I like to think that everyone who stays in a hostel long
term has some sort of problem. Like a personal issue that makes them unfit for
“normal” society. We’re all little self-selected mental patients in a
come-as-you-please BYOB asylum.
Donna has a fear of furniture, of owning things really.
Which is an interesting way to live. She hates the thought of having an end
table. She keeps most of her things on the floor. Which bothers Helen, who
inhabits the bunk above her. Helen prefers to keep everything in bags, hanging
off the bunk.
Donna thinks owning an end table is horrendous. She finds it
wasteful. All the effort and materials put in something you don’t need. You can
just as easily set everything on the floor. Same goes for sitting, “you don’t
need chairs either, we’re perfectly comfortable chatting here on the floor”. We
were having this convo Indian-style.
Helen chirps “Yeah, but of you set on the floor like this ya
mite git piles”! Helen speaks and texts like this. “Pals?” I ask. “No, Piles.”
“Pows??” “No P-eye-els.” Through the language barrier I learn that piles are
inflamed hemorrhoids. I’ll spare the details, but Helen is veterinary nurse
from England, and her poetic description of anal contusions brings a
Dickinson-ish light to proctology.
Donna and I don’t believe in getting piles from sitting on a
floor.
“People feel like
they need all this stuff and they don’t. It’s just all crap”. She thinks that
having furniture is a commitment. “You’re tied down by all the things you buy
and you don’t need them”. It almost makes sense. I ask for items that might be
approved. Clothing? Guitar? Food? All approved, clothing is a necessity, a
guitar gives you pleasure and all consumables are A – OK. But something like an
end table doesn’t pass because it “doesn’t serve a function”. “Then you’re
committed to a table, that you really don’t need”.
“When you’re done with the end table you can just smash it
and leave!” I half-joke, explaining how short term a relationship with an end
table can be. “NOOOOOooooor!” (She’s aussie, they end os with rs) “That’s worse
because you’re wasting even more”.
Donna was in Southeast Asia last year and in Cambodia she
got Dengue. She laid in a cabin alone for three days. It’s very likely she
could’ve died there. She was traveling light but had one thing that reminded
her of home, a bag of muesli. She could come home from partying late at night
and when everything was closed she would have some munchies that reminded her
of Oz.
She was lying on a mattress on the floor, sweating out the
fever, when she got some visitors. A family of rats dashed in and chewed
through her only possession. Through fluttering eyelids she witnessed the rats
feasting on her precious muesli.
At this point I pointed out that a useful item that could’ve
prevented the rats from getting to her muesli would’ve been an end table.
Miguel is the only other guy in the dorm. He’s an older
Cuban, who we think has a speech impediment. A real one, not like Helen’s. He talks through his chin. And we don’t know
what he does or where he goes. We ask,
he often says he’s with women. He doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he “loves
women”. He had a cigar yesterday “Ah reaaly nice one, mmmm, I like Monte Cristo
y the Lanceros from Cohiba, mwahhhh”. Everything is oddly sexually described.
