train would go. I’ve pictures of her in D.C., at Gettysburg, Monticello, San Francisco, you name it.

In an era where being an independent woman was somewhat frowned upon, she was independent. Mind you, she never learned to drive. This was all public transit and trains.

My dad helped too, he’d been in Japan & Korea in the early 50s, trying not to die during a war, and getting into marvelous trouble in Japan on leaves and furloughs.

One of his better stories, one that fascinated me was about how he and his friends would go to a restaurant in either country, and just blindly order. Whoever got the ugliest dish paid. He thought he was safe when a friend got the squid. Until a WHOLE OCTOPUS, eyes and all, broiled in its own ink was placed in front of him.

That always seemed like the coolest thing: go to a restaurant you’ve never been and just order something. How cool a way to learn new food? Sometimes, you get the octopus, sometimes you get amazing malaysian food. Amazing wins over OMG WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT more than you might think. Food is a great introduction to different cultures.

As I’ve mentioned, I grew up in Miami. My family moved down in 1970, and I didn’t really leave until 1986, when I joined the Air Force. I was there for some shit. Mariel, Liberty City, Murder Capital of the world, Cocaine Cowboys, (I still can’t really watch “Scarface”. Because too much of that movie isn’t some gorefest story, it’s what was happening in my world. There’s not a lot of exaggeration there), all of it.

It’s easy to fall into the tropes. Miami’s a pit, it’s a crimefest, it’s nothing but Cubans. But that’s the saddest way to look at it. Because Miami showed me so many things. ¿Qué Pasa USA? Pastelitos. Pecadillo. A properly made Cuban sangwich. The smell of the wall of ovens baking Cuban bread in an Imperial Supermarket just off 8th Street and Salzedo. The bizarre joy that was the Bed Race. Goombay, where I discovered a host of carribean food and music. Tito Puente. Gloria Estefan before she was Gloria Estefan. Guava. Flan. Materva. The Red Room. The Kitchen. Coconut Grove when there were still more hippies than hipsters. The Friday night Hare Krishna Drum Party in Coconut Grove, where you’d have a hundred people dancing along with the Krishnas and they would just play their asses off. The guy who sold small crabs and palmetto bugs dipped in gold.

It’s actually hard for me to talk about Cuban Culture like it’s some separate thing, because I grew up in it. I’m not Cuban, not even close, but that culture was a part of my youth and my adolescence. It’s not “other people’s” culture. It’s a part of me as much as it can be. You grow up in Miami, your first concert is P-Funk, it’s hard to live in The Honkie Zone™.

Here’s an example of how it affected me. One day, after I’d gotten out of the Air Force, my boss takes me to a Cuban place in Pinellas Park, La Terecita. (AmazingCuban food, BTW.) The waitress seats us, sees we’re a table of superhonkies, and gives us menus. With the food in english. I literally had no idea what any of it was, because you order Cuban food in spanish. What the fuck other language even makes sense? So I ask the waitress, when she returns, “Is there a spanish menu? I don’t know what any of this is in English.”

She looks at me and asks “Where you from?” I tell her Miami, she laughs and says “Okay baby, let me get you the menu.” (If you know what a Cuban accent sounds like, then you get more of the picture.) She comes back with a Spanish one, aka a real one, and at last, I can order my Picadillo y maduros y Materva. Fuck me, english, what use is that?

You also never understand why people are puzzled at children drinking coffee, because you start kids on cafe con leche as soon as they’re off the tit. I mean it. Non-Miamians don’t really get how central Cuban coffee is to life down there. Water is minor, cafecitos are critical.

As a kid in Miami, this was my “community pool”, Venetian Pool. It’s an old limestone quarry converted to a pool. To be able to use the diving boards, you had to swim across the pool without stopping, watched by the lifeguards. That was what turned you from a little kid to a big kid. Swimming is a necessity, because half your elementary school field trips are to the beach. Yeah, yeah, education, starfish, the stingray shuffle. I’m still convinced it was how the teachers wangled free midday beach time. As they should.

Some places brag about how you can watch the sun rise and set over the ocean by just walking a few miles. In Miami, on the highway out to Key Biscayne, you could do that just by turning around. Then there’s Stiltsville, and a not-long drive away, things like Pennekamp and Key West. Along with treasures now gone, like Ocean World, and Miami Marine Stadium, where you could see unlimited hydroplanes, and watch concerts with the stoners on rafts in the middle.

I was also there for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Andrew. My biggest memory of that is just after the hurricane, when shit is still fucked up and Gloria Estefan, who unlike most celebrities, grew up in Miami, and is a hometown girl, holding a benefit in the Orange Bowl, to raise money to help folks out. It’s kind of fucked up, power is still wonky, she is a bit of a sweaty mess, (we all were), and yet there she is, singing “Coming Out of the Dark”, and somehow, everything was going to be okay. Gloria Estefan will always be okay in my book for that.

I don’t think you can grow up with my parents in that town and not look to the side every so often. Or all the time. And it helped me see, not just the bloody obvious truth, like the lives lived different of non-honkies in this country, but all the things.

Like driving between base and town in Grand Forks on highway 2, happy to be off early, (at 2am) and it’s one of those snowstorms where it’s not a blizzard, but the flakes are coming down big, wet and noisy. You can actually hear them hit, and as I come around a curve, there’s this explosion of light, and two two trucks pulling a semi out of the ditch. As Toccata & Fuge in D Minor is blasting in my Civic. Pipe organ version, of course. There is something perfect about that, along with Bach at 2am during another snowfall in the middle of nowhere.

Or another night, same highway, same time of day, only it’s summer, and there’s this flash of light and a roar I only hear because my windows are down, and as I look up, I see a metor blasting through the sky overhead, on fire, big trail of smoke. I pull right the fuck over because if it hits, fuck yeah, i’m gonna get a piece. (No, the obvious downsides didn’t occur to me, because ROCK FROM SPACE.) It burned up completely before it hit, but I got to see it.

You look to the side, and you find things. Like malaysian restuarants in Kansas City. Or how, in Biloxi, just outside of Keesler AFB, if you and your friends go to the same Chinese place enough, and keep ordering “something with beef, something with pork, something with chicken, and surprise us” enough, eventually the family that runs it starts making you the non-gweilo versions of things. Or that there’s a fantastic Dim Sum place not a half-block from the Moscone in S.F., an amazing cajun place in Knob Knoster, MO, and one of the best southern restaurants ever is near Binghampton, NY, (THEO’S4LYFE!)

You see things that other folks miss. Like a tango club performance in Union square, where the guy in his 70s is shaming all the younger men. Because he may be old and slow everywhere else, but he is the Tango grandmaster and the youngin’s best just step back, this is his show.

Walden Pond. It’s not just where Thoreau lived, (with lots of help from his friends. He may have wrote about self-reliance, but he was not so good at practicing it) it’s a place. It’s a swimmin’ hole. Kind of cold, but very beautiful, and a great place to take slow walks with friends. The whaling museum in Peabody. Realizing that on multiple occasions, a pre-fame/pre-Gaiman Amanda Palmer made you milkshakes and sundaes (and she was very good at it.)

You become best friends with everyone in a ten-meter radius at a crawfish festival, because you just can’t suck head, and so you give away heaping plates full of the nasty things to anyone within reach. For this, you get a lot of free beer. Some years later, at Bad Medicine Lake in MN, you gorge on the biggest crawfish you’ve ever seen, (LOBSTER-SIZED) because people up there think they’re gross, and the bottom of the lake is covered with them. It is totally worth the hypothermia you risk, and pissing off a plethora of plastered, pulchritudinous sorority sisters because if they reject crawdads, they can’t be worth your time.

You meet people who aren’t like you, and learn at a young age, just how full of shit you are, and maybe you should fix that. You pick up foul words in multiple languages, (profanity starts both fights and friendships. Often simultaneously.) You learn that the “stripper paying her way through college” isn’t just a trope, and she amazes you both with her pole work and her analysis of pre-Revolutionary War America.

You discover, if you’re open to it, that there are amazing people everywhere in all walks of life, doing all kinds of jobs you aren’t, and they are just fascinating. That there are former adult stars on Twitter who build amazing models of Star Wars ships from metal because that’s what they do, when they aren’t losing their minds over the San Jose Sharks or making beautiful art. They talk about their work too, and that’s even neat because you learn about the behind the scenes stuff. “Inside baseball” is fucking fascinating when it’s about porn. (Ed. note: this person checked out a few years ago. I genuinely miss her, and presence on Twitter.)

You learn that two authors you admire who have become friends have forgotten more about food and culture than you’ll ever know. You learn the history of Switzerland that’s about just how terrifying the Swiss are, “…I’m from Northern Ireland, I don’t do well with unannounced gunfire.”, and that a description of dinner eating between two members of old Russian Royalty can be far, far more…intense than any non-porn writing has a right to. (Seriously, hie thee to wherever you can find them, and read all of “Tales of Old Russia” by Peter Morwood. DESCRIPTIONS OF DINNER SHOULD NOT HAVE THAT EFFECT ON PEOPLE.)

Actually, if you see anything with either Peter or Diane Duane as authors or co-authors, just read it. Trust me on this.

It’s not hard to see the world as it is, good and bad, awesome and terrifying. You don’t even have to leave the country. You just have to look around every so often.