Outsider

Nothing like international travel to remind you how weird your home is. It allows you to consider yourself and your culture from the perspective of an outsider for a while. Quite mind-bending (humbling) if you can enter that perspective. Having spent the last two weeks as an temporary Brazilian, I offer the following observations on the American experience:

Consider the fact that in Texas, every other vehicle on the road is a big-ass gas-guzzling truck.

Also, we light up our cities like the inside of a football stadium during a night game, turning night into day.

We rush through our meals with a smart phone in our hands or worse, work through our meals.

Can we just talk for a minute about how disgusting U.S. beef is? What on earth do they do to those poor cows?

Serving all those meals in disposable wrappers or on disposable plates with disposable silver ware is just about the most egregious symptom of a throw-away don’t-care society you can imagine.

Cops on every street and hovering in the sky in their helicopters night and day make you feel like you’re living in a police state. It’s noisy and oppressive.

A city criss-crossed by highways is ridiculously loud and smelly, but the highways sure don’t seem to reduce the traffic problems much.

Hand-shaking is such a cold and impersonal way to greet someone, really.

Our coffee is just flavored brown water with no kick at all. Why bother?

Apparently Budweiser really is the king of beers. Who knew?

Crossroads

Like when you hear that song with the chord that shivers your soul

Or lift your head to follow the curve of the hawk’s flight

You meet those eyes in a quantum moment

You are here, it doesn’t matter where

It’s not once in your fairy tale life of loneliness and miracles

That opened your mind at that moment of perfection

There are so many crossed paths and crossed lives

Expand into space and breathe that terrible ache deep into your heart

Say yes and step onto the dusty pavement

Laugh at the pain and the battering sun and yes

The death and the life and those eyes

It’s already ended but it must begin

Your car is waiting, it’s time to get in