Why I travel.

Take me back.

Take me back to rotting garbage on dirty streets, where water is a luxury and stink a certainty. I want to feel unwashed and threadbare sheets on hard beds, and pay more than I think I should for it. I want suspicious food, where I savor every bite, knowing it might be the one that ruins the next day. I want to take nothing for granted, be vulnerable and love everyone who shows me kindness.

I want to be concerned about bed bugs, so I remember their absence. I want to be aware of the malarial menace of mosquitoes, so that I notice when my ankles are unblemished.

I want to be foreign to the irritation I felt on the BART train yesterday, “delayed” a couple irrelevant seconds by the guy who was too busy talking on his phone to put his ticket in correctly. I want to feel only incomprehension for the ambient discontent of the spoiled and comfortable, knowing that they are me. I want to stay shocked that people complain and grimace while they wait a few minutes for delicious, safe, nutritious food, prepared by people they won't even bother to thank, unmindful of the insane miracle that brings it to us, every single god-blessamned day.

That work, those wages...
a foreign experience

I want to look at those wrinkles everyone here has between their eyes, the scowl of the perpetually concerned, the mouths of unspecified tension, and feel a wash of gratitude that cleans my face and lifts my lips. I want to be aware of the masses that have so little, every country on Earth. I want to remember how scarce and precious food was for all of human history except the past tiny sliver, invisible on the timeline, and how horrifically we will return to that state...probably sooner than we realize, so that I can stand in awe in a grocery store again, unrushed, uncritical, reverent.

I want to move slowly.

I want to disconnect.

I want to be away from screens. I want to read a book.

I want to talk to strangers.

Here I have friends, but move among the distrusted, suspicious without reason, fearful until proven innocent. There is little danger here. Screw the newspapers, the evening news is a betrayal.

There I will know no one, but might move among possibility, alert and careful, but accessible and listening. The danger is much higher there. The intimacy with human brutality and human kindness, experiential and firsthand, the latter outnumbering the former, despite brutality's instant potency.

Here I can go in comfort. I can pass my day easily, accomplishing tasks in virtual reality, e-living in binary code that I can never touch, my life erased by a magnet.

There every hour will be uncertain, the world so foreign, so unknowable, that it might touch me at any minute. It will be under my fingernails and between my toes. Present on my skin and stained into my clothes. It's possible I will bleed. It's possible I will help, just a little. It's possible I will reach new magnitudes of suffering, or experience joy so visceral you'd have to pay a fortune to chase it.

Take me back. I want to travel.

What happens to men like Rudi?

Rudi worked as a truck driver for decades, meaning he was on the highways throughout the Sandinista-Contra years. In his mid-fifties he was laid off, and now no one will hire him because he is only four years from retirement, which a new employer would have to pay for.

“At first I stayed home” he told me. “But that was...no good.” He looked down at his feet when he said this, and his voice was quiet. “No good.”

He paused, looked around with tired eyes. His mouth moved a little, but no words came out. His cheeks were sun-lined and rough with a light growth of stubble, turning grey. He doesn’t shave every day anymore. His eyes were dark, watery, but looked at the world with the steadiness of one who knows what his life is, and does not run from it.

“So now I come here. Sometimes somebody will pay me a few cordobas to go pick something up, or take it somewhere...” He trailed off.

Another man, another park,
same Leon afternoons

We sat in silence for a moment, me trying to think of something to say, he lost in memories. Then a sound like violence annihilated the somnolent stillness.

Twice daily, 7:00 AM and 12:00 noon, the city of Leon pays tribute to the cotton factories of the past by blaring the air raid siren that used to summon and dismiss workers. The trees shivered and the pigeons scattered like shrapnel. I imagined the plaster must be flaking off the colonial facade of the cathedral behind me. Rudi and I looked at each other helplessly, eyes squinting shut against the aural assault. Just another thing to be endured.

After all, there's nothing like a mind-erasing factory wail to remind you that you no longer have a job.

Once the echoes in my head subsided, I asked my new friend where the best place was to buy a batido, the fruit smoothies that the gods gave to Latin America out of remorse for the heat, and invited him for one.

Leon's parque central where Rudi spends his days

We walked, Rudi’s steps slow and steady, no need to rush anymore, to a collonaded room where a bored high schooler stood behind a chipped white counter. We ordered two pineapple batidos and sat directly under the ceiling fan. We drank the chunky sweetness and conversed as well as we were able given that my Spanish was still dusting itself off, and he had the thick accent of an elderly local who has lived his whole life in the same place.

When we were done I shook his hand and said goodbye. As I walked away I turned to watch him for a moment and he shuffled back to the park. What happens to men like Rudi?

I just quit my job.

I was hired at a “medical research” company for a particular project to last 6-8 weeks.  Last week was #10, and we finished the main part, with an additional 2 weeks to do the second phase.

After that?  I heard we are all going to get laid off.  No, I heard there are a few short projects for some people.  No, I heard there is work for English-speakers year round this year.  No, I heard they are going to make us into cat food.

Whatever.  In the last 10 steps to work on Wednesday the notion of finishing the project then quitting had just concreted in my mind like a massive belch relieving a churning stomach.  I was going to wave my hand to disperse the air and walk away.

The first phase was calling doctors and CEOs, who are notoriously challenging and whose secretaries in the US are frequently difficult/dreadful/bulldogs.  The second phase was calling business owners, and the expectation was that it would be a piece of cake.  They were collectively a piece of something alright, but it ain’t cake, ya dig?

These people were disgusting.  Truly just jerks.  When did it become acceptable behaviour to hang up on people?  Do their mothers know they behave this way?  I don’t want to go on and on about it…but seriously…fuck these people.  (Speaking of mothers, sorry Ma, I know you hate it when I swear, but sometimes it’s warranted, you know?)

It is a rare thing for me that I feel the desire to do harm unto others, either verbally or by flying over there to smack some manners into these ass-mongers, but I found myself wanting to call them back, not to magnanimously remind them that this was uncivilized behaviour, but to tell them off.  And that just ain’t me.

I sat at my desk and felt a weight on my chest, sickly constriction, bone-bending disgust.  I could barely muster the energy to call another one.  And when I did, it was another craptastic wheelbarrow-full of chumpholery.  Repeat.

Everyone feels down sometimes at work and I had slogged through a bunch of those low points before, but it was suddenly more than I was willing to bear.  (Actually it was a graph of an exponential equation.  The x-axis is time, and the y-axis is soul-drainage.  It was already an upward slope, but all of a sudden that shit took off.)

So maybe I am a wimp who couldn’t stick it out.  Couldn’t finish what he started.

Or maybe I am courageous enough to leave something once it passes a threshold of suckiness, despite the inner obligation-voices telling me I should stay, obey the comfort of a reliable paycheck, don’t hope for more.

I have too much love for my beautiful soul to mistreat it like that.

When I look at the blank faces of rush hour commuters, their road rage as they go to and from jobs they don’t love or even like, or I hear the universal small-talk of hating one’s job, it feels like disappointment.

Disappointment that this is all life is.

This disappointment doesn’t occur on playgrounds.  Or at junior high school dances.  Or at graduation ceremonies as valedictorians spout clichés about finishing one chapter and beginning another, or lighting candles to light the future, or any of that shit.

When does that enthusiasm and optimism die?  Is it inevitable?  Is it as universal as I feared, sitting on a train full of people who didn’t even think about interacting with each other?

Back at the job, I will miss are the people.  I won’t be there for the last week, as everyone winds down together, and says goodbye with awareness and pacing.  I said goodbye as I was walking out the door, basically.  Literally in several cases.  There are some people I didn’t even say goodbye to.

But tomorrow I will go to class, run an errand, then fucking go home.  Make dinner for K.  Go to the gym.  Go to bed relaxed.  Not annoy anyone.  Read.  Did I mention actually SEE my girlfriend?  Have a conversation with her that doesn’t consist of “hello, how was work, good, me too, good night.”

After quitting, I came home and starting making a surprise dinner for K.  I stood in the bathroom window, pinning the cutting board against the windowsill so I could watch for her to get home, so I could call her as she was coming up the stairs and ask “what do you want to have for dinner…together?  Surprise!” as she was opening the door.  But it turns out, not wanting to spend another night here alone, she had gone to her parent’s house to have dinner there.

While inconvenient for my attempts at a surprise, that really underlined that I made the right choice.  I have no idea if I will be able to find anything better or if I will regret walking out of the giant fart-container that was the call center, but come on home, babe, I’m here again.