LIFE’S GREAT DECISIONS Last summer, battling yet another illness, and realizing

LIFE’S GREAT DECISIONS

Last summer, battling yet another illness, and realizing the northwest would never again be a place I would want to live, I looked at the world in an effort to try to find a place to start a new business and write.

One by one I eliminated most of the cities in the USA, other than perhaps a few in texas – I want an urban lifestyle. But there are almost no urban centers left that are culturally aristocratic. None. In fact, Urban culture is decidedly proletarian, with aristocracy, if it hasn’t moved out of the city altogether, restricted to walled enclaves.

I can sit here in a cafe in a country where I can’t even reliably speak traveller’s level of the language, and identify with people better here than I can anywhere in the coastal states. This culture is an extended family. It’s relatively homogenous, even if torn between catholic east and orthodox west. But despite that division, I look on everyone as my people – my family. Because they feel look like and act like family.

They are us before our decline.