Fall is here. My favorite time of year. How much do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love trees exploding into color, the sound of leaves crunching under my feet, the taste of hot apple cider and cinnamon donuts, costumed kids trick-or-treating, venturing to the mountains, watching football, wearing my favorite clothes and cologne, and the end of the summer swelter. Fall is the absolute best season, and I wish it lasted all year but it doesn’t. It’s over before you know it, which is another thing that makes it so special to me. Like all good things, fall is fleeting. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It departs long before you want it to. Pretty soon the trees will be bare, the ground will be hard, and snow–which always overstays its welcome, at least in the northeast–will be the only perk of three months of winter. Winter always feels like it lasts five months, not three. Maybe I’ll break this one up with a working trip to Brazil, where it’ll be summer.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Fall has kept me muy occupado, but there’s finally a nip in the air, so I do believe it’s time to reconnect with this little internet space of mine. It’s been a while.
1. I have a love/hate relationship with hiking, and I’m good with it. I went hiking in the Catskills a couple of weekends ago. The Catskills are a much shorter trip for me than the Adirondacks, and they have plenty of great mountains around. Unlike my ill-advised hike of Whiteface Mountain two years ago, this time I planned properly. I used a proper hiking backpack, loaded the 10 Essentials, brought enough water, downloaded AllTrails, and packed two headlamps. I bought all this shit two years ago after the Whiteface debacle and finally got a chance to use it. I brought my Nikon with me too, but at the last minute I decided not to take it because with the lens it added another 4-5 pounds to my pack, which wasn’t worth the few photos I was likely to take. I’m not a landscape photographer and photography is not a primary purpose of hiking for me, so it made no sense to carry that extra weight for 7 miles just to snap a few photos that my cell phone could handle.
I hiked Giant’s Ledge/Panther Mountain this time and based myself in Monticello, which was about an hour south of the mountain. I got my ass up at 4 a.m. to get to the small trailhead parking lot by 5:30 a.m., which is when AllTrails said it filled up. Supposedly police don’t allow you to park along on the road, and it was strictly enforced, so I didn’t want to risk having to enter from a different trailhead location because the hike wouldn’t be as scenic. Accordingly, I sucked it up and got up earlier than I have in probably 10 years. Pain, my friends. Pain.
I walked outside to the hotel parking lot in the middle of the early morning and there was no one around. I stood next to my car, looked up at a black sky full of stars in total darkness with no sound and no light pollution, and it felt like a spiritual experience. Even with the hotel in front of me and other cars around, the powerful silence made me feel truly alone in the world. It was beautiful. I got in my car and texted my sister to tell her where I was going in case something happened, which I almost forgot to do. I was hiking solo again, which is my preference. Worrying about someone else when a mountain is kicking my ass and making me even more ornery than my baseline, or having to make small talk with someone I don’t know that well, or having to worry about a significant other’s flagging stamina, creaking knees, and moodiness in addition to my own just ain’t my preference. Let me do this alone. Let me suffer alone.
This is what hiking is to me. A way to break my life open, get me out of my comfort zone, get closer to nature, and most of all, challenge myself physically and mentally. This is why I love it even though I don’t go often enough, something I am striving to change. But it’s also why I hate it. Few things challenge me this much, on this scale, all at once.
I drove to the trailhead in total darkness with no one else on the road. I meandered through small upstate NY towns whose occupants were still asleep and wouldn’t be awake for hours. It was glorious. I felt like a spy going behind enemy lines. It felt strangely surreptitious and like I had the jump on everyone. I should do this more often, I thought to myself. I love the quiet and peace of the early morning. If I start loving it more than the quiet and peace of the late evening, I might actually switch gears and do a Reverse Uno on myself.
I got to the trailhead right at 5:30 a.m. and wouldn’t you know it, the parking lot, which again, was really small, was almost totally full! I managed to squeeze my car between two other cars, one of whom had parked like a moron, further away from his neighbor than he had to, which almost deprived me of a spot. But I made it. I’d won an adult game of musical chairs. Then I had a decision to make: do I start my hike in total darkness, using my headlamp (I brought a spare too, in case one of them failed) or just hang in my car until the sun started to come up? I chose the latter. This was my second serious hike in my life and I was totally alone. The last thing I needed was to roll an ankle in the darkness with no one else around to help me. It seemed like too stupid a risk to take. So I moved my seat back and took a half-assed nap until some light started to appear in the sky. Then I got out and started the hike.
The good news: it wasn’t as long or hard as Whiteface and I handled it much better. I was more mentally prepared for the rock scrambles and the toll it would take on my body. My pack was better fitting and less of an obstacle, and I was in better physical shape than last time. I also had enough water and the mental security of two headlamps if I somehow couldn’t get back before dark, which wasn’t going to happen this time because it was a shorter trail–7 miles instead of 9.5–and I’d started so early.
The bad news: just because it wasn’t as hard as Whiteface doesn’t mean it was easy. It wasn’t easy. I went past Giant’s Ledge to the peak of Panther Mountain, which added significant elevation and length to the hike, and there were definitely moments when I asked myself why the fuck do I even bother doing this to myself? What is the point of this? It’s not the ascent that gets me. That I can handle because I have a goal, I can take my time to get there, and there’s a reward at the end. Yes, it can be demoralizing when you think you’re getting close and then there’s another stretch of rock scramble to navigate, but that usually ends quickly once I start up again.
No, It’s the descent that I hate. Going down a mountain goes faster but climbing down those rock scrambles absolutely destroys my quads and knees. Keeping an eye out for loose rocks, which is extra important when you’re hiking alone, is also mentally exhausting, especially when I’ve spent all day climbing and just want to get back to my car. I must be using bad form or something, or going too fast on the way down because I’m an impatient bastard and just want to get home. I have hiking poles, which definitely helped. but god damn, by the end it felt like all the cushioning in my knees had evaporated. Seeing my car was like reuniting with a lost lover. It’s like that every time.
After two similar experiences in a row, I started feeling bad about my love/hate fee-fees about hiking. I started to feel like an imposter. How could I theoretically enjoy something that had me swearing at inanimate objects and myself half of the time? What good is “getting into nature” and “seeing natural beauty” when all I’m doing is looking down at my feet 80% of the time so I don’t roll an ankle and have to be airlifted to a hospital?
But then my TikTok algorithm saved me. It seems that seasoned hikers feel the same way I do about hiking:
Totally hilarious, so now I feel better. And it’s important to lean on the bright side: unlike my Whiteface hike, which left me virtually unable to walk for a couple of days afterwards, this time I was actually able to mostly sort of walk right after, and my recovery only took three days, instead of a week.
Can’t wait to plan my next hike!
2. It’s time for a return of Big Beard. Mountaineering and the onset of fall have also inspired me to bring back Big Beard. I started growing a beard for the first time in my life about six years ago, during COVID. An ex-girlfriend liked beards and suggested I grow out the sandpaper that I was rocking at the time. I thought my stubble looked cool, but it irritates the hell out of other people’s faces and sundry body parts during intimate moments, so I was certainly open to minimizing my abrasiveness.
Sidenote: The physical kind. My personality abrasiveness stuck around a bit longer. Some would say it’s still here.
I have come to love having a beard because it’s a nice contrast with my middle-aged Charlie Brown head. My beard also lengthens my face and enhances my “I don’t give a fuck” attitude in a way that’s hard to explain. It’s like this built-in shield to the world and a look that’s now become a part of my personality. It gives me this psychological edge that I didn’t have before. If you have one you know what I’m talking about.
When I started my beard journey a few years ago, I didn’t know what I was doing beyond letting it grow, learning how to manage it with YouTube videos, and resisting the temptation to shave the fucker off when it started making me look like a little unhinged like Ted Kaczynski. Speaking of Ted, here’s a photo I took in the middle of COVID when it got really long and I decided to do a little pre-Halloween parody of him:
I think I nailed it even though it leans a bit too much Taliban shaman/terrorist. My beard is actually somewhat styled there and doesn’t look half bad (to me at least). After years of hits and misses, I kind of like that length and style, at least for the winter months.
Anywho, even after taking this photo I let that thing grew to a length that I look back on now like WTF were you thinking? It’s a fine line, after all. I really don’t look good with a huge beard, which takes over my face. Also, when I grew it really long and had to wear a COVID mask, the whole thing got mashed and misshapen whenever I took the mask off, so it looked like I had just stumbled out of a mental institution. This is why my passport photo–I unfortunately had to renew my passport right in the middle of COVID–looks like absolute shit. It’s one of the worst photos ever taken of me, and now I’m stuck with it until the 2030s.
In the years since–especially in the past couple of years, I’ve learned how to manage my beard with trimming and the right products and have kept it really short, more of an “executive beard,” as the community describes it. I also kept it short because, let’s face it, not all women like beards, especially longer beards. I had been dating a lot so I was trying to appeal to as wide an audience as possible without shaving it off.
Sidenote: I once had a woman tell me on a dating app that it’s too bad I have a beard because I have a nice face and it makes me look so much older. I was like Thanks? Yes, I know it makes me look ten years older–a white beard doesn’t exactly scream ‘youthful vigor’ and there is no fucking way I’m going to color it like some aging actor. But that’s what working out and eating right are for. Go find an out of shape, potbellied clown my age who’s clean shaven.
I’ve had a short beard for a long time, but now I’m bored with it. I’m bored with my face. It’s time for a change. It’s time for a Big Beard comeback. But when I say “Big Beard,” I’m not talking ZZ Top here, I mean big for me. We’re gonna grow this baby out a bit and get back to Taliban Shaman length and thickness. At least for the fall and winter. One plus of being in a relationship and not dating is that I don’t have to concern myself with what potential romantic partners think about it. I no longer have to appeal to a wider audience. One plus of being in a long distance relationship is that M. doesn’t have to love it either–she just has to endure it on WhatsApp until her visit at the end of the year. We’ll see what happens then. She’s already calling me “Papa Noel,” hahaha.
3. I’ve been doing light qigong every morning for the past couple of months, and I really like it. It’s those slow movements you see old Chinese people do to get the lymphatic system going, calm the nervous system, and just loosen up to start the day. I didn’t know what it was or what it was for until I got clued in. It’s quick, easy, and when combined with stretching and about four cups of coffee, it’s a great way to wake up and start the day. And who doesn’t want to live as long as an old Chinese person? Clearly it works because causation always equals correlation, amirite? It’s really low impact, so I’m going to try to get my mother to start doing it. She couldn’t understand me describing it to her on the phone, so I’m either going to have to humiliate myself on a video tutorial on WhatsApp or teach her on my next visit during the intermittent pauses between our political arguments.
4. I think we’re finally getting the beginning of the end of the Trump Shitshow in two weeks. Dear World, yes, we created this mess ourselves. At least some of us did. 77 million people or so. We’re sorry. We really are. I’d say we’ve been suffering the most, but we’re not suffering more than Iranians or Palestinians are suffering thanks to him. Or the millions of people around the world who have died thanks to his cutting of USAID, which was their only lifeline and one of the few things my country does right. But we’ve been suffering too in one of the biggest rake steps in American history. Even his dumbfuck supporters are getting screwed–finally–and at least part of their cognitive dissonance is cracking. They’re all “I didn’t think this would happen, I’m losing my farm/I can’t feed my family/I can’t pay my rent/my wife got deported. I didn’t think this would happen! I only thought he was going to ratfuck OTHER people, not me!“
You stupid assholes. Watching the lightbulb finally come on for you low information morons is small consolation for the destruction your ignorant votes for that corrupt, self-dealing POS have caused all of us. Fuck all of you. Every single one.
But we may finally be at the end of this. The midterms are finally upon us, and unless Democrats fuck this up–which is always a possibility with those incompetent fools–we should see a changeover of congressional power and finally, FINALLY some oversight and investigations of this criminal by a Democratic-controlled House. “Should” doesn’t mean “will.” People need to show up and vote, and those votes need to actually be counted. We’ll see if both happen.
5. I just bought my first new car in ten years–an EV–and my prime directive life lesson of “patience” is finally starting to pay off. I have wanted an EV for a long time. A very long time. My reasons are obvious: getting off of fossil fuels, saving money, not having my car contribute to polluting the environment, and progressing to the next stage of technology, which should have happened decades ago. Tesla makes great cars, and I have friends who own them, so for a while, before say 2022 or so, I was tempted to buy one. But then Elon Musk bought Twitter and showed his true colors as a racist right-wing asshole. Then he contributed $250 million to help Mango Mussolini win a second term. So Tesla was off my list. I’ll be damned if I gave that motherfucker one red cent of my money. I won’t even give him 8 bucks a month so I can tweet without a word limit. If none of these things had happened, if he had just stayed a quiet dweeb who ran his companies and stayed out of politics, or at least tried to have a positive impact on the world, I most likely would have bought a Tesla. Instead, I saved my money and waited for an equal or better alternative to appear. And I waited. And waited. It took years.
Then, finally, BMW came out with one worth buying.
I’ve previously owned two BMWs, including a two-door, manual coupe–my first car and probably my favorite car I’ll ever own–so this was where I focused after a Tesla ceased being an option. For the past 5 years or so they’ve had electric vehicles for sale, but they were built on their old internal combustion engine chassis, so even though they were electric, they were based on old tech and BMW basically just repurposed an ICE car into an electric. They seemed like decent cars, but I’d waited this long, so I wasn’t going to go for something that wasn’t built electric from the ground up like a Tesla. So I kept waiting for them to come out with something that was all electric from top to bottom. Then I watched the assholes currently in power take away the $7500 tax credit for EV owners for no fucking reason except to help their fossil fuel donors and the dying ICE car industry. More incentive to keep waiting.
Sidenote: this is why this country no longer advances and evolves any more and is getting surpassed by countries like China and even some European countries when it comes to energy and the car industry. Greed. Myopic devotion to short-term profits and friendly corporate interests. You get one party in power who does one thing and the other party reverses it the second it takes power, regardless of whether the prior policy was a good idea or not. This schizophrenia is one way that empires die, which may be the only positive here, because the American empire needs to die as quickly as possible. We need a cleansing.
Finally, a couple of years ago, BMW announced it was building electrics on a totally new chassis, but they wouldn’t be out until 2025. Then it was 2026. Then it was the end of 2026. My patience was definitely tested, but my current car was running fine, so I could afford to wait. A few months ago, BMW announced that its new electrics would be arriving stateside in October, and I bit the bullet. I’d been researching and following the development of this car online for years. I’d also been monitoring its likely cost, factoring in the now-retracted EV rebate, and had put away some bonus money to save for it. The only question is whether I wanted to wait another two years for that rebate to possibly come back under a Democratic president (which we might not even get, even after this shitshow, thanks to our dumbfuck voting population).
This was way too many variables for me. I had an almost ten-year old car that might start to fail and cost me money soon even though it had ridiculously low miles on it thanks in part to COVID and me working a lot from home over the past six years. I pre-ordered my fantasy new car online to spec last spring. Last Saturday I picked it up at the dealer and drove it home for the first time. It’s a little bigger than my prior car, and I don’t like big cars at all, so when I saw it in person I was a little worried I’d hate it or it wouldn’t handle as well as my car, which drives like a go-cart in spite of its small SUV status.
Oh man, I absolutely love it. More than I expected I would. I’ve never driven an EV before, so driving it is still a bit surreal . The tech inside is such a massive upgrade over my old car, and there’s a steep learning curve to program the car and do basic things like turn on the fans and even open the door. But god damn, it’s next level and handles surprisingly well. Looking at ICE cars all around me, seeing their exhaust as they pump their pollution out into the world, makes me wonder why we still have them. It’s like riding a Japanese Shinkasen bullet train and seeing an Acela putt-putting on the track next to you. Why haven’t we fully transitioned to EVs??? Why haven’t we made them affordable for everyone and built up charging stations everywhere?
Because we’re a greedy, second-class, rapidly declining country that puts profits first, that’s why. We haven’t yet squeezed all the money out of that fossil fuel lemon. There are too many people and corporations who stand to lose too much money if we fully transition to EVs. This is where a visionary government could make a difference, but Americans preferred a return to 1938 instead of moving forward to the 22nd Century like China and Japan are doing. The results speak for themselves.
My favorite things about this car so far: the way it accelerates–not as quickly as a Tesla, but waaaaaay faster than ICE cars, and the way it decelerates on its own when you take your foot off the accelerator. You don’t even need to hit the brake, it just starts to slow down slowly on its own when you remove your foot from the accelerator. It’s totally seamless and not jarring at all. This should save me money on brake pads. There’s no engine either. No failing fuel pump or other hundred things that can go wrong, as with an ICE car. No polluting the air too. It is the weirdest thing to park my car in my garage and not worry about killing myself with poisonous exhaust. This thing also has a massager built into the front seats, a dash panel that looks like something out of Star Trek, and an android looking AI program with a hot voice who can adjust everything with a voice prompt. She even called me “Tim” the other day when M. was in the car with me, and she rolled her eyes. Hahahaha. I love this f’ng car.
Of course, there are downsides. I’m going to need to find spots to charge it–I don’t have a charger in my apartment yet–and batteries degrade over time, as do ICE engines, so we’ll see how things hold up. I plan to have this car for a long time, at least as long as my last car, so I’m pretty happy. My patience paid off.
6. I need to pour one out for my old car. That car stayed with me during one of the hardest times in my life. I bought it right after I separated from Ex. because I couldn’t keep driving M. to pre-K in a two-door coupe. It wasn’t safe and getting her out of her car seat in the back was a friggin’ nightmare. My need for a bigger car couldn’t be driven by my fucked up marriage. I needed one. I ended up buying a small SUV that wasn’t necessarily the car I wanted, but the car I needed and could afford given my imminent divorce, which was going to cost me a pretty penny. Then, about a month after I bought it, I got into my first (and hopefully last) car accident. I had just dropped M. at pre-K, was driving home, and some lady tried to make a left at the intersection when I was entering it going straight. I had the right of way and she miscalculated and then stupidly stopped in the middle of the intersection half-way through her turn. I slammed on the brakes but I couldn’t stop and couldn’t avoid her either. I ended up with major damage to the left front side of my car, which took a couple of weeks to repair and jacked up my insurance for years afterwards even though it wasn’t my fault. That car saw me through a separation, two moves and a divorce. A long drive to Pittsburgh and back during COVID, the longest I ever took with it. Like a metaphor for my life, it endured multiple dings and scratches that I didn’t bother to fix, including a nasty scratch on the back panel I got when I pulled into the garage of my current apartment for the first time and closed the garage door with the trunk open too high. It was a good car. A loyal car.
Some people anthropomorphize pets. I do that with cars. They’re like people to me, and my relationships with my cars have lasted much longer than my IRL relationships outside of my family. My cars have also been more loyal than actual people, rarely failing me. So when I traded my old car in for my new car, I was sad because I felt like I was abandoning someone who had done nothing wrong except be there for me through one of the worst periods of my life, only to be traded in for something newer and better. Even though it was just a thing made of metal, wires, leather, and plastic, that car will always represent something more to me. Even though it wasn’t my car of choice when I bought it, in many ways it became an extension of myself, a reflection of myself, during a very troubled period of my life. We survived it, scars and all. I’ll always be grateful for that car.
7. I’m going to miss M.’s tuck-ins. Just like that, they’re gone. It started not long after her birthday. She just stopped asking and started going to bed on her own. No more late night talks unless she explicitly requests one, which has only happened once in the past four months. So we’ve reached another stage of life, and it’s bittersweet again. I knew it was coming and it’s obviously necessary and a sign of her growing independence, but that doesn’t make it any easier for her father. All I can say is that I’m glad I maximized it when she still wanted to do it. I’m glad I will always have those memories, just like I have memories of her when she was little and was learning to walk and talk, memories of swaddling her and putting her in her crib, memories of waking up in the middle of the night to feed her and put her back to sleep. It’s all so precious and fleeting, no matter how many people warn you to enjoy it while you have still have it. I’ve absolutely done that and it’s still hard watching her old stages pass and new stages arrive. Then for some reason I find myself thinking about the ex-husband of my ex-girlfriend who chose to remain thousands of miles away from his kids, which caused him to miss all of these daily experiences, these changes in his children apart from intermittent visits that lasted a week or so, and vacation trips with them. I have no idea why he in particular comes to mind in moments like this. Maybe he had reasons for his choice, even though I can’t think of any, other than money and ambition. All I know is he had to have missed a lot of special moments, daily experiences of watching his kids go through life, question things, and need a second trusting sounding board for things that come up in their lives. Their mother more than fulfilled this need, but fathers matter too, and WhatsApp video calls are not the same thing as being there in person. I’m seeing this myself on a daily basis, even though I don’t have M. every day. All these years later, I still don’t understand how someone could voluntarily decide to miss all of this because it’s gone in a blink. Their childhood is gone in a blink and you can’t do a rewind. What’s gone is gone.
He’s far from alone in this, but it couldn’t be me. Whenever I get tired or frustrated or start feeling stuck in this town, a prisoner of my own parental choices, I think of that guy, and I start feeling better.
8. I’ve mostly given up debating people about everything. I used to post on Facebook about the things I care about: elections, politics, social issues, Gaza, how the IDF are modern-day Nazis. At some point, I just gave up because what’s the point really? When you look at how manifestly corrupt the current president is and hypocrites who spent 6 years ranting about Hunter Biden but have absolutely nothing to say about Trump & Co., who are robbing this country blind like a bunch of Somali pirates, what is the fucking point of trying to convince these people of anything? When you see people ignore a three-year livestreamed slaughter of 22,000 Palestinian children, killed in the most horrible ways imaginable, what is the point of trying to discuss with them why this is a bad thing, an unjustifiable horror that no one should tolerate in 2026? What is the point of trying to discuss this with people who deem it acceptable? Who attempt to rationalize it?
There is no point. So yes, I rant and get it allllll out on Twitter, but that’s just posting how I feel. Venting. I rarely debate people any more. I’ll discuss and go back and forth on certain issues with people I respect who may disagree with me, but I no longer spend my time trying to persuade people beyond sharing what I see and what I think. Now I mostly limit this to Twitter. I’m convinced that there just is no convincing people of anything because confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance are just too strong, so why waste my time? Most people are not persuadable on anything, not really. Most don’t have an open mind. To the contrary, most people are locked into their beliefs to a fault. I’m not debating people any more. I value my time too much. Even with my mother, I just try to change the subject as quickly as possible when she heads down that road. She’s 81 now. Do I really want to spend whatever time she has left debating the merits of the biggest pedophile asshole this country has ever seen robbing the country blind? No. No I fucking don’t.
9. I love it when I find out a song has a totally different meaning that I thought. Case in point. I’m driving back from the Catskills, listening to Alan Hunter on 80s on 8, and he says that the Van Halen song “Love Walks In” from the album 5150, which was written by Sammy Hagar, is not actually about love at all. It’s about Hagar’s repeated experiences with alien visitations throughout his life. I’m driving home in a pouring rainstorm, and I’m like “What the fuck, how did I not know this?”
I get home, google the lyrics, and good Lord, it’s all right there:
Contact, is all it takes,
To change your life to lose your place in time,
Contact, asleep or awake,
Coming around you may wake up to find,
Questions deep within your eyes,
Now more than ever you realize,
And then you sense a change,
Nothing feels the same,
All your dreams are strange,
Love comes walkin’ in,
Some kind of alien,
Waits for the opening,
Simply pulls a string,
Another world, some other time,
You lay your sanity on the line,
Familiar faces, familiar sights,
Reach back remember with all your might,
Oh there she stands in a silken gown,
Silver lights shining down,
And then you sense a change,
Nothing feels the same,
All your dreams are strange,
Love comes walkin’ in,
Some kind of alien,
Waits for the opening,
And simply pulls a string,
Love comes walkin’, in
Oh, sleep and dream, that’s all I crave,
I travel far across the milky way,
To my master I become a slave,
Till we meet again some other day,
Where silence speaks as loud as war,
Earth returns to what it was before,
And then you sense a change,
Nothing feels the same,
All your dreams are strange,
Love comes walkin’ in,
Some kind of alien,
Waits for the opening,
Simply pulls a string,
A love comes walkin’ in
Love comes walkin’ in,
Baby, pull the string,
Love comes walkin’ in,
Love comes walkin’ in, yeah
Crazy! Apparently Hagar has had multiple encounters with ETs and UFOs in his life, starting at the age of 4, when he claims he saw a floating UFO hovering over a country field in Fontana, California, where his family lived. He claims to have had four separate encounters, including one in adulthood near Joshua Tree. He wrote about all of this in his memoir and has discussed in multiple interviews. I had no idea. It takes guts to do this in the face of all the mockery he’s received for it, including from people like David Lee Roth (of course).
Years later, more and more people are coming to terms with the fact that aliens exist and we’re not alone, including our own government. But it’s pretty wild to listen to this song now that I know what it’s really about. It used to seem a little off to me as a love song (“some kind of alien,” “Earth returns to what it was before”?), but now it makes total sense. I love it when that happens.
10. My eyes are still on the dual citizenship prize. My Italian lawyers now have all my papers and will be filing my case in an Italian court within the next six months. Then who knows how long it will take for a decision. But I’ve done all I can do to make dual citizenship happen, and now it’s in the court’s hands. With all the ups and downs of my life over the past 10 years, all the upheaval and change, one thing that’s remained constant is my goal of leaving this country and living in Italy when I retire. It’s going to happen one way or the other, either through dual citizenship or a retirement visa when I’m able to live there one day. Citizenship would be easier, but the important thing is a I have a real plan and my feelings about it haven’t changed. Wish me luck.
