2009.120: "We could be having dinner in Paris Tonight"
I had a friend in Newport Beach, a drummer named Bill, and I recall what he said when I spent $2,000 on a trade-in for a new car: "for $2,000 we could be having dinner in Paris tonight". This was along time ago, but by golly, you still could come from L.A. to Paris and have dinner for $2k. What's ironic about this memory is that I was destined to live in Paris (and thus have dinner there every night) for something like 25 years. Even more ironic is the fact that I'm writing this from a tiny hoel room in Paris, and I'm not that happy about it.
Context is everything. When Bill said that, I'd never been to Europe and I pictured this incredibly foreign, adventurous, exotic thing with people speaking a foreign language and having strange customs. Today, the only really strange custom is the universal health coverage we call Sécurité Sociale that allows me to go get my meds without paying out for them, since I have a voluntary mutuelle that makes up the difference from what is already reimbursed by the Sécu.
The rest of the exotic experience? Passing a MacDo, the various large screen LCD sports bars, the Picard frozen foods chain, the SUV with its engine running, it's Schwartz Between the Galaxies all over again. We were already so much the same before the Internet, now it's official, most of the first world resembles the rest of the first world.
This makes me wonder if we haven't missed something: civilization is overrated, wilderness is everything.
