I felt at home in northern Nevada, 90% white, but hard to make a living. No desire to go back to the East Coast or Texas or the Rust Belt again. Scotland had the treasure of warm hearted people, excellent whisky, snooker tables, and the tragedy of unemployment, horizontal ice storms, and frightful menus. I don't know what to say about Holland and Belgium. Superb food, good ganga, generous friends, talented crews, nice spas. I lived and worked in Holland many years, more than once, shot some of my best work there. Hard to get paid by the Jews of The North, as they call themselves and laugh. They're not Jewish, that's the punchline.
Still trying to figure out the place I liked best. Certainly not France or Germany. I did a lot of work in England, terrific production crews and facilities, terrible transport, awful food, even in the best restaurants. English hotels were astoundingly bad, English apartments stupid.
Hmm. I'll have to check the map again. Costa Rica was tranquil and beautiful and dangerous, lived there a long time, multiple escapades. Australia is the Lucky Country. I lived in Perth a couple years, did my first professional film production work 25 years earlier in Sydney. Same problem with awful Pommy food, reinterpreted Down Under. Indonesia was bizarre. Worse food than Libya, worse dictatorship than Libya, worse air transport than Libya. Islam corrodes everything it touches, lethal intellectual poison when it's mixed with Javanese mysticism.
I kept returning to Colorado, but the cost of living skyrocketed. My favorite landmark in the mountains and prairies is an ugly one horse town in Utah, a bittersweet joy to visit. No jobs or business opportunity in Helper, but there's authentic Gilded Age decorations and fixtures in a spacious, high ceiling coffee shop that was a thriving hardware store 100 years ago. Excellent coffee. Beat the birkenstocks off Boulder and shames sniffy Wamego. In 1993, I was driving a '78 Chevy van that had a weak cylinder, routinely fouled a sparkplug and stole compression. The only place open in Helper was an auto parts store. The owner unlatched the van engine doghouse, reached into a difficult spot on a hot V8, and changed the plug. I worried what it might cost. At the counter in a sparsely stocked shop, he used a calculator to figure out how much I owed with tax ... $3.76 for a sparkplug. People are just, damn it, decent in Helper. I went back to Helper whenever I could, always saw something new that was there all along, like the snowplow engine that was twice as tall and twice as long as a normal locomotive, parked on a section of track that went nowhere, rails rusting slowly underneath it.
Luxembourg funded me twice, has the best pastry on earth, but they speak French and have strict rules about residing there, unless you're an EU bureaucrat. Singapore was astoundingly gorgeous, totally fascist, hard to qualify for a work visa, and I didn't want to live there.
I liked Denmark, notwithstanding thick ice and steep drifts that made fools of an IPCC global warming conference and hundreds of frozen street protesters. The downside in Copenhagen was molasses slow bureaucracy and insane rules about household trash. I had to use a key to open a tiny porthole outdoors to shove in little bags containing eggshells and used coffee filters. There was a cabin for empty wine bottles, thousands of them. Food was so-so, much of it from Africa and South America. Nice neighborhood bakeries. My daughter selected what seemed to be a chocolate ice cream bar from the freezer at a corner store, took one bite and spat it out. It wasn't chocolate. It was ice cream covered in black licorice, a Viking treat.
All things considered, I like the Ozarks best. No building codes, wild and free, huge pastures and forests that are always changing with the seasons. Strong neighbors. WalMart vittles and paper products, low taxes, nice county officials that you can count on one hand, oodles of decency, stacks of split firewood in winter. Cows say moo. Coyotes howl at night. Very little traffic on gravel roads. A great place to think and write novels. 100% white, a garden of Eden with burn piles in calm weather, fresh tomatoes, potato patches, hot chainsaws and rifles.
Good enough place to die.
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