flying and landing in America

When I think of coming home to Memphis (the HOME of all time) and what I feel there, I am always so excited and aroused. It's the closest I get to the past, The Past, and my memories that are older than 5 years...I was explaining to my colleagues here in Hannover that flying over the Atlantic every year or more is actually a delight for me because it is a quiet time (I have been very lucky in my seating arrangements) and I get lost in thought and read and write as long as I want to and even manage to sleep some. It is a tunnel. And on the other side, I come out into the United States of America. The air is different and the people somehow still surprising to me. The only homelike place in the US is Memphis, Halls, and even Anne's house in DC; No, just her bedroom..the things in there, even the new things, are familiar. Like I was with her when she bought them. Anne, my double cell.
Maybe it's ironic to some people, but being away, I realize Memphis's sophistication. No where I have been do I find the live music, the passionate public display, of people reaching out to eachother through music, that I see in Memphis. And, after considering it so for some time, it isn't just because I understand what's going on (because I do not always) or because it's Home (because it's changed, the crowds have altered), but because there are a lot of people making music, making art, doing things they believe in just because they can and because they are encouraged by their friends and families. No big deals, no huge names--save the history and the living legends.
In Memphis, the places familiar in the US, I feel the most comfortable expressing my desires and driving drunk. Or no. It's another context only.
This week, I had two views or confrontations specifically related to my American identity. One I was able to speak through; the other conversation waits on the backburner--perhaps some LIGHT conversation to bring up at the Christmas Party next Wednesday.
The unfinished one: At my workplace here in Hannover, we watched the old version film of Animal Farm based on Orwell's novel. In the introduction, my colleague mentioned a history of totalitarian regimes, socialism, communism, and critique, and then I did not catch the complete thought (or was it one?) but he mentioned what is having in America.
What IS happening in America?
The other confrontation: THe US and its protest culture and its lack of bureaucricy between an idea and it's realization (at least in the arts). In Germany, this professor was telling me, the people (because of past regimes in Germany, not just National Socialist, but empirial and the Kaiser Reich) are reliant on the government to enact change. In the US, because of the (dreaded) individualism, people do have the idea that they can make change happen. At least, our culture perpetuates this (reality or myth) in historical tales and in biographies of "great men."
Having lived in Germany now for 6 months, the bureaucracy is overwhelming... Perhaps it is also self-assuring and security for some people.
And so my impressions from living in Hungary for two years are confronted with another sort of regime history. How much I assumed to know about Germany! I DO know a lot. I have heard a lot of things and understand. But, I have not yet been an active critic or person involved in German dialogue. It will change, it is changing.

On the plane home, I will listen to music, drink the wine and spirits available, enough to stretch myself out (mind and body) and take self-portraits in the plane's lavatories.
I make plans for projects that I never finish. I have dreams of grandiosity and performance.