Not long after I arrived back in the U.S. in March, after spending more than a year touring the world, something occurred to me: I couldn’t wait to leave again. Living abroad for 15 months had given me a whole new appreciation for life a few thousand miles removed from American lunacy.

Certainly, America hath its charms. When I finally had the opportunity to go into a Trader Joe’s again, it felt like a trip to Disneyland. Speaking of which, I also was able to return for the first time in a few years to my old hometown of San Francisco, and visit for the first time ever the Walt Disney Family Museum located there. And I was able to catch up with my son, whom I’d really missed despite being in touch via video chat.

But after a few days, such positives become overshadowed by … well, the other stuff. The cost of living was even more outrageously high than when I left a short time before. There were more school shootings than ever. Fox “News” and its fans were even more unhinged and blatantly dishonest than ever. (How is that even possible???) And a perennial con man and serial liar with the personality and intellectual development of a spoiled 5-year-old, who literally tried to overthrow the U.S. government so he could hold onto power, was the polling favorite to be elected president. Again.

I found it really hard to stay for very long in such a place if there was any alternative. Fortunately, there was.

I’d been offered a job teaching for a few months in Cambodia, where I’d already spent 4 months last year, becoming quite fond of the little country that is the same size as Oklahoma but quite different. Sure, “Gombujia”, as the natives call it, has its own share of problems — among them a sluggish economy and a de facto one-party government with occasional authoritarian tendencies. And the citizens are certainly not delusion-free.

One young man, commenting about the United States, said that it seemed to him that for all of Former Guy’s faults, he’d been the best person to handle the economy, having been a successful businessman. He was quite unaware that just about every business TFG has ever run has gone belly-up. Another fellow said that he wished he could live in America, because people there are free to criticize their government. He didn’t realize that this will change if certain powerful people get their way.

Residents of Third World countries often have a glorified and unrealistic image of the U.S.; and they’re shocked when they hear what things are really like there — when they hear, for example, how many people are sleeping on the streets of American cities. On the other hand, one of my colleagues remarked that Cambodians once viewed America as a beacon of democracy, opportunity and inclusiveness; but that impression has considerably dimmed given the rise of the MAGA cult.

In any event, neither Cambodia nor any other place on earth has a level of civic insanity to rival that of the MAGA/ Q-Anon mob. And I’m quite willing to trade the conveniences and privileges I’m accustomed to for a chance to get away from all that.

Anyway, the point of this is that for the next few months I’m going to have a very full plate. I’ll be working full-time for the first time in years, having been more or less retired for a while. So it could be quite a challenge to crank out these blog posts in what little free time I’ll have. I’ll give it my best, but who knows?

Meanwhile, if you’re living in the U.S.A., you have my sympathy.