Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Immigrate or Emigrate?
“Like so many Americans…” I’m tired of writing that phrase. I don’t want to be like so many Americans. To this end, I am looking toward immigrating to England. England is just a destination, shorthand for ‘anywhere but here.’ They speak English (or so I’m told), have national healthcare, itty bitty cars and weather similar to Seattle. ‘So many Americans’ don’t live in England either, so there’s an advantage too.
Obviously there are obstacles. I took five years to move the 40 miles from Tacoma to Seattle, so London seems a long way off. I don’t have a passport, nor any money, nor a career that I could parley into a work visa. I’ve never been to England either, although I assume I’d like it… and I’m usually right about these things. I do love Seattle… but it’s an alienating place… cockeyed city blocks separated by roaring streets that makes walking through downtown like traversing a series of flooded rivers. And then, once you come to the center of it, there’s nothing… a commercial wasteland.
I have to get off of this coast. I’ve never been anywhere else, and if I’m to be a writer I have to see more and feel more… experience love and death to paraphrase William Styron. I can’t do that here. This place is too sterile; where they regularly bulldoze any structure over twenty years old and the populace wanders around with confused eyes trying to find an identity among the Erector Set apartment buildings and chain stores.
I’m probably wrong. Perhaps I’ll be miserable no matter where I go. Nonetheless, I feel a growing compulsion to leave.
