I have to begin this one by saying that I have hit a strange sort of wall in my journey and am all the sudden really feeling the lack of Root Beer!!! Gawd Dammit I really want a Root Beer!! Supercold and frothy...I mentioned this to a friend from the states a couple days ago and she said, "Yeah, or like a root beer float!" and I almost passed out right there. If I could eat a root beer float right now I could die right after and be that happiest dead person ever!! Heavenly brown and frothy liquid...shimmering in the distance...on the horizons of the future and in the recesses of the past...Root Beer, why'd you leave me?!? I guess technically I left you, but still, dammit, where are ya when I need ya!?! I'm in a sad state, a bad way...the only thing keeping me going is my newly discovered wafer addiction!! The wafers here are intriguingly splendid! Travel really is pretty romantic, can't ya tell?
I am almost done with school here in Santiago and it once again blows me away how fast the time motors by. I will be back in Paris-Londres for the weekend in the center of the city, and then monday I head to the coast with the quest of exploring more Neruda territory. I regularly employ the Steinbeckian theory of vacilar, I may have written about this before in a blog...I can't remember, and in the spirit of your grandpa and his habit of telling the same stories over and over again, I proceed...vacilar is a verb in spanish that implies choice and incertainty. So Steinbeck would pick something, like a place or a random item that he wanted to find, and head off in search of it. The thing about it is that the place or thing is not really important. It doesn't matter if you find it today, or in a hundred years, or ever...it represents a direction that you are more or less headed, but the point of the act is the adventures you have on the trail in between...that's to say, there's a point on the horizon and you head indirectly towards it, going which ever way the wind blows you in the meanwhile. If you ever have the free time to try this, it really is a healthy and enjoyable thing to do. You'd be amazed the things that come to pass while vacilating this way and that....sounds kinda dirty doesn't it? Ha ha!! So yeah, the only thing I really have to do in Valparaiso is go to the house of Neruda...but I know that adventure will find me in the process and I look forward to that without a doubt. I'll now segway into the forthcoming rant with this: For us Norteamericanos it can be tough to really embrace the concept of vacilar. It flies in the face of all our training in life and business...leave without plan or direction, heading towards something that may or may not matter, to be a leaf in the wind with no real attachment to time or distance...yeah, how practical is that??? Most people I know would consider this a complete waste of time! What about your career? But I swear to you that some of the most important things that have ever happened to me have happened in these blessed periods...I have found that most of the time, the most important things in life defy our contemporary logic...and for that I am thankful because I was not designed, built or programmed for logical operation!! Ha ha! Y estoy agradecido por eso!!!
So, I gotta just vent for a second about something. This is something that I think you can all relate to. Something that is really, really, incredibly annoying in our country. It is reflective of some of what I would refer to as our 'collective insanity' as Americans...the story goes something like this:
I have a bank account with Bank Of America in San Francisco. I actually have two, and only two, accounts there; a CD and a checking account. While travelling, at times, I need to move money from the CD (which obviously gets much better interest, so that is where the gradually decreasing bulk of my dough has been kept) to the checking account, where I can get at it from an ATM. Well, as you might imagine, there aren't any Bank Of America branches in South America so I need to occasionally make contact with my bank to make the switch. You can't do this online, because they are protecting your security...so they offer a rainbow assortment of '800' numbers for you to call to get this done. The thing is, frequently, when trying to call the US from abroad, you can't dail an '800' number. I used to have what they call a 'Personal Banking Specialist', whatever the hell that means, but she effectively bailed on me last fall and I have been swimming in a sea of international banking frustration ever since.
Ok, so I get on the website and find the one non-'800' number to call. It is for lost or stolen cards. This isn't my problem, but I figure maybe they can give me a non-'800' number for the CD department that I can call. It turns out that they can't give that number out for 'security reasons'(?). But they do give me an international number for customer service, then they transfer me there. I have to pay quite a bit for these calls from the locutorios (phone booth stores), so the being-on-hold makes me extra nuts. I wait through about fifteen minutes of alternating patches of classical music and mechanical voices telling me how much my business means to them and how a 'Personalized Specialist' will be with me shortly. This is all bullshit and I happily tell the machine this. (This is last thursday, by the way, which will become important info later in the story.) Finally this nice lady answers and I explain my deal and she says that she'll transfer me to the right place. Well, after some more fantastic minutes on hold, a sort of dumb sounding guy answers and I again explain my sitch in full and he tells me that he needs to transfer me again to the CD department...I say that I thought that this was the CD department, he reminds me that it isn't. So back on hold I go...this is about 45 minutes in...and after about 5 minutes on hold, a mechanical voice suddenly tells me that my call could not be processed at this time, and that I should call the '800' number again later!!! And then it hangs up on me. Little mechanical bastard hangs up on me!!! After 50 minutes!! Ok, you say, that isn't terrible...well I called back and the same thing happened again! With a different series of operators of course, but with the same outcome. After almost an hour and a half in the booth, I stand up and stretch and go to pay. A lot. I give up for thursday. I go back friday, feeling fresh and ready to spend some more happy-time in the booth. I bring a book. I call, I wait, I get hung up on. (Yes, I did tell everyone I talked to that I was getting hung up on. They all thought it was strange. On this we agreed.) I try one more time on friday, and a machine ends up telling me that they are now closed for the day and, in fact, will be closed on monday too, because y'all have some sort of holiday up there. I say fark it and go slam a beer.
So on tuesday, I buy a telephone card, which is cheaper than the booths, and make another try. Once again I explain everything very calmly and politely, and of course by now, thoroughly, with each and every person I speak to. And once again, I get hung up on in the final stretches...during the wait for a CD 'Specialist'. (What the hell is that supposed to mean?!?!) By now I am seeing red, as they say, and ready to hop around in circles, bashing myself in the forehead with a ballpeen hammer. I call back one more time, with more determine than ever. I start asking each of them for their full names. I write these down and hope that my asking for this info will make these Phone People somehow give a fraction of a shit about getting me connected with the hallowed 'Specialists' in the faroff and well guarded land of Deposit Certificates. The Phone People are all very careful this time, especially in dailing the right extension numbers for me. Even though I get transferred to the wrong place a total of three times and was on the phone for almost sixty straight minutes, I was not cut off! Finally, I break through the force field that surrounds the CD Realm and I am talking to a real, live 'Specialist'! Turns out that this first 'Specialist', we will call her Ivory, is not so special. That is because she is only 'authorized' (WTF...) to handle accounts outside of California (WTF!!!) She is going to have to transfer me to a 'Specialist' who handles California. Cuz I'm in that jurisdiction. "Whoa whoa whoa Ivory!!!" I cry, beads of sweat standing out on my furrowed brow, my hands clenched in balls of desperation. "Don't do it!!!" She doesn't understand my emotion. I explain. She agrees that that is indeed 'too bad'. She says she thinks she might have an associate who can help me, and puts the phone down and goes off to look. For fifteen minutes I listen to the tapping of keypads and the sluggish sounds of distant office banter. Finally she comes back and says she found someone who can access the sacred accounts of a place called Cali. This lady actually gets the job done, and it's a good thing too because I was, at that point, explaining to each and every one of these Phone People that you can get better service at banks in the third world...and, in fact, you do. The funny part of it, is that all they have to do is punch a couple of things into the computer and it's done. It's a process that takes 45 seconds to complete. Wow, quite a thing. All in, it took about four hours of hold time, upwards of 16 operators in at least five states, about 35 dollars in long distance fees, an incredible amount of patience and an uncalculable quantity of minutes off the end of my life. (From frustration, of course!) Almost took a lot longer off my life because I was about ready to do myself in right there in the living room towards the end of that last call!!! What the duece!?
Ok, breathe for a minute...ya, good. I was thinking about this a little bit, and it strikes me as something important, even if it is something completely common in our fine new world. You look around you in the US, and you see so many people who are chronically frustrated with things. Their lives, their jobs, the people around them or the things around them. And this is important to notice because people always wonder why we have so many problems despite being 'the most advanced country in the world'. (Imagine this line spoken from a megaphone, in a really deep and commanding, movie-type of voice.) And please note going in that I realize that the causes of these problems and various 'discontents' are wide-ranging and not easily capsulated...I am approaching only one of which right now. And the cause is that we have the notion that things are supposed to work, but in reality, they only sort of work. This is a two pronged problem in this case. The first prong is that the machine or system or program is supposed to do all these fine things; it is supposed to make your life easier. (It is advertised in this manner, it is guaranteed for life, it is sold so enthusiastically!) But it turns out that it only does these things part of the time. Of course they generally can work, but you find yourself needing to fix these things a lot. You realize that you don't know how to fix them, and you have to call tech support, where they leave you on hold for a half an hour and then the 'Specialist' that you have been waiting for throughout your lunch hour, is not 'specialized' in the area that you need help with. In the end, it takes more time figuring these things out than the device or system that you have was designed to save for you, and that is indeed frustrating. But that is only the half of it. The part that is even worse, is that when one of these machines doesn't do its job, there is no one to tell about! No one to go to. No one who represents culpability... If the computer fucks up and erases the work you have been saving for three years, who are you gonna tell? Who will give a shit? The computer? If only. The tech support may give you the standard "aw, that's too bad..." but what does that do besides make it worse? In the case of the bank phoneline, my Chilean mom said I should write an email to someone about it...to who? Who is going to care that a cook with a few pennies spread between a couple of their accounts is having problems transferring them over the phone? The operators? No. The managers? Are you kidding? The bosses? (Whoever the duece they are...) No. Then who? The machine you leave the message on? The Inbox that houses the email? Yeah right. There is no outlet in this system. You realize that in this Shiny Modern World it really doesn't matter if this stuff doesn't work. What are you going to do? Sue them? File a complaint or a lawsuit? No. It's too small an issue for that. So there is this double futility that the average person feels from these things. We have an expectation of things that should tend to work, but in reality they don't always. Think about the 'Casino' re-enactment scene in Office Space...it's what you'd like to do.
"Well, Matt, these things work most of the time, and such is the nature of things, sometimes they stop working."
Yes, of course, but that is not what the marketed expectation is...that is not understood in the random seeming 'behavior' of a failing machine...that is not the way the average person thinks about these machines...that is one of the dark sides of technology and it's percieved role in our current world. So you get frustrated. You want to do something about it. Then you are funneled into an automated system of voice responsive machines and computer voices that don't really help you at all... and it is all in the name of progress...they tell you that we are making progress. This is progress.
Alan Watts once wrote that with every solution (to one functional problem or another) that we come up with, we create twenty new problems. (Twenty is an arbitrary number...it would obviously depend on the situation.) His example is cars. We came up with cars so that we could better move around. So that we wouldn't have to worry about the fickleness of horses or -god forbid- walk. And so that we could travel longer distances in less time. Get places faster, etc...you get it. But then think of the infrastructure needed to support cars. All the sudden you need; roads and pavement and road maintenance and gas and gas stations and oil and oil wells and overseas investments and wars for 'foreign interests' and occupation for drilling rights and cops and tickets and courts for violators and secretaries who keep records of the violators and licenses and license bureaus and licence records and (thanks to satan) DMV's and cranky counter workers at DMV's and airbags and shocks and struts and every little thing that is underneath the hood of the car and car commercials and used car salesmen and mudflaps with naked girls on them and windshield wipers and wiper spray that doesn't streak and jesus friggin' christ!!! All sorts of other things too. Vertigo vertigo vertigo!!! All having to do with solving this one fundamental problem. Now consider all the branches on this vast tree, and all the individual problems that each little bud on each little branch has and needs to be dealt with, and then try to make it all mechanical and digital...take all the human interaction out of it and tell everybody that this is going to function even better than ever and you end up with a world of frustration!! And frustrated people. People shooting up classrooms every couple of months, people killing each other in the streets with guns that we are guaranteed the right to own, people abusing a veritable cornucopia of drugs and alcohols in attempt to escape from the daily reality, psychologists and psychiatrists clogging up the now digital yellow pages, prisons choking with inmates, frustrated juvenile offenders with frustrated parents who are never around because they are too busy working two frustrating jobs to put food on the table in order to be a little less frustrated by the now deflated idea of the all important 'American Dream'.
Oh, but Matt, you can't say that people kill other people as a result of having to be on hold with the bank for forty five minutes...
Alright fine, not directly, but certainly indirectly, and if you don't think that all these factors are related to each other, then I envy the bubble you live in. (Stay there, you're far better off!!) Of course these things are interconnected, and of course the mounting frustration towards one thing contributes to the frustration towards others. Add these things up, and push it to the limit, and you have a highly combustible situation frequented by a society of matches and cigarette lighters. Socio-culturally we live in dangerous times where the prevailing causes and factors for things that we feel and experience are difficult to understand because they are impossible to isolate or separate from the always moving mass of other causes and factors. Through the medium of technology, the multiplication of details has occured exponentially, while our understanding of what is happening has not, leaving us confused and understandably frustrated by our position.
Please understand that I offer this view not as a blanket condemnation of development and technology as a whole, but rather as a frequently experienced and thoroughly thought out observation. The way that I see it, there is no 'solution' to this. It is just the way things are now. "La Vida Moderna." "The World Getting Smaller." "The World Getting Better." "The World Going To Hell..." Call it what you want to, but the way I see it, there is no denying that this frustration is here for the long haul. More technology will not make the frustrations of human beings go away. As humans, based on a natural human system, diminishing the presence and role of humanity in favor of machines will never result in a more present humanness. Ironically, but of course naturally, the thing that will actually most help with this human frustration, is human contact and human interaction. And remembering nature. Yes, actually leaving the house and/or office every now and again! Going outside. Smelling the mountains, the air, the wind and the water. Experiencing silence and the vastness of the natural world that we shun in favor of our urgent urban lives. Going back in time, so to speak, going back against the technological current to humanity and nature will be what keeps this boat afloat. I will doubtless encounter opposition to this way of thinking, because the mechanical replacement of humanity and human interaction is more and more frequently accepted as the mainstream version of what is good and right, what we were destined to do as 'enlightened beings.'
"You're an ignorant hippy," they'll say, "You're a backwards socialist-type who thinks solely of ideals and utopias. There has always been suffering and frustration amongst humans...can we not say that we are minimizing it in our 'progress'?"
And to that I say fine. Not quite so, but fine. That is another topic for another time. To the idea of this progress that is spoken of, and to finish this rant altogether, I offer, oncemore, a favorite quote of mine that was uttered by an aging John Steinbeck:
"Why is it that more and more, progress, seems to look a lot like destruction?"
Well, I have now made two Steinbeck references in one blog, which has to violate some sort of blog rule. And it makes me look like I am the trumpeter of all things Steinbeckian!! Ha ha! Ironically I haven't read him for months and I am currently neck deep in a bout of Dostoyevskyism!!! (The first picture/illustration at the beginning of this blog is of his Brothers Karamazov) His writing really gets into your head. To quote the female boss character from the 40 Year Old Virgin, in albeit a totally different sense of the quote: "He'll haunt your dreams!" Ha ha. That movie is brilliant.
So this is a pretty long blog now. If you have made it this far, you deserve a wafer!!! I'm having one!! Ha ha ha! Wow these Chilean wafers are really something...
Random final notes for today: Ciao Fidel, que te mueras bien...Incredible, the diarhea that flows from the mouths of American politicians...School shootings could be a sign of something deeper happening (ya think?)...Wafers are tasty...Cats are actually rather selfish...Root Beer really does have something special going on...How ironic is it that Ronald Reagon's son Ron, is a democrat...Food poisoning is a drag...and a few words from a Neruda poem that I memorized the other day...:
Pero no hay nada como el viento de los duros montes,
El agua de riego en los fríos canales, el espacio inmóvil,
La luz colmando la copa del mundo, y el olor verde de la tierra...
...si no me enseñaron la tierra, si solo para recorrerla,
Si nunca entré con el arado, si no vivi con los terrones,
Ni dormi sobre la cebada,
No puedo hablar con los violines, porque la musica es terrestre...
Translation...
But there is nothing like the wind from those hard mountains,
The water of irrigation in the cold canals, the unmovable space,
The light filling the cup of the world, and the green aroma of the earth...
...if they didn't teach me the earth, if only in order to know her,
If I never entered with the plow, if I didn't live with the soil,
If I never slept upon the barley,
Then I cannot speak with the violins, because the music is of the earth...
So take that technology! A little Pablo for yer ass! Take that!
1 comment:
Okay...wheres my wafer then? ;0)
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