I No Longer Live In The United States

Ex Pat Life

Well, we did it. My wife and I. We left America. After nearly two years of theoretical conversation and half a year of hard work we finally, actually moved to Madrid, Spain.

I’ve always on some level wanted to be an ex-pat. As an American writer in the 21st century how could I not? My influences are obvious: Hemingway in Paris in the 1920s, Joyce in Switzerland in the early 1900s, Henry Miller in Paris in the 1930s, Baldwin in Paris in the 1950s, Burroughs in Tangier in the 1940s, etc. The romantic notion of the (especially American) writer fleeing home for new cultures, sophistication, fresh style and new experiences.

But I am in no way anti-American. I love my country, confusing and ignorant as it sometimes may seem. It's still a nation of sterling brilliance and uncommon democratic values, open-mindedness and compassion, historically speaking. Even now. There’s a reason so many across the globe ache to come here.

My reason for moving was more Romantic, more literary, more experiential.

I wanted something new, something original, something so profoundly different from what I’ve always known that it couldn’t be ignored. Granted, in many ways I already achieved this in 2019 when I moved to Manhattan. But it was still America.

Europe is different. I’ve visited plenty of times but living here is something else. We have passive income. The cost of living is much cheaper in Spain. I can write all I want. We’ll travel as much as we can. It’s a good life. Kierkegaard wrote something once (in Either/Or, I believe) to the effect of, The purpose of life cannot be simply to work in order only to survive. (That formula, for me, necessarily leads to despair and meaninglessness.)

To live--truly live!--to travel, to write, to SEE all there is to see, to have genuine vision: This, to me, is the stuff of life; the meat, the protein, the core of the thing. Yes: I am privileged in many ways.

For a long time I felt I was cursed: Blackout alcoholism, self-hate, familial estrangement, violence, inner and outer chaos; all struggle, the black hole of rage and denial. I fought my way to sobriety and freedom; that was over 14 years ago now.

Britney and I walk, miles and miles through narrow cobblestone streets, up hills and along clusters of Senagalese immigrants in Lavapies, Madrid. I feel distant from America and I like that. It feels coldly right. Not revenge but justice. Justice for being America’s good little soldier boy-worker bee for so long.

Night life. Mexico City, Greenwich Village and Morocco all rolled into one. I’ve been speaking a lot of Spanish and I love it. I love being foreign, feeling foreign, grasping for the right word in a different tongue. Dinner at 8:30. Siesta. Jamon y tapas. Te negro con leche. Valle valle to everything. Bookstores are omnipresent. Folks are friendly. Romanticism exists in abundance.

I know we bring our problems with us. Our American problems; our human problems. Everywhere you go, there you are. You can run all your life and not go anywhere. In AA they call it ‘doing a geographic.’ You change the place but the mind remains the same. This is all axiomatically accurate. And yet: A shift of location, especially across the Atlantic to another country, means a shift of awareness, a shift of consciousness, a shift of inner meaning.

We’re all a chaos bag of inner opposites. Yin and yang, good and evil, moral and immoral, taboo desires and conventional longings.

We are the crack in the dam that is the human experience.

I am water flowing over and through the cracks in that dam.