vagando

Category: united states

  • Thank You Chase Bank

    I graduated college in May of 2008, walking out of academia in a black Chinese-made robe befitting of an executioner into an economy and s society catching the first whiffs of the miasmatic decay created by our materialism. I decided to spend another summer fighting forest fires and save money for what could be a long winter. I worked 112 hours running a chainsaw on a good week, spending most of the summer in Northern California’s timber stands. I finished the season in September and moved back to Chicago right as Lehman Brothers collapsed; the first limb shed from the leprous system. Chicago had a ‘good job market’ and it was time for me to seek out a Sisyphean task that would bestow me with a stainless steel refrigerator, George Foreman Grills (yes, plural), a waffle maker, low slung Japanese chic memory foam orthopedic bed, and the slimmest profile television available as the centerpiece my loft in a district where meat used to be packed. In essence, all that I was promised and deserved after years of studying. I lackadaisically applied for quite a few jobs as I watched and read about the hornswoggling, the avarice, the delusion, the Ponzi schemes, the fraud, the losses, the prospects of retirement evaporating for millions; It was like watching 300 million people find out that Santa isn’t real. Fighting a forest fire has a clear cut purpose, something that could not be further from the idea of bundling something, derivatizing it, rating it as quality since you don’t really understand what it is and then selling it to people who don’t understand what you are selling either. But everyone is going to earn a lot of money, right? Right. Nobody loses? Nobody.  I was appalled and stressed about my future, until Chase Bank offered me a job interview. I was going to get a low level position in the orgy!

    I was going to get rich, if only I could figure out how to convince myself and these people that I would be good at doing something that I had zero interest in doing. If I got rich then in quite a few years I could possibly do something that I would enjoy; it is just like indentured servitude, it wouldn’t be that bad. I began sweating as soon as I received the phone call as my mind frantically searched for a way to lie to myself and everyone else. If I could pull it off, I would be perfect to work in finance. I entered the office, shorn of my beard and wearing a suit; the lie started there. Four pale faces sat behind a desk, some sort of panel of midlevel managers from far-flung, forsaken branches of the bank in the Chicago suburbs. They were still doing the indentured servitude portion of their career from what I could gather. We cover the formalities; I kept a copy of my resume on my lap to make sure that my words corroborate with the carefully tailored distortions written in sexless, sleek Arial Narrow. I worried that I might lose control of my hands and watch them float away or that my face would tire from smiling incessantly, but neither came to pass. I sat thinking about how I should have drank either more or less coffee, until it became apparent that merely handing them my resume was insufficient to get me a piece of the sweet apple pie that is America. They wanted me to do some role playing, but I was already role playing. You can see how this might become confusing.

    ‘Okay. Let’s pretend that I am a bank customer who simply wants to make a deposit. You will be my teller. Your goal is to convince me to refinance and move my mortgage to Chase Bank.’ She actually pretended to be driving a car, her hands rotating the steering wheel to pull up to a hypothetical air tube and speaker through which we would communicate. I am not sure if her feet were doing the pedals as they were under the desk and I could not seem them.

    ‘Hello, I would like to make a deposit. Could I have a deposit slip?’ She calmly leaned towards the non-existent speaker.

    ‘Good afternoon! I will send that right out to you!’ I can’t remember if I pretended to put it in the airtube or not, but my adrenaline was building to crescendo amid a sense of impending doom.

    ‘While you are writing that out, DO YOU CURRENTLY HAVE A HOME MORTGAGE!’ I asked in sheer terror, surprising myself as I yelled the last part at the fictional speaker and the woman.

    ‘Yes, but it is with another bank.’ She curtly replied, seeming unfazed by my loss of control.

    ‘Have you ever thought about…..refinancing… your loan with Chase Bank? It could…..save money. RATES ARE LOW!’ I consciously took breaths in between words in an attempt to hold it together, making it until the last bit before my tone and volume began rapidly fluctuating again. The adrenaline and disgust were rising rapidly and overcame me. They must have been able to smell the sweat and fear, I briefly wondered if they enjoy this? I contained the overwhelming urge to run.

    I felt like some sort of lab rat being grotesquely tortured, completely incapable of understanding the overarching purpose for having electrodes attached to my miniature nipples. I was shaking at this point, my fists balled, my pupils dilated, and my feet twitching in fight or flight response. They asked me some benign questions and things slowed down a little bit. The adrenaline slowly wore off and I sat in a post-ictal state as they talked more about the specifics of the Personal Banker position. I peered out at the glimmering SUVs backed up behind a red light. I observed a woman talking on her phone in one car, looking absolutely crazy as she gesticulated in the absence of context. I alternatingly glanced at the desk, at these people, at my shoes.

    ‘Are you motivated by financial incentives?’ A bald man officiously squaring a stack of papers over and over again asks me.

    ‘I don’t think so, no not really. Well….I mean… it depends. I want to earn some money.’ I couldn’t lie, the fear had evaporated. It all fell apart, but the honesty was a release. I knew the job was lost at this moment. I view my general indifference to pecuniary remuneration as a virtue, yet what I had just said was tantamount to confessing to a battery of priests that you don’t believe in god. These people lived for money, they worshiped it. There was no other reason they would work within this nightmare.

    I walked out of the sterile box into the afternoon sun with new knowledge about myself and the world. Thank you Chase Bank for changing my life. I went home and bought a plane ticket to Mexico that left a few days later. I have never put that suit on again, it currently serves as moth food in some unknown closet.

    I am certain that some will read this and perceive me as selfish, privileged, shortsighted, a shirker of duties, an addled mind detached from reality, a bum, naïve. In response: you can take whatever path you would like, but I have chosen a different path, something that can probably be gathered from this strange collection of writing seemingly devoid of purpose. I have had to struggle, but I have found profound happiness and tranquility. I have chosen to make time to sit in the sun, to enjoy my food, to walk, to meditate, to meaningfully converse, to make sumptuous food, to travel, to read, to write, to learn for learning’s sake, to make love, to challenge myself. I watch the frenzied pace of society with the utmost mirth.

    I have made the effort to live the life that I want to lead in a world that increasingly seems to strive to make this more difficult.

    We can never perceive where the path that we chose to walk will take us, the end is only an illusion, yet we can make decisions in each moment that will continue taking us down the path that we would like to walk. The radiantly profound moments drawing one onward, happiness is found in moments that pass as we walk the path, not in an end or in abstraction. I find my life expanding, flowering with each passing day. I chose this path with full consciousness and all of my heart.

    There seem to be few dissenters bothering to speak over the din; I am writing to elucidate that it is an individual’s choice how they lead their life. I am exhorting you to sit down and take the time to figure out what your values are and examine to what degree you are living in accordance with them. You only have so many moments left.

  • A Top Down Approach to Aid

    There is a community that to this very day remains beyond the reach of aid, in the periphery that lies outside the blinders of both governmental and nongovernmental organizations. A place where thousands live frantic and stressful lives in a perpetual famine of time and resources, their needs marginalized and left unaddressed due to stereotypes, their lives spent frantically striving simply to meet their perceived basic material needs with limited time to spend with their families or on the simple pleasures in life, forced by their environment to live in a perpetual state of debt, resiliently putting on a smile despite, day after day, waking to face a world that will never be capable of meeting these needs. A place of alienation and shame, neighbors living isolated in fear of judgment for their relatively low standard of living. A place where stressed wracked parents frequently erupt into violence at children’s sporting events. A place where families are torn apart as breadwinners are forced to commute long distances as the local economy is unable to provide a living wage. A place where children and adults frequently resort to drugs to escape their reality. A place where suicides are swept under the Oriental rug, dismissed as just another case of ‘autoerotic asphyxiation.’ A place where the majority sees the need to drink bottled water out of fear of drinking from the tap. A place incapable of locally meeting its own food demands. In Lake Forest, Illinois the cries for help go muffled into down pillows or echoing through the dozens of rooms and furnished basements in each home.

    Save the Poor Rich People will be there to listen and help carry these misconstrued miscreants into a brighter day. We will work to foster appreciation for the inevitably limited resources that one has. We will try and teach basic financial management courses to enable families to live sustainable and meaningful lives within their economic means. We will provide economic opportunities for children, so that they are no longer offered the limited choices offered to their parents’ generation: lawyer, doctor, businessman, financier, robber baron. We will provide other avenues for self-actualization and try to fight against a culture that turns to drugs, prescription or otherwise, as a solution to legitimate psychological issues developing out of an unhealthy environment. We will try and repair broken homes, to bring families back to the dinner table.

    I feel the gravity of my home calling me back, my 28 year celestial cycle coming full circle, calling me to stop escaping the poverty of my homeland by gallivanting around Latin America;  to return and share what I have learned from other cultures regarding human development and quality of life.

    Let’s go America, we have work to do! The top 1% has not grown as a percentage of the population in decades. Email me for funding opportunities to improve the world from the top down!

  • Dos Güeros

    The United States of America to Mexico

    I wake up at Brin´s fiance´s place in Española, New Mexico with the lingering stabbing pains from food poisoning or anxiety induced illness from over a month and a half of moving from place to place. My life has never been more scattered. I couldn´t eat the day before and instead drank two glasses of vodka, a couple of fingers worth in each, with the intent of vomiting up the contents of my stomach. I succeeded. The following morning I awoke, loaded my bike and panniers into my sister’s car, who drove me to Green River, Utah where I met up with my friend Brin.

    We intend on beginning our trip in Columbus, New Mexico where we will try to find a place to leave Brin’s car.

    Let me step back and contextualize this trip:

    I had planned last winter to continue hitchhiking out of the freedom, simplicity and adventures it provided. In the middle of summer, after riding a bicycle more than a few miles for the first time in five years, I decided to buy a bike. A bike to ride South. I had no idea what I was undertaking at this point. The first person that I told about this change in plans was my boss as we were working on a van in the shop.

    ‘Hey Tim, I think I figured out what I am going to do this winter..’
    ‘YEAH! WHAT´S THAT?’
    ‘I am going to buy a bike and try to ride it to South America.’ I don’t think I finish the sentence before it begins.
    ‘AAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA……’ It continued for a while, I don’t feel like typing it all out. It was the most that I have ever gotten him to laugh. He never explained why this was so hilarious and I didn’t want to ask.

    I talked to a few friends who ride frequently. I measured myself. Everyone told me that I needed to train extensively, that I needed to buy an expensive bike and have it custom fitted. In the end I decided to order a stock Surly Disc Trucker from the internet, due to its simplicity and my desire to make miles. Most people I talked to about this trip had nothing to contribute but reasons why I shouldn’t or can’t. My intention was to get on my bike and start riding. I will train and figure it out as I ride.

    I finished guiding one of my last river trips for the season and my bike was sitting in a box at the warehouse. It was one of those evening where whiskey just tastes better than food. My brother, sister, Brin and I started building my bike after finishing a bottle of Canadian Host. We drunkenly eyeballed, cut, tightened and assembled the bike. An auspicious start. We ripped the ‘ly’ off from Surly to leave simply ‘Sur.’ The bike came together in a blur, emerging out of our soused collaboration. We decided was a good idea to quit at some point. We hit a bucket around the shop with brooms, playing some sort of violent variant of floor hockey. Brin hits a slapshot that shatters the bucket and it slices across my face. I go to the bathroom and am unwittingly assaulted with a fusillade of soaps, rags, towels, shampoo bottles that come flying between the top of the drywall and the ceiling. The bottles explode as they impact the walls around me spraying fluorescent chemical streams.

    I wake up on the back porch with my brother and sister huddled to my right and Brin without a sleeping pad using my left leg as a pillow.

    The next few weeks unfold as I slowly collect parts and try to plan for something that I have never done before. I ride a little bit, never more than 100km in order to get in shape. On my first long ride I eat no breakfast beforehand and only bring two cookies. My legs feel like they are being beaten with a baseball bat as I descend down Logan Canyon. Diet is important?

    In the twilight shivering and hiking our bikes over a rock strewn dirt road on our way from Salt Lake City to Logan, my sister says something that has stuck with me for the entirety of this trip:

    ‘Hey, just let me know if you are too tired and I can call for a ride.’ I propose.

    ‘I have never given up on anything before, I am not going to start now. Let’s go!’

    We get a parking ticket in Santa Fe and spend an hour trying to pay it to no avail. We decide to mail it from further down the road and stop in Socorro. After mailing it Brin crouches down next to his VW Passat, the front end is held together with a cam strap and one of the turn signals dangles from its wire on the fender. We make eye contact and just start laughing.

    ‘So this is where my life is at? Taping my car’s turn signal into place after paying a ticket on my way to ride my bike through a place that everyone keeps telling me is one of the most dangerous on earth.’
    ‘Sounds pretty good to me.’

    We are going to Mexico. We pass through Albuquerque, the worst city that I have ever seen on Cops. Images of meth, knives, flashing lights, strip malls and prostitutes flash through my head. Anchorage is the second worst city due to a Special Summer Solstice Episode of Cops. Violence, drunkeness and depravity appear all the more surreal and disturbing when played out in broad daylight at 3am.

    We follow the Rio Grande and its line of yellow Cottonwoods southward through the rocky and barren landscape to Columbus. We find a bed and breakfast run by a nice old lady named Martha who says we can leave the car there, no questions asked. We go to sleep with the lights of the border fence shining over us in Pancho Villa State Park.

    In the morning we pack our bikes, something that I haven’t even done before. It takes a bit of time before everything finds its proper place.

    As I pedal the steel frame of my bike flexes and sways under the weight. It fishtails, yet rides better weighted. After two kilometers I try and adjust my mirror before we reach the border, hit a speed bump and am nearly catapulted over the handlebars. I am reassured when the bike continues rolling without a hiccup.

    The border: kids selling trinkets, men yip like coyotes out of cars, food simmers in every direction, animals beg and scatter and broken English echoes. The energy of Mexico is inexplicablely intoxicating.

    We head out into the wild Chihuahuan desert, a massive expanse of rock and scrub. A straight road fading into the distance demoralizes us. It undulates over the rolling landscape, I find even minor climbs exhausting. We draft off of one another to save energy, alternating every few kilometers. My entire body burns and aches. I drink water as quick as possible, unable to get hydrated. A pain develops on the outside of my left knee and becomes excruciating. I feel even the most minor shifts in wind that barely stir the grass along the roadside. I am going to do this for how long? What did I get myself into? What if I have to turn back with no job or place to live with my tail between my legs?

    Brin gets one flat tire, then a second within a few minutes. The valves are being cut by his rim, a jagged edge encircles the valve stem. We use one of the destroyed tubes to fashion a valve protector. Not an ideal start.

    ‘Echale güero!’ Horns blare. Norteño music is remixed with the Doppler Shift.

    The drivers are incredibly respectful compared to American drivers, contrary to expectation. The sun beats down on us, I wince under burden of the pain in my leg and focus on taking one stroke at a time.

    We eat at a restaurant in Ascención with dozens of fighting cocks strutting and crowing in cages, the walls pasted with posters for upcoming fights. We talk to various characters around town, lack of teeth correlates with our lack of understanding.

    As the sun sets we ride out of town trying to find a place to camp. We head down a gravel road between some cornfields and turn into the lot behind an abandoned building. We look around making sure that nobody is watching. A few workers wander in the chile field across from us.  We disappear into the cornfield after 107km.

    Day 1:

    As darkness descends we emerge from the field and set up camp in the soft tilled dirt that flanks the field. I dig a trench to sleep in that feels like a shallow grave. I lay down exhausted under a moonless sky electric with a million burning suns. I wake up occassionally as cars rattle and crunch down the gravel road. The highway roars all night. As the moon rises the coyotes begin to yip and howl in all directions. I don’t think I can do this.

    I get up though and do it again. My knee protests as I begin to move in the morning before the sun rises. I am soaked in dew. I crouch inbetween the corn rows trying to take a shit as I hear Brin come crashing through the corn stalks. He tries to take a picture of me crouched over the steaming pile, but it is too cold out for the camera to work. We steal some red jalapeños from the field across the way as we set out.

    Most drivers wave as they pass, an old grandma gives us the finger. We pass several checkpoints where we are searched and questioned. The soldiers seem unable to comprehend what we are doing. We ride on a two lane shoulderless highway, the wind from trucks either buffets us or propels us depending upon their direction.

    We arrive in Janos at 10:30am without having eaten breakfast. We eat the most exquisite food on earth, Mexican food. We buy some packaged mystery meat and other provisions for the day. The day heats up under a vacant sky. Time passes slowly, the trucks pass quickly. My knee pain, which I have decided is from my IT band, leaves me wincing and hobbled. I am struggling mentally and think I might have to give up. Day two: The tip of my dick is chaffed and bleeding. I walk like Captain Ahab.

    Brin and I sit on the roadside under a Cottonwood eating lunch. The chiles that we picked from the field in the morning leave Brin in tears. I valiantly savour their heat when combined with the  gratifying mystery meat that we purchased in the morning. We lay around in the shade for an hour or two before riding into Nuevo Casas Grandes.

    Riding into cities is exhilirating and irritating at the same time. Cars are less courteous, but people are more interested in what we are doing and want to speak with us. We jostle over speed bumps and run stop lights. We make our way out of town in search of a place to lay our heads. Barbed wire lines the highway with almost no break. We stop in front of an agrochemial disposal site and debate the merits of sleeping there. We press onward in the fading light.

    We climb into some small mountains after already having ridden over 100km for the day . I am running on fumes. The rotor on my front disc brake squeaks as the bike flexes under the force of each stroke. We stop at a few locked cattle gates in dismay. The sun disappears. We ride down a hill and find a wash at the bottom. We pass our bikes and gear over the barbed wire fence when there is a break in traffic. We walk up the wash a couple hundred feet and drop our gear on the sandy bottom. Brin runs up a nearby peak to catch the last of the daylight. I hobble.

    We reach the top and look over a broad valley surrounded by gentle sloped foothills. We take it in before descending in the last scrap of light. We cook two batches of popcorn on my stove. We garnish the popcorn with lime, chile and salt. Brin swings his headlamp to his side and recoils as a massive Black Widow hovers in a nest built into the bank. We admire its size and I anger it by throwing unpopped kernels at it. Wait there is another right next to it, and another….there are hundreds lining the rocks near us and on the walls. I agree to stop harassing them.

    Trucks wail on their jake brakes coming down the hill. I realize that I can do this, that I am doing it. I cannot fail, as there is no goal. I lay in my sleeping bag smiling as I think about my life before sleep draws me away from my reverie.