RE: Returning to USA after many years
Man.. This is a lot like how I felt after returning to the States after living in Oaxaca, Mexico for a couple years. You don't even realize just how nuts it is here until you leave. Everything is a trap to get you to spend money, from holidays to even grocery shopping. Everyone is so entitled and caught up in their own selves to the point where you can feel really lonely in a crowd of millions.
As for the cops hanging around bars, yeah I've had that experience here in LA in Hermosa Beach. Just after I watched a cop ticket a guy for "drunk while walking in public" ( he had just left a bar to walk home - not bothering anyone), I walked toward my car to see cops coming out of every alley and street simultaneously to harass people just as they left their parking spots. All people who had come out of the bars.
Apparently, they do this every weekend. They hide until the bars close, and then come out all and once and pull over every can that they can without provocation. It was a shock to me, after being in a town in Mexico where the closest cop was a 1.5 hour drive.
I think i prefer the cops being far away. Same in Thailand. It took the cops so long to get to my bar to handle a belligerent customer that we just decided to handle it ourselves.
Pretty much the same way where I was at. It was a bizarre scene down there, though. Full grown men would have rock fights in the street. I was trying to drag this dude out of my girlfriend's business who was totally drunk. He left and came back with a beer bottle to attack me. I took the bottle away from him and then he started trying to throw rocks at me!
The guy was like 40 or something, and I was 22 at the time. I finally chased him off, and thought it was a one off kind of thing. Then I noticed people rock fighting all the time to settle disputes. But it usually ended without anyone really getting hurt.