WTF America: Venice Beach Freakshow (Chapter 5)
Venice Beach Freakshow
Not everything in this book has occurred since I moved here in 2013. I have been here before, both times to visit Kimberlee. The first was in 2009, and aside from confirming that I loved the woman that would become my wife, it was pretty uneventful. Nothing too crazy happened. Living as a tourist for a few weeks takes a lot of pressure off the experience of being here.
It was the second trip before I started to notice the crazies. I’m lived in some pretty small towns throughout my life, and the crazies are pretty easy to spot. When you’re in these little towns, everyone knows everyone else’s business so knowledge of new or old crazies get passed around, to keep everyone alert. Or you just get used to spotting the nutters, or rather the general behavior of Irish nutters.
I can’t spot an American nutter, because most of you look alike. You mostly look like Americans, and my assumption is that you’re not all a bunch of whack jobs. The media might tell me a little different, and if Facebook is to be believed every single person that your friends encounters is sick in the head, and apparently trying to destroy them. I’ve been accosted by two crazy people since I’ve been here and the experience isn’t pleasant, not because it’s inconvenient but because you’re facing off with mental illness even if briefly.
Situation the first: I’ve gone to the gas station to buy a couple of beers, for that is what my heart desires this particular evening. I lock up my bike, and go inside, past a woman having a very animated conversation on a payphone. The payphone isn’t the crazy part of this story. When I go back out and begin unlocking my bike, I hear a statement from the woman at the payphone and I genuinely can not figure out if this was intended for the phone or me. “If you see someone, like, trying to rape me, call the cops or something. Be a human being, and call them instead of just standing there.” Having dealt with the occasional Irish nutter, I remain silent and go about my day. The phone hangs up, she proceeds to her car, which is a white honda accord stuffed to the gills with what I assume is this woman’s entire life.
“This is why this whole place is going up like Sodom and Gomorrah” she says to me, as I catch her glance. Never antagonize a nutter. So I nod and say “yeah” and go about my day. This woman still sticks with me to this day, because she’s become this odd touchstone for me in relation to how I encounter and deal with the world. I doubt that I was in a position to help her, or make her life better that day, though I certainly would have done her the favour of complying her request if the situation called for it. I remember her, because you can’t really inhabit the mind of another person, so you kind of need to do your best to imagine yourself in that position. I brushed her off as a crazy, because that’s the easy thing for me to do, instead of recognizing her as a person like me, with problems like me. Not that her problems sounded similar to mine – I just lacked beer – but I feel like the best way to engage with humanity is to imagine other people as complexly as possible, to quote John Green.
The second crazy was also in 2011 in Huntington Beach, and she caused an existential crisis. She was wandering around a parking lot, weeping openly and shouting that her bike had been stolen. Standard protocol says avoid eye contact, head down, keep moving. It was as I rode past her on my bike that I was accused by her, of the strangest thing. “Do you even have a face?!” she says. Which is not what you want to hear when you’re an immigrant in a new land, who’s struggling with losing an identity as they adjust to a world they’ve never lived in. It’s a pretty cruel thing to say to anybody, to accuse them of being some faceless non-person.
The usual response to this kind of behaviour from most is silence or violence. Shouting back or ignoring people. I went to an Electric Six concert this year, and on the walk from the gig to the tram, I passed several sleeping homeless people in the city center. The homeless, the mentally ill, the down on their luck, the freaks – the crazies – never seem to get a fair shake. It pains us more as a reportedly civilized society to recognize the existence of these people that it pains our society that the circumstances that put them there exist. This is not a problem unique to the United States – few countries really take care of their crazies and their freaks properly.
In the city of Venice in California there’s the Venice beach boardwalk, and it houses the Venice Beach Freakshow. Kimberlee and I went in there, to see the three headed turtle, and the mermaid skeleton, and the electric lady. All that good stuff. I don’t watch it, but people are terrifying themselves with American Horror Story: freakshow this year. On this level we’re happy to engage with the things we’ve sanitized before we’ve encountered them. Behind the glass the cyclops skull isn’t so scary, but when there’s no glass between you and the guy on the train that’s calling fellow passengers baby-killers, that’s where humans are uncomfortable.
Is this an indictment of US government policy? Yes and no. I don’t believe that America breeds more crazies than anywhere else. By and large I’ve found Americans more polite than a fair amount of Irish people I’ve had the displeasure of running into. Back home, there’s your nutters, there’s your genuinely dangerous people that you’d always give a wide berth, and then there’s a contingent of drunk people you’ll probably have to deal with if you leave the house on the weekend. Here though, there are different breeds. There’s those religious fundamentalists that protest at the planned parenthood clinic in my neighbourhood. There are open carry people that really need to go to WalMart with their AR-15 rifle. There’s that asshole that rode behind Kimberlee and I in his truck honking for almost a full minute, because we dared to be in the street on bicycles when he was clearly a righteous road user that could dictate that we shouldn’t be there. Some of the same Irish crazies are here, but there’s a whole other subset of unique ones.
This internal debate of mine, over the lack of compassion for the freaks and crazies, never really reaches any resolution. In any immediate situation where you’re faced with these sort of people, most people shut down and don’t engage, because the first thought is for personal safety. And when personal safety is the first thing in your mind, people make a lot of terrible and shitty decisions that cause terrible things to happen to their fellow man, by action or inaction. I try to find the best in everyone, I try to help whenever I can, but I like most just stay quiet. When the crazies intrude on this quiet civil society of ours we’re confronted with the mistakes we’ve made as a society – the people aren’t the mistakes by the way, it’s the policies we’ve made as governments and as people. We decide to cut funding to mental health programs, either because we voted for something else, or because we made healthcare too expensive, or because we allowed greed to propagate in some way that made casting people out the most economical thing to do.
Or maybe we choose to ignore people will mental illness because we do see them as human. They’re us. And we’re terrified when we see that our reflection is so fun-house mirror, because we know that maybe a quirk of mental chemistry could put us out on the street, screaming at cyclists.
To lighten the tone, there are another group of freaks that I’ve run into. People that shout things out of car windows. There are a lot of cars here, and I have never before been subject to so many high speed, dopplered opinions. I’ve taken to waving at these jackasses as they bray from passenger side windows, or as they hurl giant iced slush cups at me. Or as they declare “Fags!” while driving past my wife and I. You can’t imagine these are the most observant fellows. What is it about surrounding people in armour – amour that’s capable of travelling at 100 miles an hour, has air conditioning, political talk radio, and can separate them from everyone else – that turns them into assholes?
Maybe everyone’s crazy people it’s in the constitution. You can say the most insane shit you like, and it’s totally covered. Nobody is even really allowed to stop you from saying it. Nor are they allowed to take away that gun. The counterbalance is that nobody really has to listen to them. You’re free to ignore your fellow countrymen if you disagree with them. And I do roundly disagree with parking lot lady – I do have a face.
Are Americans crazy? Nah. They’re polite, they’re welcoming, they’ve got a decent handle on things. I’d say they appear crazy because the culture is different. You don’t have the cultural touchstones that are, say, growing up hunting, so carrying a weapon around seems insane to people that have never handled a gun. Yelling at someone from a car is pretty much always insane though. Don’t be doing it.
I don’t really have a solution for these problems. I’m just attempting to observe, and perhaps catalog the world around me for future reference. Reference for me, and reference for you. We could behave more compassionately around one another, both in the immediate area, and in the abstract. Vote for the candidates that you think will do the most good for the most people, maybe? Perhaps talk to your friends that seem to be presenting symptoms of mental illness, so they don’t slip through the cracks before they can get help? Give to those charities that will get people back on their feet?
All the world over, people will have their nutters. Americans are normal. Their crazies seem crazier to outsiders though.
WTF America: Cowboy flavoured pizza (Chapter 4)
Cowboy flavoured pizza
You never consider just how much your national identity hinges on food until you’re outside of your nation and without your food. It’s not like I was an aficionado of Irish food. I would struggle to even name 4 or 5 dishes, if pushed. I’ve never constructed an Irish stew, and since arriving here I’ve constructed few stews at all. But the food here doesn’t even really rhyme with the food back on the island. Firstly, there is Italian food. There’s mexican food, Indian food, Turkish, African, Lebanese, and there are so many pizza shops as to be functionally uncountable. And this will all likely occur within a few city blocks of one another.
This is largely because there’s a really high population of immigrants here, and immigrants always make the best food. That’s why the British national dish is probably Indian in origin. Weaving food culture into the main culture is something Americans do remarkably well, and remarkably often. During the national holidays of summer, like Presidents day, Labor day, 4th of July (etc) there’s food. These holidays aren’t really about celebrating the tenures of presidents or the gains of organized labor, or celebrating Freedom. Well scratch that last one – 4th of July is crammed full of freedom. It’s a stuffed crust freedom pizza with freedom fries, and the crust stuffing is freedom. Guess what it’s topped with. If your guess was freedom, you win some more freedom.
But back to the point – these holidays are about food. There are plenty of cookouts and barbecues, and these terms are not synonymous. What most Europeans consider a barbecue is just a cookout – you’re cooking food outside. There’s no holiday that doesn’t require, necessitate or demand food, usually in copious quantities. From what I’ve seen, quite a few Americans relax by eating. And who am I to judge, I knew a lot of Irish people that need to get blackout drunk once a week to ‘relax.’ I’m pretty sure the drinking is the more damaging habit.
I don’t say Americans love to eat as a negative statement – I’ve never felt more welcomed to any table I’ve visited, even if it was at a Chili’s. Once you engage Americans on their own turf they can be a very welcoming people. The view from outside is that the US is insulated without being isolationist, and that’s likely what gets people’s backs up. This notion that the US pokes its nose is around the world, which refusing to take note of anyone else. That sort of isn’t the case if you look at the food though. There’s little more American than Italian pizza, or German hamburgers, or really watery beer.
From what I’ve seen, food is this double edged sword worldwide, only because so much abundance exists. It’s notable that with increased food availability obesity has spread beyond these shores, but that’s hardly the only factor. For many cultures food is love, largely because food has been in such short supply at times. The famine in Ireland occurred around the same as the US civil war, which is well remembered all over the US, so I feel like each exist in fairly recent cultural memory for these cultures. I’ve found myself aware of not having enough at times in my life, including here, so I can totally understand why people reward themselves, medicate themselves, mood-enhance themselves, and over feed themselves with food.
Food invites probably the best cross cultural exchange we’ve yet figured out as a species. We don’t speak the same language, we don’t look the same, but we can both agree that your people can cook the fuck out of a chicken. The sauces of this culture so compliment the cooking style of that one, and American barbecue is made a little better with Asian sauces. When immigrants come into a country, particularly this country, they are in many cases lifted out of an environment where there isn’t enough. Enough what isn’t important, because America has more than plenty of enough to go around. And these people are willing to share, as there is plenty to go around. Food isn’t that expensive here, but Kimberlee and I have run into times where means didn’t match demands, and not through personal failure or frivolity but through poor economic circumstances. But we were shared with.
A little money buys your average dweller of the United States a lot of food. And this culture has the wonderful notion of leftovers. You never cook one meal, you cook at least two at a time, one for now and one for later. This leads to people begging you to take food at the end of parties, often enough food to feed you for a whole day. And these parties will almost invariably put out a decent spread of food, because it’s a party, and we eat at parties. Whereas I’ve seen Irish parties where there wasn’t so much as a packet of peanuts, but there was enough alcohol to drown a horse several times over.
Cooking with leftovers in mind changes your perspective on food. You purposefully cook too much, but you’re often surprised when you open your fridge the next day, and there’s two or three dinners in it, ready to go. The food is almost magically “extra” because you didn’t eat it yesterday. And when you always seem to have a bunch of extra food, when a stony broke friend like me remarks on being a bit peckish, I’m presented with a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, because it was stuck in at the back of the fridge.
I did indulge in an American thanksgiving after I arrived this year. My first thanksgiving. It was a small family affair with all the local members of Kimberlee’s family, and we ate like Babylonian kings. There was macaroni and cheese – home made, not the boxed stuff, which by the way is probably one of the most foul things I’ve eaten that was supposed to taste that way. Never trust powdered cheese. There was a full turkey, many greens, two kinds of stuffing, sweet potatoes, biscuits, gravy. My once-a-year epic meals usually include a fair lashing of beer too. It’s comforting food, it’s winter food, it’s family food. Most of the food I’ve eaten here falls into those designations. They say baseball’s the national pastime, but I’m inclined to believe it’s eating. If time isn’t spent eating, it’s spent preparing meals, or watching cooking shows, or sitting in the drive through. And I get it to some extent. Eating is the first pleasurable thing a human does, and for many they will continue to derive pleasure from it throughout their life.
Unless they’re eating a cowboy flavoured pizza. There’s the downside to food, the other edge on this sword that provides us with as much as we’d want. The money. So when food is so abundant, and there are so many choices, the marketing gets a little out of whack. So it’s not actually cowboy flavoured pizza, it’s just called the cowboy.
But the responses from the regular peanut gallery for the original WTF America posts bear repeating:
“hmmm…”cowboy flavour” makes me think of leather and dust.” – Robin
“Grits and sweat!” – Angela
“Glitter and eyelash glue” – James
“It should be spaghetti western flavor!” – Joe
“Denim, gunpowder and Jim beam was what came to my mind first” – Eamon
This is the problem when a market is so competitive, food is so abundant, and everything has its price driven down. A system will go off its rails. So each sector of the market is looking for a niche, or an edge, or something that puts them over on the other guy. Some come up with cowboy pizza, others offer all you can eat, others give you free champagne with Sunday breakfast. Chili’s for example, for 50 dollars provided Kimberlee and I with over 3,000 calories of food to consume in one sitting. My end was a burger and sweet potato fries. Add in bottomless chips and salsa, and split what I can only refer to as a cookie pie dessert, and you’ve consumed more in a sitting that you would usually in a day, an amount that many around the world wouldn’t consume in a week.
And I don’t say this to shame anyone out of eating, or to trot out the old ‘There’s starving children in Africa, so eat your peas’ trope. Food can break down the culture barrier. But there’s so much emotion, marketing, and other things tied up in American eating and American food that the food kind of becomes its own impenetrable monolith. The best way I’ve found to deal with it is total immersion – eat what they give you, and you will more often than not be pleasantly surprised. Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful for me, as it reminded me of Christmas dinner in Ireland enough to stave off homesickness over the holidays, but it told me enough about this new place that I lived in to make me feel right at home.
I attend a party and there’s so much that’s offered to you that greed doesn’t really cross your mind, and that’s a challenge given that Irish people will gladly ignore their conscience and eat too many biscuits, and then later castigate themselves about it. I’ve not experienced any caginess around food here. Within abundance people will share all day, but within abundance there’s less to tell you no, other than that reflex that makes you unbutton your pants after dinner.
It’s an odd relationship these people have with food. But it’s an odd relationship that Irish people have with alcohol. Turn down a drink back home and you’ll almost invariably be met with a question: “Not drinking? Are you on antibiotics?” because obviously there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want a drink. Here there’s no such attitude. Maybe you just don’t want it. I’ve never eaten better in my life, both in terms of quality of food, and the level of nutrition. Trying food from different cultures, especially this one, has broadened my horizons and my palate beyond anything I considered. I’ve lost weight, I’m fitter, and you get used to the bacon.
Never did try that cowboy pizza though. Or that precious cheese. Or that suddenly salad. or that bacon bowl, those blue chips, or the pigs feet, or the frozen white castle burgers, or the baconless Bac’n pieces or the creamy Peter Pan peanut butter.
WTF America: Papers please (Chapter 3)
Papers please
Modern international migration, as far as I’ve interfaced with it anyway, is not nearly the rats nest of red tape that most imagine. Nor is it so easy to get the particular visa that I got that anyone could do it, and be inside the US, guaranteed within a year. After I was unable, and honestly a tad unwilling to stay in California because of fear of the immigration and customs people, I went home. And walking away from the woman I love, willingly, without the knowledge of a specific time when I’d return is probably the most crushing thing I have ever done. There was a plan, but once you exit the US, you’re at the mercy of the border people if you want to get back in, and having almost been turned away after 30 hours of travel in 2009 I wasn’t interested in having a trip wasted painfully. Enter the i-129f.
This is the fiance visa, the K-1, the thing that people are usually talking about when they talk about citizenship marriages. The K-3 variant is for the already married, as opposed to the affianced. It is the fastest way to get a green card that isn’t based on employment, and it is the fastest way to US citizenship. I’ll allow your prejudices to subside a moment in light of that statement. I’m not saying the process was hard, and I’m not saying that it was easy. I knew that the fiancee visa was an option when returning in 2011, but that knowledge did little to soften the blow of stuffing my significant other into a small text box or video window in my computer.
So when you get started with the process it’ll cost you $340, which doesn’t seem bad, but this is the first of many charges. The first package must include copies of birth certificates, 50mm passport style photos, signed statements from each partner that say “We know each other, we’d like to get married,” divorce certificates and detailed forms that list your every place of residence and work in the last 10 years. This list is by no means exhaustive. So if you don’t have any of these things, you will be required to procure them, and Kimberlee’s divorce certificate required an Arizona to California trip just to visit a courthouse and get a form notarized. Papers, please.
So next after you’ve got the basic stuff together, you need the other stuff. For me the most awkward part was criminal history stuff. Have you ever tried to prove that you do not have a criminal history? I’ve never even been arrested, I am a straight arrow to a fault, which is perhaps why this process was both so painful, and so relatively painless. Apparently there are standard forms the police complete that state they have no record of you, and I required one from the UK and one from Ireland. The Irish form elicited quizzical eyebrows, but success, from a police commissioner two towns over, while the UK form required something a little weird. You need a character witness to attest to your character, and this witness has to be someone that is known to you, is a respected professional, and is not a relative.
Take a minute to think of anyone you know that’s an established professional that you’ve been in contact with for a decade, who is in good standing in the community, that isn’t your dad. I settled on my dentist, and once he had been informed that I was not my brother, I was off to the races. Again, these things are not necessarily cheap. I have half a dozen little pictures of myself in various sizes that were required for all the forms. So by the time you’ve put all this together, and triple checked every form in this inch thick stack, you mail it with your check. And now it’s wait time. And you’re consulting forums, and you’re checking agency timelines, and you’re tracking the package to the best of your ability. However, you get very little information back, and any notification you do get is by mail. And if your mail correspondence gets dropped into the mail two days before christmas, and never reaches you, you’ll experience a three month delay. Papers, please?
The entire petition by the way is predicated on the idea that this is a request for a visa on my behalf, by my American citizen fiance. So I am unable to look into anything, and I get stonewalled if I try to ask. There’s no number I can call to find out, so my paperwork and bureaucracy hating wife has to call United States Citizenship and Immigration Service and hash out the problem. So everything gets sent out again, and I get my visa right? No. Now I have to essentially do the same thing again, because the visa process is separate and requires it’s own documentation, and more money. Including a 400 euro, 15 minute medical exam, on the other side of the country. They check that you’ve had your shots, because you acquired your vaccination records somehow, they take some blood in case you have syphilis, and you get x rayed for TB. I do not have TB, and now I have proof. You also must turn your head and cough, for reasons that I’m sure exist, but the process is no less strange and a little humiliating. You want to get into the US don’t you? Then drop trow.
You’ll be back to pick up your results, and you usually do this on visa interview day. On interview day you’ll grab everything you’ve collected up until this point and wait a little. This is the culmination of the waiting. Check your electronics, leave your bag, throw out your water, get wanded, pass through the magnetic frame that steals the soul, and take a number. When you finally do get to the window a first guy will take the things he needs in order, and then waiting. Trust me when I say your heart is in your mouth. The meeting with the chief honcho that makes this decision is the quickest part. 18 months of my life came down to 4 or 5 questions, including where we met, what our jobs are, and other questions that have become a blur with time. He told me right there and then I was getting my visa. I called him a 5 star diamond, and walked out happier than I’ve ever been. Now you have at least some papers.
Flying, arriving, getting married, filing another stack of green card paperwork happens quickly, because there is no time to sit on this visa you just received. You have 90 days to get all that shit done, and peace of mind doesn’t arrive once you have done. The first piece of paper you get arrived a few days later, and it’s called the ‘notice of action.’ This notice of action carried the ominous phrase, in all capitals, bolded:
THIS NOTICE DOES NOT GRANT ANY IMMIGRATION STATUS OR BENEFIT.
I’ve said the process is both hard and not. The reason it’s both is because it’s just a bureaucratic process wherein you are a number. If you provide the things that they ask for, when they ask for it, and all those papers please are in orders please, you’ll breeze through with relative ease. On the other hand being a number is dehumanizing, as is having a doctor examine your balls, as is ticking a box that declares you were not associated with the Nazi government of Germany 1939-1945 inclusive. Because this isn’t a legal process, you pretty much do not have any recourse other than appealing within the system. You can get a legal professional to help, and I did see plenty of those tagging along with other couples throughout this process, but really you’re facing off with a faceless monolithic entity that crunches numbers, and doesn’t particularly care that you’re in love. All the people I met, the officials themselves, were genuinely curious about my love, and realized that this is what the whole thing is all about. But when you’re attempting to please a series of checklists it’s intimidating. And then every communication you receive once you arrive in the US reads:
THIS NOTICE DOES NOT GRANT ANY IMMIGRATION STATUS OR BENEFIT.
After you receive a number of these pieces of paper, you begin to startle when you see cop cars. You startle when you enter a damn post office, because these people have government level power, of a sort. It’s not nearly as soul destroying as the waiting, or the threat of getting kicked out of the country, but it doesn’t make for a peaceful mindset. You’ve got everything together for your interview for your green card, and this is the key, this makes you a human again. I couldn’t apply for housing because I didn’t have a social security number, but I could get one once I got a green card. I couldn’t get a job, I couldn’t open a bank account. I was amazed that I was able to buy beer, or walk down the street without a social security number. It takes a hell of a lot of work to become a new person that exists within a system, and it’s a strange thing to do for anyone.
You go to the interview with your spouse, and then you sit down with the interview person. You’ve been wanded again, and given your fingerprints again, and you’ve taken your shoes off again, and everything else that’s necessary, or apparently necessary. The interview itself takes about an hour, and you get a little more specialized grilling, where you’re warned about consequences, and asked about various details of your life. It’s nice that your partner is there – it’s very calming, and you can answer as a pair. If you fail this interview, you’ll both be treated to a secondary grilling, alone and the answers will be compared. So don’t forget who cooked dinner last night, or who does the sock laundry. I was also warned about the stop and check law that exists in Arizona, where the police can check your immigration status if they suspect you’re not from around these parts. “But you probably won’t have to worry about that, unlike some other people” was an offhand statement from our interviewer, which is kind of precisely an example of white privilege. I’m not tangenting onto that subject. Just noting that some things exists in institutional settings.
I was approved. This is the moment I became a person again. I became a conditional legal resident. And no feeling has ever made me soar within. I felt so light that I could have stepped onto the kerb as I walked across the parking lot and climbed right into the air. I’m tearing up as I write this, but there is no way to explain the enormity of the weight that was lifted. To become whole again, to have safety returned to you, to have a status that you can point at all the letters that say “You don’t have shit son. Don’t fuck this up, or we’ll remove you from this country and from your marriage” and give them the finger.
This process isn’t hard. And this process isn’t easy. And through it all, I’m finally papers pleased.
WTF America: Three Fingered Kit Kat (Chapter 2)
Three fingered Kit Kat
The whole concept of ‘culture shock’ can be kind of hard to explain. Most people that have ventured outside their own country for vacations have likely not even encountered culture shock, as they’ve exposed themselves to similar circumstances – eating chips on the Costa Del Sol. Either that, or they’ve gone on vacation to vacation settings, like going to Vegas, or going to an all inclusive resort where it’s possible to do nothing but sit on a beach and drink umbrella drinks for a month. These cases don’t really expose people to a wider culture, because they’re vacation settings, wherein there are expectations that line up with what vacation means in the mind.
Another barrier to experiencing culture is simply time – few people who do spend time abroad spend enough of it. Vacations exist in this odd space-time where that part of the world doesn’t exist for you while you’re gone, and you don’t exist to it when you aren’t there. (This is a useful time to mention that I’m just this guy, you know? The opinions expressed herein are not to be taken as some sort of gospel) Spending time in a place gives you a knowledge of that place that the locals get after time. You build more accurate mental maps, the world around you begins to breathe and live, instead of just grinning maniacally at your money with sparkling teeth behind neon lips.
So to explain culture shock to people I developed an analogy, a small parable that goes a long way to illustrating the feeling of culture shock. And that is the parable of the three-fingered Kit Kat. So the story assumes that you know what a Kit Kat is, and I believe that most people do. Biscuit, wafer, chocolate candy confectionery. Snap them in half exactly in the centre, between the Kit and the Kat. The come in bright red packages, and honestly they’re quite hard to miss. They’re familiar to many. And what’s notable about them is that they come in pairs, or quads. There are two fingers, or there are four fingers. Or one massive finger if you’re buying chunky, but that’s not important. The parable is as follows.
Imagine you wake up somewhere you’ve never seen. You eyes come to focus, you being to take in your surroundings. Bed, pillow, sheets, duvet. Further out there is a side table, lamp, window, television, phone. Given your level of cultural understanding, you’ll probably recognize this scene as a hotel room of some sort. Checking the side table will confirm that bias, as a bible presents itself, but that’s when they uncanny creeps in – you can not read this bible.
The ideograms, letters, and characters are so foreign as to be indecipherable. The window offers no familiar skyline, not even one that you might have seen in that terrible movie that one time. Venturing out of the room, lands you in a hallway full of doors, and given that exit signs are usually accompanied by lights, you follow those. An elevator presents itself, and the lowest button is probably the ground floor. If it is you’ve been very fortunate, and you stumble into a foyer. Now there are people you don’t recognize, or understand, or know. Exiting the building and wandering into this city gives you no further clues as to your location.
Everything is so remarkably different that it’s difficult to take in at all. All is symbols and greek to you, until you spy something akin to a corner store. Oh sweet bastion of convenience, that may contain delights that you might recognize. Food that by packaging or appearance will make its flavour and texture instantly known. You pass by carts with strange fruits on them, you walk past the pictographic newsprint, and you enter this store. You know stores keep candy by the register and there it is. And there’s that familiar red packaging sitting front and center. For the first time since waking you understand something – this is a god damned Kit Kat. You are certain, and you are positive. You don’t even need to talk to the cashier, you can just put some of these coins down next to your touchstone Kit Kat and you’ll be handed back the spares and the Kit Kat.
You walk out with your spoils, you crack the wrapper. And there are three fingers on this Kit Kat. It’s the last damn straw. You’ve got absolutely nothing left to give, and nowhere to go, and even if you were to grab someone and shake the bejesus out of them, they don’t understand your language and they’ll be no help. Such is the life of an immigrant. I can’t grab someone and shake them until they understand Father Ted, or shake them until they inherently get that Ireland is not England and that there was a period of war about that fact.
The culture is not your own and trying each day to navigate it throws up a lot of these three-fingered Kit Kat moments. My wife, Kimberlee, likes to say that her and I don’t speak the same language, and we don’t. She has the vocabulary of a college educated California girl, who is well read and a proficient non-fiction writer. On paper we both speak English. But in the practice of the whole thing, my brain operates much like this sentence – overly wordy, with questionable syntax, and a lot of divergent activity. And it’s cause, is growing up while speaking in native Hiberno-English.
You can look up the dialect if you don’t believe that it’s a real thing, but most that would talk to me begin to pick up. Words that don’t exist on this side of the ocean squeak their way in and bring the conversation to a grinding halt. Todger being an example. While, in the sense that “It’s while cold,” and then there’s the grammar. The phrase ‘be being’ is a staple of my speech and thinking, because it was never driven from me as a speech pattern. Irish people have a remarkable capacity of cramming 5 minutes worth of conversation into an hour, and it’s through the use of redundant phrases like be being, and taking a remarkably long winded route to the solution of a problem that probably didn’t exist in the first place. It’s not the gift of the gab, it’s the curse of the gab. We simply can’t allow a silence to go unfilled, an occurrence unremarked-upon when there’s occurrences to be remarked upon.
To return to a point made several paragraphs ago – three fingered kit kats. By the way, I’m not sure where I picked up the idea for the analogy, but somewhere out there on earth there’s a place with three fingered kit kats. These smaller moments where you marvel at something unremarkable to the locals are the moments that you remind yourself you’re an outsider. It’s not exactly alienating, but it certainly feels a little alien. I was once told that blending in among the Yanquai was the key to getting along with the natives, but I find it very difficult to blend in when presented with religious breakfast cereals, or hot dogs made of fish, or chicken and waffle flavoured crisps (potato chips) Or just the concept of chicken and waffles, I mean really, fried chicken for breakfast.
These kit kat moments pervade my days in a way that’s inescapable. There are different languages at play. When requesting tea, the choice of iced, hot, green, sweet or unsweetened presents itself. Instead of just saying yes, you now have to choose, and likely the choice can’t be answered with ‘yes I’d love a cup.’ You certainly won’t get your standard cup of Irish or English style builders tea, which is milk and two sugars. It’s not even remotely the same tea when it does arrive. American tea, Lipton is the standard choice, is made from Orange Pekoe tea leaves, and Irish and English tea is Assam tea. Limited research has told me that Orange Pekoe isn’t even a tea in itself, it’s a grading system for cut tea leaves. So it’s in no way region specific. It lacks in punch, it’s thin and not nearly as malty as I’d enjoy. Special instructions are required, along with assuming that there’s a supply of ‘English breakfast tea’ at your chosen hot drinks emporium, to attain something that’s universally understood in the old country.
But this isn’t the old country is it? And not only will strangers and friends remind you of this, but you’ll find reminders all by yourself every day. When you go to step off the kerb and find yourself looking the wrong way each time for over a month. When you go to someone’s house and they don’t have a kettle with with to make the all important tea. Everything you took for granted isn’t the same anymore, and what’s more you’ll have people look at you cock eyed because you’re not aware of their status-quo.
Without these familiar cultural touchstones it’s easy to lose yourself. I had to relearn how to drink of all things. A pint isn’t a pint here. The standard 568ml pint cannot be found, unless you visit an Irish or English themed pub, and then you’ll find that it costs more than an American pint. For the uninitiated, the Irish pint is 20 US fluid ounces, and the American pint is 16 US fluid ounces. There are ridiculous reasons why the US fluid ounce exists, and it’s different from the UK fluid ounce, but I digress. To complicate matters, the beer cans most often exist in 12 US fluid ounce bottles, or 24 ounces, or 32 ounces, or 40 ounces if you’re willing to drink some of the worst battery-acid special-brew bullshit water on the market. A further complication is the percentage. American beer has a floor of about 4.5 percent abv, whereas mass market Irish beer has a floor of around 3.8 percent abv. Add to that my homebrewing experience which saw our final brews come out at 2.8 percent. So many early parties were plagued with the Irish guy drinking too much, which is a wonderful way to introduce others to your people.
Each person is an ambassador for their tribe, their people, and I do try to be a better ambassador. Even if I’m only advocating for better tea, and maybe beer that isn’t 7 percent alcohol in a weird sized can.
WTF America: Religious Breakfast Cereal (Chapter 1)
Religious Breakfast Cereal
When entering a grocery store, or any shopping establishment, you have a general idea of what will be on offer. Usually if you walk the perimeter you’ll find your grocery staples like your bread milk, eggs and whatnot. Within the aisles is where you find the cultural differences. Sure the perimeter will usually hold local cultural variants of familiar items, but the difference is deepest the more you venture into the very heart of the store. And therein I found religious breakfast cereal and realized that I was a long way from home.
Journeys never actually begin. What may seem like a series of logical events, is more a random scattering of happenstances that coalesce upon reflection. So you could say this journey to America began in 2008 when I first talked in depth to the woman who is now my American wife. Or it began when we fell in love a few weeks later, or shortly thereafter when we decided that I was going to visit in a year’s time. But it could have easily began when I decided to venture into a media studies degree in college instead of going into engineering, which would likely have been the more lucrative career. However as much as a journey can truly begin, this one began on Hallowe’en.
After an attempt to stay in 2011 fell through we began working on the process of immigration for fiancees. They call it the K1 fiancee visa, and for two years we diligently filed the paperwork when requested and we waited. During the early part of this two years, after my return from California, I inhabited what could be called a depression. I was sullen and withdrawn so after a month or two of moping I decided that I needed to fill the time between leaving and returning with distractions. And those distractions were fun; I brewed beer with my brother, we made a video series out of it, I quit smoking and took up vaping. And after patching up the most important friendships in my life I began playing Dungeons and Dragons.
The immigration process is tedious because time is so elastic. This last year in the US has felt like no time at all, but those two years stretched into a decade as I waited. A large part of my existence for over a year was a single minded focus on returning to the US to finally marry the woman from which I was at the time separated. Focusing on the minute details of immigration policy and the stacks upon stacks of paperwork that are variously; required, optional, advisable, mandatory, necessary, and useless doesn’t make one a great conversationalist, and often not a great friend. My friends and family grew to understand though, and the last year of waiting was so filled with support it was almost too difficult to leave.
I was awarded the visa in the summer of 2013 after jumping through the requisite hoops (which is a chapter all to itself) preparations to leave truly began. All that time that had preceded that moment disappeared, and all the time that remained seemed so very short. No longer was I just another Irishman, I was an Irishman that was leaving. There is little way to explain the feeling that resides within when you know you’re leaving somewhere. When your life goes from stretching infinitely in front of you to being on a clock, your perspective shifts. The date of the flight wasn’t even set until a month beforehand when the ticket was purchased, but the date was finally set – Halloween.
I travelled over 24 hours straight to get to the Phoenix Air Harbour airport, via a card ride from Donegal to Dublin (thanks Kev) to JFK in New York, to home. Home shift while on the flight – I didn’t have a return ticket, so somewhere over the centre of the United States where the darkened clear sky perfectly reflected the twinkling lights of towns below, this land became closer to home than home did. Everyone has their horror story when it comes to flying, and mine I can assure you is as boring as all the others, but this journey felt unlike any other.
It’s an odd space to inhabit, the headspace of an expat, or an emigrant, or even an immigrant. All you’ve ever known, and what I knew wasn’t a whole lot outside the county of Donegal, begins to fade a little. It becomes a place where you were a different person, enduring a different set of circumstances. The you that was doesn’t cease to exist, but it becomes a photograph. Sometimes when you look at family photo albums, especially if you do it often, the memories become inextricably linked to the physical object that is the photo itself. You don’t remember those feelings you had, or the elation of the day, or what the air smelled like that day on your tenth birthday, you just remember the photo. When the photo represents everything you’ve ever known it’s quite scary.
What’s even weirder is the knowledge that you need a new photo now. You must construct a new identity that grows in this new place. You need to be a new person to fit these new circumstances, and the mind wishes so much to hold onto the previous identity that I understood that desire among British people to move to the Mediterranean and drink British sized pints of stella artois and eat chips in pubs that look like home, and have two day old copies of the Daily Mirror. The desire to belong exists in us all, but especially in the immigrant. But going out for pints of Guinness and wearing green, and listening to the music of the old country just makes the memories of the old life resemble a photo more and more. Living the old life in the new place isn’t a new life at all, you just like it because the weather is different.
I feel like it’s important to embrace the new culture. This place isn’t the old place; so why would you want to be the old you? Creating that new photograph, that new mental space and that new identity is the only way to actually keep the old one intact. Observing your surroundings, immersing yourself in the new life, considering the possibility that one day you might start saying ‘aluminum’ instead of ‘aluminium’ because this is where you live now, and this is who you are. Dualism is not necessarily cognitive dissonance, but when everything is so different it seems like it would be easier to retreat within, and hide in the old ways. But that way lies further dissonance, and further desire to eat chips in wood paneled pubs while reading the news from a place where you don’t live any more, a place where your heart should no longer live.
So you watch the local television, you drink the local beer, you eat the local food. You go to the grocery store, and you start wandering the aisles, and you start gravitating away from the ethnic section, because that’s where your stuff is. Side note – it’s weird that people consider you exotic, or ethnic. It’s very othering, but alienation is another chapter heading for another day. You walk the aisles and you buy the staples. You find your feet in a new country and you’re of the opinion that it couldn’t possibly be as different as you’ve made it out to be in your mind. And then you see the religious breakfast cereal.
Far be it from me to question the faith of others, which is exactly what I’m about to do so I guess it’s actually quite close to me, but why do you need your breakfast cereal to be decreed as holy before eating it? The cereal in question is called Ezekiel 4:9 and the passage on the box, and in the bible reads as follows:
Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof.
As you can imagine, I was thoroughly confused. I get that there’s a bread recipe in the bible, though I’m sure it’s not the world’s greatest cookbook. In my mind there’s two reasons that this breakfast cereal exists: either it’s your calling, or it’s your marketing. If it’s your calling, you’ve decided that this holy loaf — as brought down from on high, as dictated in the good book, as sanctioned by God himself — is what you’ll dedicate your life to. You’ll build up your business, you’ll get your supply chains on the go, you’ll bring this blessed raisin bowlful to the tables of the God fearing to fuel them through days of piety. Or you’re full of shit, and you’re marketing this to the niche market of people that requires sanctity from their morning nourishment. I guess cinnamon toast crunch is the tool of the devil or something.
In my esteem, each of these options are equally likely, and equally valid expressions of the American experience – extremely honest representations of hard working, good natured living, or bullshit artists trying to exploit good natured saps, and I mean that in the nicest PT Barnum sense of the phrase ‘bullshit artists.’ It is an art afterall.
This breakfast cereal epitomized something for me, and it brought to clarity a hole that had been in my thinking: I was not at all prepared to be an immigrant, I had only prepared to leave. My existence had been tied up for years in the concept of being a leaver, and there was a big gap where being an arriver should have been. The flight itself, the act of leaving, the selling of possessions, everything that happened on that side, and even the arrival in the US was an end. Could even call it a fairytale ending, given that I got married two weeks after arriving.
But it was a beginning. A beginning that I was woefully underprepared for, and that breakfast cereal showed me the folly of my ways. I wasn’t over Kansas anymore, making the switchover to a new home. I was in a grocery store in Arizona, shopping with the woman of my dreams at the beginning of a new normal life, and apparently that new normal included religious breakfast cereal.
WTF America shall be a book
Yes, very aware I haven’t updated this blog for a long time, and the explanation for that shall come in due time.
But right now this is an announcement for what’s happening here, this month.
Over on Facebook I’ve been involved in a photo series called WTF America since I moved to the US one year ago, yesterday.
It seemed to me from the photo series that Americans (generally) had fun poking fun at their cultural foibles, or enjoyed explaining their strange culture to me. Outsiders had a lot of fun getting a peek into those things that are considered normal here – Religious breakfast cereal for example. I’ve decided to pair the light comedy with other insights into my first year living as a modern immigrant in the US.
So this month I shall be doing my very best to get 50,000 words of the book written, because it’s NaNoWriMo. My plan is to upload either excerpts or full chapters to this page throughout the month, and if this works out well, hopefully I can finish the book and bring it to all of you.
What kind of pie? Occupy
So I haven’t been to my local occupy event in a while now. It’s a small event, only running for a few hours on a Saturday. There’s no permanent encampment, not a lot of chanting goes on, not much in the way of flash mobbing. But it’s our group and it’s got some very honest and genuine people that are just trying to make the world a better place.
So why haven’t I gone down there in weeks?
I’ve had a different reason almost every week that I’ve gone there: first off I was protesting because the Irish government was bringing in water charges, which is a nice way of saying that they’ll be installing water meters on every home and business in the land and then taxing the water that’s used.
I was against this move because this creates a completely new tax on people who are already struggling. This won’t affect the rich that have second and third homes, this is just another charge that it’ll be hard to pay for those that are struggling. That and this whole thing is going to be handed to a semi-state company and I’m against privatization of public services. So I went and protested.
I protested that for a while and then one night I was sitting up watching a livestream and I saw Scott Olsen go down. I saw the Oakland Police throw a flashbang at a group of people that were attempting to pick Olsen up after he had apparently been hit in the head with a tear gas canister. He suffered a fractured skull and one month after being in a coma for several days he was still having trouble talking. So I went and stood when Scott Olsen could not and protested.
I protested because there were austerity measures, I went to stand up for the Greeks, I protested because Silvio Berlusconi [A man who I disagree with politically] was ousted from office and was replaced by an unelected banker, Mario Monti.
Smithwicks Pale Ale
So Smithwicks came out with a new Pale Ale.
Eamon and I have tasted it a few times and we’re pretty much in agreement;
Smithwicks have done quite well in making a simple, yet robust and pleasant pale ale.
The advertising literature makes a big deal about the beer being full of 100% Amarillo hops, and it is a nicely hopped beer. I’m not usually a fan of pale ale but this one may have changed my mind a little. It’s by no means an exceptional or stellar beer but it’s a very nice entry into the market and it typifies pale ale.
The beer is clear with a yellow to orange colour though the head retention and formation seems poor.
The smell is a simple pale ale smell with mild vanilla, banana, custard and biscuit/cookie/bread notes.
The taste is smooth, a little tangy and there is a definite biscuit taste. The aftertaste is very low on the bitter with a lasting hop/citrus tang.
I would definitely suggest that you try this beer. If you’re in Donegal Town you can get a pint of this beer in Dom’s Pier One
Drinkin’ with Dave Episode 12 – Furstenburg Lager
This week I gives a shout out to all of my subscribers, I drinks a Furstenburg Premium Lager and I direct people to some of my favourite youtube beer brewers.
Like if you liked and I appreciate every subscriber.
Thank you all for watching.
The Guinness Guys Episode 2 – Black and Trash
This week Eamon and I drink the Black and Trash, which is made with Guinness Draught and Budweiser.
We score the pint based on: taste, how it fares as a cocktail, and how it compares to other guinness cocktails that we’ve had.
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Thanks for watching, and if you want to see the scores in advance click though.
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