weird country

The United States really is a weird country, isn’t it?

This is what I wanted: to be away long enough that my home could start seeming like a strange place rather than like a banal backdrop of normalcy. America is an oddity, and its people are oddities as well.

All I had to do this morning to feel the weirdness is walk down the hill to a convenience store, a Starbucks, a grocery store, and then read through the Wall Street Journal a bit. It’s a bizarre place, the USA.

But I also get the sense that things really have changed in the past decade, and I’ve fallen out of step a bit. Maybe I’m still expecting to find the America of spring 2000, and it’s gone.