Day 29: Disinclined

It didn’t work out. No monastery for me. I actually slept very well last night. I used my sleeping bag and one of the blankets from the host and was all warm and snug. I had the same kind of dream as the night before, where you see so many people you know. This time, I was able to infer a meaning. It made me think of certain half day Fridays in the early Fall and late Spring when I was in High School. The kinds of days that seemed to last forever. You’d walk out of school early with a large group of people, endless possibilities brewing in our heads. We’d head down into the city and go out to the park and run into more people we knew and it would snowball and everyone would sort of conglomerate like that and it was just a big wonderful party. Those were the happiest days. I love seeing everyone in one place, different friend groups intersecting, everyone getting along and laughing. That rarely ever happens anymore. I missed my five year High School reunion and there wasn’t any motivation on anyones part to have a ten year. It makes me sad. And it’s not like I was happy back then. I was depressed, miserable, even sometimes suicidal. But I sure had fun with my friends and laughed my ass off on many occasions. But that’s all gone now. In contrast, I look at the people in these small villages who grew up together and never leave each others sides for the entirety of their lives. I look at that with envy. In America we make a great deal out of “growing out” of “toxic” friendships, leaving our shitty hometowns and such and such. That’s all very well and fine but why must we fully abandon these rich communities where we were brought up and these friends who knew us so well? Are we ashamed of who we used to be and they serve as reminders? We will never get that back. College had the same feeling, and that’s why so many people recall those years with such a fondness. We want to be around each other, but for some reason as we get older we become more hermit-like and look at social events as an annoyance we must deal with. And I don’t blame us, as those social events are full of posturing and bragging and talking about career and investments and all that. I miss being with my friends, in large groups, and there wasn’t much at all to seriously discuss so we just made jokes and we laughed and laughed and that was all. And I think, in those moments, we were pretty happy. I know I was. When I go back to Philadelphia for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it being a moderately large city, there’s no bar that you can expect to find all your old pals the way you have in the suburbs and small towns of America. I’ll reunite with the small pocket of friends I’ve maintained over the years, but it never feels complete, it always feels like there are a few too many people missing. And when I do chance upon one of them on the street, my heart fills with so much joy, it’s so wonderful to see an old face. Why did we ever have to part? Why couldn’t life have just been a continuation of living in dorm rooms? That’s why I’m still drawn to hostels. I love being around that energy. Even when I worked in Alaska in a fish cannery under fairly brutal conditions, I loved it. There was so much camaraderie, so much laughing and joking and genuine feelings of friendship. We were all in one big family together. I think I can say most peoples favorite memories in life are such. Working on a film or a musical, playing sports, going on a group adventure, working on some big project with lots of folks you get to see every day and form attachments to. People want to be in groups. Whether or not we like our work colleagues is a far larger determining factor in liking our jobs than the work itself. I loved working at Macy’s even though it was… Macy’s, because the team was so wonderful and every day we would just laugh on set and not care all that much about what we were doing and I could genuinely feel love there. Yes, I know it sounds corny, but I felt love at Macy’s. And now I don’t talk to them anymore, which makes me sad. I kind of brought that on myself by making a couple of sexual errors, but that’s life. Then, at Vox, there was nothing, it was a barren desert of human contact. It was just sad. No love at Vox. Such a lonely place. I never should have gone there. Everyone kept to themselves, a real computer and headphones sort of environment, so dismal and dreary, and the office was always half empty because so many people worked from home. The one person who wanted to talk to me had Borderline Personality Disorder, which she freely admitted, and she talked way too much and did some other things too and I ended up getting her fired for sexual harassment. And I don’t know how people make working from home work. I’ve only done it here and there, editing videos, and one day of it is enough to drive me stark mad. I need people. And yet, I run away from them. Because I also hate people. Hell is other people. But heaven is other people. What a confounding predicament. I need to be forced to be around people. I need some kind of social/work/living structure, some kind of compound, that envelops me in people, like one of those post-apocalyptic space ship scenarios. Maybe I should go to jail? My social life has always been difficult to maintain. I’m fine at making friends, but keeping them is another story. I’m not a plan maker, I’m not a reacher outer. It gives me loads of anxiety to even begin making a plan. Who should I invite? What should we do? Those two questions alone are enough to make me jump off a bridge. My whole time in New York I leaned heavily on my best friend, Caleb, to be the social chair for us both, and I know this must have exhausted him, but I grew a dependency on it that was almost impossible to shake off. We shared practically all of the same friends, and most people texted him instead of me about plans, sometimes mentioning to “bring Nick along”. My other good friend, Vernon, who I’ve known just as long, was always frustrated with me because while he always made efforts to hang out, I rarely reciprocated. In fact, it’s sad to say, but most of the time I made plans it was with girls I met on dating apps, and the plan was let’s meet at the bar near my place or yours, because I was much more driven to sleep around then to pal around. Hanging out with friends and drinking just felt like a waste of time, something that didn’t really lead to anything tangible, just a repetition of the same fruitless conversations, unlike sex, which was always on my mind and which I used as a form of therapy. When contemplating going out to socialize, I was basing it off the probability that there would be A: women I want to sleep with or B: people who are also in film or comedy that I can discuss collaborating with. That was all that I cared about. That was a sad life I was building for myself, and I knew I had to break away from it and have a healthier, more wholesome, more autonomous social life. But, you know, it’s hard. Traveling though, that’s easy. I show up to a hostel. I put in my best effort to not be weird, maybe get a laugh here and there as humor is my social currency, and bam I have friends for the day. I don’t need to worry about invites, they’re all there. I don’t need to worry about what to do, we’ll think of something together. There’s no need to think about sex or networking, if one or the other happens fine but it’s pushed far in the back of my head. When I was a kid, my friends and I all worked at this bourgeois pool club called the Lombard Swim Club. We didn’t have phones or anything, but on a summers day we would just go to the club and find each other. If no one was there, we’d go to Rittenhouse Square or to the Schuykill River or Tany Park and probably chance upon someone, and then just like on those after school Fridays there’d be this snowball effect where we’d walk around slowly picking up more and more people. I wish there was an equivalent in adulthood. But adulthood has been a lonely place. I hide out in my apartment waiting for a text and then what I’m not sure go to a bar or restaurant or coffee and have the same conversation as last time? Then everyone has their partners and they stop talking to their friends as often and it’s just their partners and they make these special little efforts to see their friends on Saturdays or something stupid like that but there’s no longer any heart in it. Blech. No thank you. There couldn’t possibly be one person whose company I could tolerate for that long. Give me the dorms please. Hell, give me the gulag. You know, it’s a dark thought, but I wonder if there were ever times in Auschwitz and Dachau when it felt like a regular old party, where people stayed up all night in the dorm rooms laughing and joking about certain guards or morbidly joking about the state of things and what was for dinner that night and that this brought them together and maybe it was even fun. I wonder if any of the survivors have positive memories of that time. That’s probably too morbid of a thought, but I do wonder about it. In Ladakh, we’ve been passing through quite a lot of road construction. It’s not at all like in the states. Here, labor is comically cheap. There are entire villages living on the roads with women and children and men all working together. They seem to be from south of here in India proper, imported to Ladakh temporarily to build the roads. But they have a nice work life balance. Half of them are always sleeping on the side of the road in broad day light, the other half sort of working but not so incredibly hard. They’re talking and joking and they don’t seem to be toiling in misery, it’s very social. No overseer driving a whip. When we bike past them they give us big wide smiles and greet us, they seem content with their lot. That’s the way it should be. Anyway, that’s what my dream made me think of. 

So Adam and I wake up and get our backpacking gear together and set out for this dubious trip to the monastery. But we are oddly tired this morning. It’s a combination of the altitude and our homestay tea being criminally weak. We walk down towards where we think the bridge should be, and we get a little lost in the maze of stone fences and pasture land, and then we just kind of give up, and we sit down for a little while. We fished out the candies we’d brought for the trek and started wolfing them down. We smoked some cigarettes. We lay down in the grass and baked in the early morning sun. It’s just warm enough to be comfortable. We decide we won’t go to the monastery. But it’s okay. Because I feel at peace right now anyway, and I’d rather just sit here in nature for just a moment and feel some real peace than schlep to a tourist destination that carries the idea of humans feeling peace but really I’m just there to take a picture to show that I went there. So we had our Phuktal monastery together right there and it was enough for me. Being on the bike all the time can sometimes feel like go go go. You’re passing these beautiful places but rarely taking the time to really absorb them. So it’s precious when you take time to slow things down and enjoy the scenery you’re rushing past. I’m also still in pain. I mentioned briefly that my right knee joined in on the pain party, well its gotten worse. Honestly my left knee might even be in better shape than my right knee at this point. It ain’t pretty. We went back to the homestay to gather our affairs and hung out with the family for a little while. The little daughter is one of the cutest kids I’ve ever seen. She had this little cough that made her even more adorable. I hope it’s nothing serious. She kept playing with our bikes and singing that “baby shark” song and also “heads shoulder knees and toes” much to her mothers delight who was kind of yelling at her all the time when she touched us or did something bad but it wasn’t a forceful yell because she too had a difficult time resisting the innocent charm of her daughter. This girl had bright red cheeks and a constantly running nose and she just waddled around doing whatever she pleased in the most amusing delightful way, like a cartoon character. Kids are such a treat sometimes, especially when they aren’t spoiled little Park Slope kids. Their son was a little older and he showed us that he, too, had a bike but it needed a little fixing. Unfortunately the derailleur was all bent out of shape so there wasn’t much of anything we could do but he could still sort of ride it if he didn’t change gears. He took us up to the main road, which was a punishing steep push with the bike and we set on our modest short journey for the day. I was in a lot of pain in both knees from the outset. We took things nice and slow. I think we only did 20kms between Tetha and Korgiak, and that was more than enough for me. We stopped twice for tea and snacks on the way. Quite indulgent of us. At one tea spot we hung out with a bunch of young Ladakhis who spoke decent English. They weren’t so different from young adult men anywhere I suppose. They all had cellphones and were taking turns playing American pop music from them. You go to a land that is Buddhist and you expect to see “buddhism” happening, whatever that is, but I don’t really know what it is and I can’t say I saw any buddhism happening at all in my time here in Ladakh. Sure, some of the older people dressed in an interesting traditional manner, and sometimes I saw people turning the prayer wheels, but I’m not sure what else I was expecting. Religion and culture kind of hides underneath a society, and oftentimes what you do see isn’t so different from what you see anywhere else. When we visited the monastery in Alchi, I saw a monk for the first time, and it’s not that I expected him to see my spirit and touch me with his healing powers but he could at least have imparted a warm welcome. Instead he looked at me angrily and asked if we were going to pay the 100 rupee admission or not. Why we put buddhists on a pedestal, I don’t know. Buddhists are just as human as the rest of us and their religion just as full of issues. I believe before China took hold of Tibet the practice of gouging out tongues and eyes and maiming people for petty crimes was quite common and, again, the ideas of karma and reincarnation were used to justify a pretty miserable feudal caste system. Before the British came along to India, burning widows alive on the pyre next to their deceased husbands was also popular. So yeah, I guess Buddhism and Hunduism have some interesting ideas and practices, but I’m not going to buy too much stock into the whole thing. The west certainly over-romanticized it. At the end of the day, I’m still in a place where they burn trash and everyone has a cellphone. It’s basically Paraguay. The way everyone greets me with “Jilay” actually reminds me of the “adios” I would always get and give back in Paraguay. The more you travel, the more you see how similar everything is. Culture doesn’t really thrill the way we want it to, humans tend to be fairly predictable and traditional societies tend to have more in common than not, much like “advanced” societies, it’s all quite the same with little flourishes here and there. But we westerners are so curious about the mysterious East, about the medicine and the religion and the customs and we think maybe there’s something over there, some kind of secret, that could unlock what’s needed in our own lives. The Dutch guy I met in Srinagar said it best: “we want what they have and they want what we have”. I would amend this with “we want what we think they have and they want what they think we have”. But alas, it would appear neither party has what the other party imagines them having. Yes, we are “rich” in the west, but poor in spirit and fulfillment, and our money has led us only further into this poverty. It didn’t bring us the happiness that their phone screens speak to them of. And conversely, though the parts of the old world that are still intact, in most cases uniquely carried on by the older generations, might have some kind of spiritual purity left to it, a lot of it would be quite unsettling to us if we were to really take it all in. It would be like mining for a stray diamond in a pile of shit. Sure they do the cool meditation thing or the yoga thing but also look at how they treat women and look at how sad the dogs are and oh my god the smell and the hygiene standards are nonexistent etc… One of the big advantages of post modernism is that we can look at all of the worlds religions and philosophies as a sort of a la carte menu, just taking the things we find palatable and ignoring the rest eventually reducing those cultures to their most flattering feature. But this old authentic world is rapidly decaying and the youth have phones and internet connections now and they want more than the village and the cows. The cat is out of the bag. While I wonder about how to escape materialism and excess and capitalism here in Asia, hoping there might be some kind of ancient wisdom I can unlock and tap into, everyone here is asking me how much my bike costs and how much money you can make in America and how desperately they want to go to America and how rich Americans are etc… Not that I didn’t expect it, but you know, kind of upsetting regardless. You can travel far and wide, but rest assured America already beat you there, and wormed its way into the culture, and made people want things they never needed. You could go to Sentinel Island I suppose but you will probably be killed on arrival. One of the guys at the tea spot needed help fixing his bike. His chain had broken and he’d put it back on incorrectly. After we fixed it he pedaled alongside us for some time, then all of a sudden his chain got caught and completely twisted the derailleur, completely fucking his bike. We said we were sorry and left him to push his bike back home. We’re in a sort of dingy motel vibe place run by a Marathi, not sure what gave him the mind to come all the way up here to start a business, but we talked him down to 650 rupees for the room and meals so not too bad. My body needs to relax a great deal before the torture I’ll be putting it through tomorrow. We will climb for 30 kilometers to get to the top of Shinkula pass. I won’t be surprised if I end up walking the bike up the steeper part or looking out for a lift from a pick up truck, because I’m in bad shape. On the bright side, haven’t heard a peep out of the old prostate. So it’s just the knees and the saddle sore now, my final bosses, lord do I pray they sort themselves out. I may need to take a fairly long holiday in Manali.