"I missed you in New York!" "No, you didn't. I didn't go. I'm not setting foot in your country again while he's there."

[DFW]

A friend of mine from the Baden-Württemberg area was not at a convention I always go to in January in Manhattan. He's in his mid-seventies, so I was worried there might have been a sudden health issue. But I just saw him in Berlin a couple of days ago, and he is fine. We don't have a lot in common, but about 25 years ago, his then-girlfriend had some rare form of cancer which was, at the time, being most successfully treated by some doctors in Moscow. He asked if I had any contacts in Moscow that could help him. I did, she went, and was cured. We have been fairly close ever since.

But this time, the situation in the USA just became too much for him. He said, he was sorry, but no reasonable European could make the trip to the USA if it wasn't necessary, and he didn't consider it to be necessary. After all these decades, I thought he was so laid back that nothing could spook him to this degree. Apparently the answer to that is "almost nothing." These stories are not merely theoretical tales made up by AI for youtube entertainment.