I hadn't been thinking about my angle lately, whether I'm newly anything, because I knew, or thought I knew, that I am not, that it's hard to be new in your home country.

Actually, it isn't, and actually, I don't usually feel that way. More often than not I do feel like I'm in some alien culture, without even trying. Like a few weeks ago I was hanging out by the creek and three hippies were doing interpretive dance in a pool above a crashing waterfall. I was reading a comic book behind someone else who was also reading a comic book, and I kept looking up from my comic book, staring hard at the hippies, and hoping one of them would be washed down the waterfall, or at least submerge himself enough so that his dreadlocks would get wet. Shoes and tubers (the kind drinking beer in inflated truck tires, not the vegetables) kept drifting by them and they kept arching and chanting and spinning and dancing in the rapids. Nobody was even staring at them. Nobody even looked like they thought this was unusual, or also, like me, hoped any of them would fall over the rapids. A couple of people even looked like they were considering joining. But most people just kept having picnics, or reading the newspaper, or fishing for fish, or fishing their children out of the slipstream.

When one of them did finally go over the rapids (he was attempting to hoist his partner in the air a la ballet, and slipped with his bare foot on a mossy rock) and came up sputtering, dreadlocks in disarray, attempting to make it graceful by raising a curved wrist and inclining his head, no one even applauded. What crazy kind of alien town do I live in?

I told this to Chell in a loud bar with this minutes-long guitar riff echoing in my head and after that he started shouting in German.

"It's a foreign country if I do this!!" is how he preceded it.

"You can write about this," he said.

"Not since we've talked about me writing it."

"Why not?"

"I can't write about us talking about me writing something. Especially since now I've said I can't write it since we talked about writing it. That's way too meta. I'd have to shoot myself in the face."

"Shoot yourself in the face?"

"Yeah. For being pretentious."

Well, we all know what has to happen now.