Too Old to Leave

and too sad to stay

Eighty years old. I should be dying in a chair I bought when Reagan was president. Instead I’m checking visa requirements like a refugee from my own country.

Last week I wrote this: I refuse to die in a country run by a man who thinks truth is a negotiating position. The rot is now the load-bearing wall. I’m taking Lanying, I’m taking the cat, and I’m taking what’s left of my dignity. You can have the chaos. You can have the king.

That was my mood. Pack the RV and find somewhere that still remembers what democracy means.

I’m not leaving. Not the country.

Florida, yes. Florida can have itself.

I built three software companies in this country. Six computer stores. I wrote code when code was handwritten. I raced motorcycles when racing meant something besides content. I paid into a system that promised it would be there. I’m not some kid who got his feelings hurt on the internet. I’m eighty years old and I’ve watched this country lie to itself for decades.

—

The famous are getting out. They have the money to do it clean—no garage sales, no forwarding addresses, just a farmhouse somewhere and a phone that stops ringing.

Ellen DeGeneres & Portia de Rossi — Cotswolds, England. Landed the day before the election. Woke up to the news and decided to stay.

Rosie O’Donnell — Ireland, January. PrumpTutin threatened to revoke her citizenship in July. He cannot legally do this. He said it anyway.

James Cameron — New Zealand citizenship. Called the second Trump term “horrific” and said watching the news was like a car crash over and over. He knows what it looks like when the band keeps playing.

Sophie Turner — Britain. “After Uvalde, I knew it was time to get the fuck out.” Twenty-one dead. Nineteen children. Arithmetic.

Greg Louganis — Panama. Sold three Olympic medals and his house to get there. Sixty-five years old and starting over.

Lena Dunham — London since 2021.

Minnie Driver — Back to the UK after twenty-seven years in LA.

Eva Longoria — Spain and Mexico.

Jimmy Kimmel — Got Italian citizenship. Says he’s not leaving. Yet.

Google searches for “moving abroad” spiked 1,514% after the election. The Irish, the Italians, the Spanish—all fielding calls from Americans desperate to prove their grandparents came from somewhere else.

—

I understand the impulse. I share it. But I’m eighty. I don’t have the years left to learn where they keep the coffee filters.

What I can do is leave Florida for a state that hasn’t sold its soul at auction. There are still places where they don’t ban books, where the governor isn’t running for dictator in the minor leagues. New Mexico, maybe. We spend half the year in Santa Fe as it is.

Florida is too hot—much hotter than when I came. Good thing there’s no global warming, as PrumpTutin insists. This heat on top of global warming would be devastating. Out west the air is less oppressive, and so is everything else. I feel among friends there. In Florida I feel surrounded by people who’d vote for the man again and tell you they’re Christians while they do it.

I’m not abandoning this country. I’m relocating within it. Finding the corner that still resembles the place I thought I lived in.

Florida is PrumpTutin’s laboratory, DeSantis’s playground.

He bans books like it’s cardio. He picked a fight with Disney—the largest employer in the state—because they opposed his “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Disney’s CEO tried to stay quiet, faced internal revolt, then publicly condemned the legislation. DeSantis retaliated by dissolving the special self-governing district Disney had operated since 1967. A multi-billion-dollar legal war with the economic engine of his own state, all because they issued a press release he didn’t like. That’s not governance. That’s a tantrum with a budget.

He flew migrants to Martha’s Vineyard for a photo op that cost taxpayers more than six hundred thousand dollars. Six hundred grand to own the libs. He signed a bill allowing people to carry concealed weapons without a permit or training. Because what Florida needed was more guns and fewer questions.

The famous can afford to run. The rest of us find the sane corners of what’s left—and hold on.

I’m too old to leave the country. But I’m not too old to leave this wretched state. I’ll die in a chair I bought when Reagan was president—just not in Florida.