This trip to the United States has been a disaster, and if you’ve been wondering why I don’t spend more time in the States, well, this is why.

To start with the whole reason I was here evaporated a week ago with the cancellation of the larp I was supposed to attend. I had decided to come about two months ago, mainly to help the organizers out as a kind of utility player¹ where I could fill in as needed, so I didn’t have a role or character I was looking forward to. But case rates and travel disruptions put the nail in that coffin a week ago, so I was landing in Florida with a hastily put together back up plan.

Then I actually landed in Tampa, and discovered why Florida is such a fucking pandemic disaster. I had booked a hotel near the airport before my flight to New Orleans the next morning,² and when I rolled into the lobby I discovered a massive mob of people apparently just hanging out, not a single one wearing a mask during the worst surge of the pandemic to date.³ I retreated to my room and decided to order in room service for dinner.

My updated plans involved flying to Atlanta for a few days and then crashing at a friends’ place a couple hours away, and I had rebooked all my flights⁴ and was waiting to fly out at the airport when I discovered their whole household had come down with COVID. It was good to find out before I arrived, but would have been so much better to find out before I spent a bunch of money on new flights.⁵ But it was too late for that, and I dutifully boarded the plane and flew to Georgia.

So I’ve mostly been in Atlanta, doing not a lot. I saw a movie⁶ and wandered through Oakland Cemetery⁷ and attended a performance of The Comedy of Errors at the Shakespeare Tavern.⁸ I suppose my favorite part was the High Museum of Art, which has a great floor of American art which rather gingerly touches on issues of race and imperialism⁹ and another floor of African art that does the same rather more bluntly and directly.¹⁰ I needed more time.

But really, I’ve just kind of chilled. I accidentally washed up in Atlanta and, like a lot of places where I’ve gotten slightly stuck, I didn’t have any plans or expectations of what to do. And Atlanta isn’t a great walking city — it’s spread out and designed around cars, much to its detriment. And on top of all that the weather’s been unseasonably cold.¹¹

Maybe I’d have a different perspective if I had been staying in different neighborhoods but the city feels disjointed and disconnected, less a city than an assemblage of buildings. In that way it feels like so many of the Pointillism paintings on display at the High Museum — it seems like a city from a distance, but once you get close it dissolves into so many discrete daubs of color. There’s things I’d like to have done in Atlanta, things I’d be happy to check out or revisit the next time I find myself in town. I suppose you could say I’ll miss them. But I won’t miss Atlanta. I’m not sure I ever got enough of a sense of the city to miss it, as a whole.

It’s a weird stroke of fortune that I was actually in the United States during the anniversary of the failed insurrection. I’ve anxiously devoured most of the opinion pieces I could find about it, obsessing uselessly¹² over what certainly feels like a precursor to more radical shocks to the system.

I don’t think, even as it was happening a year ago, that I ever worried it would succeed. It was too disorganized and too desperate, unsupported by enough of the establishment to ever gain the traction it needed to make a difference. It’s only later that we’ve found out all the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to try and game the system and seen the ongoing attempts to suppress the vote and install pliant officials for future elections. So if the last attempt doesn’t really feel like a narrow miss to me, the next one seems like it’s going to be a lot closer.

So it’s been an awkward trip, during a painful time. I certainly can’t blame my friends for accidentally catching Omicron, and the cancellation of the larp I was due to attend was obviously the right call as well. Given that the expense and travel disruption was annoying if kind of unavoidable. But what really shocked and hurt was walking into that hotel lobby in Tampa and being surrounded by maskless people during a pandemic.

It’s foolish to take small incidents and read too much into them. But that crowd of people — cramped, loud, milling about heedlessly — really drove home a lot of the anxiety I have about the United States these days. The utter failure of government to lead, the blatant disregard of science, the almost certain knowledge that Omicron was ripping through that group even as I watched: these are the people the health, safety, and security of the United States depends on?

I’m grateful to be leaving. I’m heading to Mexico, so I can’t honestly claim to be that worried about catching COVID. There’s a lot of risk, choosing to travel rather than lock down and wait for things to improve. But if I’m going to choose to take on that risk, at least it’ll be on my terms, not surrounded by people who give every impression of having already given up.

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Footnotes

¹ Okay, so getting to see a lot of my friends was another big draw, and doing so in New Orleans was as well. But I like to help out when I can.

² I usually cobble together flights from several different airlines in order to get cheap prices, and if you do that and miss your connection you’re entirely on your own. Staying overnight at an airport hotel means you’ve got a lot more leeway for flight delays.

³ I assume there is a surge in Florida — among other things the state government has been refusing to release tests and has been caught both suppressing and destroying data.

⁴ I say rebooked but mostly just had to eat the cost of my now useless flights to New Orleans. They weren’t that expensive.

⁵ And about two hours after I could have just figured fuck it and caught my original flight to New Orleans.

⁶ The Tragedy of Macbeth which is great with some genuinely creepy witches.

⁷ Until recently — as in four months ago — the site of The Lion of Atlanta, the oft-vandalized Confederate-era statue and blatant knock-off of Thorvaldsen’s Lion of Lucerne.

⁸ Dinner theater probably ranks pretty low on the “safe COVID activities during a pandemic” but the tables were well spaced and there was solid mask compliance throughout the audience.

⁹ There’s a neoclassical marble statue by Edmonia Lewis, herself an African-American sculptor from the late 1800s, of Columbus with a kneeling Native American woman which raises all sorts of fascinating questions about representation.

¹⁰ “African” art is interpreted rather broadly, so there’s a mix of contemporary works along with older works, tying together tribal art and folk art and modern interpretations.

¹¹ Below freezing, which I really wasn’t expecting for the South.

¹² “Obsessing uselessly” could accurately describe a large chunk of my activity over the past two years.