I have now moved out of my host family's house and am back in the world of hotel and hostel living. The one I am in here is pretty freakin' cool, actually. It is in this really old building in Paris-Londres in the central part of Santiago and the whole place looks like something out of a movie. Super elaborately decorated and very wooden and squeeky. The guy who runs it is a very nice chap, and the fact that it is affordable seems incredible to old Matteo.
We(the family)had some funny stuff go down at the house I was staying in; seemingly every night something happened that made sleeping well tough. The night of the eclipse there was a party in the street. You can hear almost everything that happens in the four residences around the courtyard I mentioned before. There is a blind lady who lives across the courtyard and she has a clock that announces the hour, every hour, in a loud and stern sounding digital voice. It is a 24 hour clock and it is funny because it is set backwards so that the nighttime times are actually the daytime ones. You'll be sleeping and you'll hear, "It's 14:23 in the afternoon..." And you roll over and go "Huh?" A real knee-slapper. I suppose it doesn't really matter when you don't need light. Then the best one was this homeless feller would sleep just outside the hedge to our house, and he would snore so incredibly loud. Rattle the furniture loud. Kety, the mom of the house, actually hooked up a hose on the third day and went out and used it on the poor bastard that night!! You feel bad for the guy, but snoring sucks. It reminded me of the common plight of the non-snoring hosteller. I am such a person, and the phenomenon is truly a universal one. Doesn't matter where you are in the world, there is always some loud snoring bastard making life tough for you. Over the years I have built up a repertoire of tactics and techniques to protect my sleep from such nocturnal troublemakers, but still to this day, I am amazed, sometimes shocked, and always quietly annoyed by these folks shenanigans. In a hostel room of four people, you might be lucky enough to not have a snorer. But in a room of eight, you most certainly will have at least one. Sometimes two, and if God really hates you, three. If you are in a room of twelve or more, you can forget about sleeping well. Unless you have weapons-grade earplugs and/or enough sedative-type drugs to put yourself in a land far, far away. For some reason, snoring is very agitating for your buddy Matteo del Norte. He gets sorta chaffed when he lays there wide-eyed in the dark listening to some rumbling bastard get the sleep of his lifetime. What is really funny is when no one can sleep except for the snoring person. I call these guys Roncers, because the spanish verb (which is great) for snoring is Roncar, and a snorer is a roncador. One night, a while back, I was laying there in a similar situation in some random hostel, and a fellow 'awake person' turned on a headlamp to do some reading since he couldn't sleep either. I took advantage of his light, and there in the dim and rattling dorm room, I composed a poem for all snorers everywhere, I'd like to reveal it for the first time here, under the title, "Ode To The Snoring Kind". Any implied violence is serious in every way!! Ha ha ha! Just kidding.
ODE TO THE SNORING KIND
We watch you stomp into the room,
We realize that our sleep is doomed...
Your stomach size, your barrel chest,
We understand we've not been blessed...
Your eyes are closed, your sounds ensue,
Our grimmest dreams are coming true...
Your breathing slows, you set the tone,
We miss dreamland, your there alone...
You only sleep upon your back,
We'd like to give your face a smack...
You keep the whole damn room awake,
We'd like to drown you in a lake...
You grunt and groan but still you snore,
We wish you'd roll and hit the floor...
And while we listen to you sleep,
We'd like to put you six feet deep...
Between your roars you wheez a sigh,
We just wish that you'd choke and die...
Your rattle shakes the cieling beam,
Your silent death, our waking dream...
When daylight shows, the light of dawn,
We leave our beds but you drone on...
Our heads like lead and full of woes,
While you still whistle through your nose...
We've got no sleep and pity is,
We hate our lives and he loves his...
And the worst part, we have to say,
You've slept so well, and enjoy your day...
Well, I hope you liked it...And by the way, nothing personal against you fine people who snore, I happen to know some really good humans who snore. It's just at night it is harder to see these good qualities!! Ha ha! I am just playing around with all this. It is annoying though. I am a sponser of weapons-grade earplugs.
This will be a shorter blog to compensate for the last one, which I think may have set the record at this point. I am at a really crappy cybercafe, but on sunday, beggars can't be you know whats. So the keypad only sort of works and at times the space bar gets stuck and goes scooting across the screen. If I am not watching when this happens it can cover a lot of ground. The thing that I like here at this place is that the old man behind the counter is spinning some gangster rap! Again, go figure. Tomorrow I will be heading to Valparaiso where there is a music festival going on, among other things. It was an important port city for many years and was known among sailors as 'Little San Francisco'. I am excited to see it. It is also now considered the cultural capital of Chile. So we shall see.
The other thing that I want to quickly reference is something interesting that I have been thinking about in the past weeks. Here in Chile the society is experiencing a generation of youth that is quite similar to ours. That is to say, raised without much of a family influence, a lot of TV and violent video gaming, not a lot of positive future thought, and with a heavy emphasis on consuming. A lot of black clothes and dyed hair, underage drugs, alcohol and easy sex, low self esteem, lack of respect for elders and others and an ever existing desire for 'satisfaction'. (Think Mick Jagger) I have nothing against this style of life really, having partook in an albiet earlier version of it. But it is also easy to see the changes that have taken place in the few short years since I was wearing black and screaming into microphones. These changes are significant, and worrisome to those with fingers on the pulse. And this is another societal symptom that contributes to the system of discontent in our America, and more and more in 'modernized' countries all around the world. Like Chile. My teachers and family here have talked a lot about these societal factors and the way that the post-Pinochet youth have embraced a bleak view with little hope for the future outside of consumerism. This is a huge topic, and I am going to keep it brief. Say a few things and then let it go for the moment.
So I was reading some Dostoyevsky and I swear to The Baby Jesus that this guy was one of the greatest geniuses of all time. You read his writing from the mid 1800's and he could be talking about human psychology right this minute. Granted, in terms of his epoch, but the underlying truth is still the same, as it always will be. So just about everything he writes could be applied to the situations and persons around any one of us, and he is particularly unnerving when you realize that he has entered into your cranium and is describing your very own psyche. Other times, he just says shit that you go, "yeah, that's just it!" Often it is some sort of manifestation of behavior or thought. So thinking about the Chile/US teenage bleakness, this passage, and a few others that I didn't include because I think you'll get the point from this one (and it takes a long time to copy it), struck me as being dead-on in a certain fashion. Granted, much of what he is talking about would go on to be known as existentialism, and so this passage and the others, have an exaggerated sense of gravity. Though not at all out of proportion with true life, just slightly differently, applied to each case. This is a passage from a short story that I like a lot, it is called The Dream Of A Ridiculous Man and can be found in The Eternal Husband, a collection of short stories. Not what I would recommend as essential or first time Fyodor reading, but interesting nevertheless, the passage is beginning to explain the reason a certain character has taken it into his head to kill himself. I think if you think in terms of the school shooters and almost school shooters and to varying degrees, lots of other 'lost youth' in our country, this is on the money. It is as follows:
"Maybe because a dreadful anguish was growing in my soul over one circumstance which was infinitely higher than the whole of me: namely -the conviction was overtaking me that everywhere in the world it made no difference. I had had a presentiment of this for a very long time, but the full conviction came during the last year somehow suddenly. I suddenly felt that it would make no difference to me whether the world existed or there was nothing anywhere. I began to feel and know with my whole being that with me there was nothing. At first I kept thinking that instead there had been a lot before, but then I realized that there had been nothing before either, it only seemed so for some reason. Little by little I became convinced that there would never be anything. Then I suddenly stopped being angry with people and began almost not to notice them. Indeed, this was manifest even in the smallest trifles: it would happen, for instance, that I'd walk down the street and bump into people. It wasn't really because I was lost in thought: what could I have been thinking about, I had completely ceased to think then: it made no difference to me. And I would have been fine if I had resolved questions -oh, I never resolved a single one, and there where so many! But it began to make no difference to me, and the questions all went away."
So you take this as a basis for thought, perception of surroundings and behavior, and add into it our very own brand of modernised boredom and instant gratification addiction, and you're asking for some wierd shit to start happening. I have an easy time in asserting that this wierd shit has indeed already began to happen...in the circus side show we call America. I bet most people would be annoyed just by my bringing this up. It isn't really fun to think about for the average Joe. It isn't a feel good type of thing. It would be funner to just tune it out. But for those of you who do enjoy bouncing these ideas around, let me know what your experiences have been in this realm of observation. On that front, we have to live in the best people watching country in the world!! Ha ha ha! You might be sitting there drinking a coffee on a bench and all the sudden be lucky enough to see someone get shot! Hey! Cool!
So I'll post again in a few days about what happens in Valparaiso. March is going to be a busy and very social month so I am sure that the adventure gauge will be set to high. That's my favorite setting! Take 'er easy, M
(What I would recommend as first time Dostoyevsky reading is either 'The Idiot' or 'Crime and Punishment'. Be warned though, they are heavy reads, and require some attention and thought. It isn't Stephen King.)
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