What's new with you?

My life is rich.  My office is heaped with books, CDs, boxes of alphabetized movies, work, work I love to do, and work I manage to avoid with a passion. (It's the same work.) I go swimming at the YMCA.  I'm in the middle of two books (writing) and at least six books (reading).  I make the most atrocious videos for YouTube, shots of the praying mantis in the garden and old home movies transferred to digital, plus lip synching extravaganzas to embarrass my family.

But I can't get Montevideo out of my mind.  I've never been there, but I am ready to move, to become a citizen of Uruguay, to sleep in a shack near Punta del Este.

I want to leave the United States.  I no longer want to be American.  I've placed many, many calls to Latin American consulates in the U.S., trying to find out the requirements for expatriation.  A maze of answering machines is all the further I can get.

It isn't just the shame of the war, the torture, the lies, the lip synching.  It's has become actual fear.

See, I go to Colombia.  I helped develop a sister church relationship with a small, extremely poor church there.  I make frequent phone calls. I mail my friend Andres burned CDs (I worry about that, too).  I let one poor family use my ATM card to withdraw money collected from our local church offering.  I worry about the NSA confusing what I do with the efforts of terrorists and drug smugglers.  They either laugh hysterically or quizzically scrunch their eyebrows, trying to decode the secret plans in our conversations.

I read about the Canadian who was confused with a terrorist, exported to Syria, tortured and imprisoned for ten months, with no apology from the U.S.  Attorney General Alberto Gonzales still denies it ever happened.  I wonder about those people we never hear about, who never come back.

Last month, the FDA confiscated a benign prescription drug I ordered from Canada.  It's not fun to find an official letter from Homeland Security in your mailbox. There went $100 bucks down the drain.  My prostate enlargement prevention plan apparently will have to be abandoned.  We don't have health insurance.

I applied to substitute teach in Urbana this fall.  I subbed for years in the 1980s.  I like it – the joys of teaching without the pain of staying up until midnight grading tests and making study plans.  After I applied in August, I got a letter from the FBI informing me of an arrest for three marijuana cigarettes in 1968 in Chicago. They didn't have to discover this information.  I had listed it on my application.  Nevertheless, the Urbana School District has refused to allow me to teach.  I got another tersely worded letter in the mail.  

Ironically, that same day I saw footage on The Daily Show of the Governor of California smoking pot in his youth.  I'll bet if Mr. Schwarzenegger  showed up to talk to the Carrie Busey Middle School, they'd let him.  But not me.

Here's where the Catch-22 comes in.  I can't clear my name of this arrest.  All court records have been destroyed years ago, burned in a fire.  According to Chicago officials, there is no record of my arrest.  I tried to find it back in 1979, using the Freedom of Information Act.  At that time, after many months, the FBI issued me got another tersely worded statement saying, to my somewhat deflated ego, that no FBI record existed.  It seems to have arisen from the ashes of 9/11. So my crime both exists and does not exist in the memory hole.  Didn't some European named Kafka already tell this story?

If a life sentence for three sticks of pot left in my college dorm room while I attended philosophy class weren't enough, the IRS wrote me last month.  I'm being audited for the year I went to Colombia to help feed displaced and impoverished people.  "It's entirely random," the auditor said.  He seems like a nice enough good-cop kind of guy.  He says he refuses to listen to the news when he drives here from Indiana.  He doesn't even listen to music. He just drives.  So far he's spent several weeks going over every scrap of paper I could find in my basement about that fateful year.  Gas receipts.  Groceries.  My DVD store rental tab. My indebtedness to Visa.  He's coming back later next month.  Maybe the audit will end someday in the distant future, even though my income is so small potatoes I barely have enough to make french fries, or freedom fries, whatever.  Luckily, if the government intends to deplete my bank account, it's too late.  I beat them to that punch long ago.  I might have enough scraped away for a one-way ticket to Montevideo.  I'm working on it.