Dear Mr. Bageant:
(That "Mr. Bageant" sounds a little pretentious, but I don't really know the right way to address an internaut whom I've never met.)
I've just been reading some of your essays after seeing your name in an article in El Mundo about your book Deer Hunting With Jesus being published in Spain in the new Los Libros del Lince Spanish language series by Enrique Murillo.
The last online essay of yours that I read, "Nine Billion Little Feet", got me thinking about how I have also stepped away from home and how that has given me a changed and changing perspective. I had already let go of the quest for bling while living on a (relatively) limited income in very expensive Boulder, Colorado, for a couple of years, but then I moved to Mexico City and started to get a more close-up picture (I can't say experience because I have never wanted for anything) of the world way outside the American Dream.
I have to say that living here in Mexico for the last four years has helped me reconsider, and in some cases reconstruct, some of the foundations of my already kinda lefty leanings. It has also given me some of that time for thinking about the issues raised in your essays. Time that comes in part from living in a place where I have plenty of bus travel time (and bus waiting time and walking time and just sittin' time) for considering the world. Time that also comes from living in another language where I often find myself asking the question my beginner level Spanish teacher said there was no room for in her class: why do you say it that way?
Thanks for some words that helped me think about my experience from yet another perspective.
Hope things are fine as frog hair for you there in Belize.
Take care,
Jenny
a Texan in Mexico
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Jenny,
Call me Joe.
Thinking is amazing stuff, isn't it? Even at the most common level it leads to insight, all be it at along a slower path.
Right now I am in the States again on business and filing for my Social Security (as if there were such a thing.) And in a way I am sort of glad about being forced to be here for, what with luck will be my last time. Good luck on that one, huh?
Like you said, being outside the snow globe of America, one which is developing some serious cracks, changes a person's perspective. I am so looking forward to falling back into the perspective of the real world, the daily one containing time to think. And cook. And write. And garden a bit. And play slow blues on an old beat-up guitar for an audience of dead flies and geraniums.
In art and labor,
Joe
