Visas and Cities.

I stared at the polished stale floor, three fuzzy white lights looking back at me. My eyes ached, my hair a greasy tangled mess, as it seemed to always be these days, my feet wiggling impatiently. I could feel my energy draining away. Too much concrete. It always seemed to be this way whenever I left my quite street near the lake to bus into the mangled skyline of the city. I often have heard people from New York, Los Angles, or San Francisco talking about how much they love their city. I never quite understood this. To me the city represents everything I try to forget about humanity, it brings my own hypocrisy to close to the forefront of my vision. Even short trips like these seemed to do lasting damage to my mind, to my happiness.

The minutes passed by, as the cold glass doors to the office opened and closed. I sat in one of the uncomfortable plastic black seats which were placed in a row at one end of the small well light room. A few others sat near me, all of us clutching different papers, all with the same tired look. The "oficina de extranjeros" was never an uplifting place. A small black half crescent desk was positioned a few feet from me, guarding the door to the plethora of offices on the second floor. A young receptionist sat controlling our comings and goings. She would have been pretty, beautiful even, but there was sadness about her that sucked away any hope of glamour from her look. It was as though this place would soon make her just as old and bitter as the others behind the glass door. It had been a half hour already, with a payment of three hundred dollars I would be legal. I would be able to work in Chile. I would for the next year be chained to my job. Paying the Chilean government which sold my rivers to private companies and oppresses the Mapuche was the last thing I wanted to do, but there are some bullets you must take to stay in the places you love.

Finally she called my name, and I headed down the hallway, the first door on the right. It was open as always and I sat down across from another tired looking person. A few papers were printed, my visa was paid, for now, and I left. I walked out, the small waiting room now empty, and headed down the gray stairs to the gray side walk, and noticed the gray sky. I had been here before with the sun, yet it still seemed gray. There was a lifelessness about this place. The people passed by me with the same dull accepting expression. Buses rushed to park next to me, as people scurried off and some scurried on all like frightened rabbits, before the bus would rush away. A few people walked slowly, their fingers locked in the hand of someone I assume they loved. I wondered if they were hoping that love would take them from this place, or maybe they didn't really know any better. Life in the city promises everything that we could ever want. Food, clothes, entertainment, work, but lacks what we need. The important places, mountains, rivers, and open spaces. Cities forget we are animals, and to cage and animal is a dangerous prospect.

I stood on the street corner, a throng of people clustered around me. We all looked up the street in expectation. We were all hoping to escape this place as soon as possible. The first time I ever came to this city I was a scared eighteen year old. I looked over my shoulder constantly, one hand deep in my pocket clutching my money, the other firmly locked on the strap of my back pack. I rushed in and out of the city as though a gang of "city slickers" would appear out of an alleyway and beat me senseless. I found the visa office I had now come to know too well for my liking, by pure accident. I struggled to understand Spanish, that now is feeling more normal than English. I went to the McDonald's I now find disgusting, and ate with a sense home in every fake bite. The bus swung to the side of the street and like rats escaping a flooding basement we clawed our way inside. There were no more seats left so I sat on the floor in the back, my head falling to my knees. Sleep soon found me, and in a couple hours I was back in the fresh air, and sleepy streets I called my home, Pucon.

The restaurant is closed. Quite indie music which I hate to admit I like, plays softly in the echo filled space. Tomorrow I will head to the river. One I know most likely, with people I like. Then I will come back and pace around the restaurant waiting for the few people who come looking for food on this part of town. My night will be filled with dreams that will make me wake in the morning more tired than when I laid down tossing and turning at three in the morning. My drinking is under control for the first time in months, but my mind is now wildly thrashing about.

 No matter how happy I am, it seems there will always be a part of me that knows what I am doing is silly. My life is about as important as the decision of what channel to watch on the television. I believe it is important as I strut around Chile with my kayak in tow, doing what I love. However I know my time on the river no more than my own way of coping with mortality. My time in the city has taught me one thing. Our brains can not comprehend our own in-existence so we fill our lives with various important seeming work  to pass the time between birth and death. For some people their jobs consume their lives and when death comes they barely noticed they were alive. For others it is pure survival and they know that if they don't sell enough fake CD's to passing tourists then they will starve, and death will come sooner then they would like. The rest find some way to justify their own selfish pursuit of happiness and die doing what they "love." In the end we all will die. At best, unless you are twelve or younger, we have forty years left. I once met an Argentinian man while hitchhiking. He told me he that all he has ever tried to do in life was go his entire life without harming anyone negatively. I found this to be a good mentality to take. But why not go one further, and try to affect someone's life positively?
What can you do with your life?

How does this line of thinking help you?

My head was deep in the fog of excess from the night before. My stomach swirled, I had yet to attempt to quiet it with food, worry that the food my not take keeping me from buying an empanada earlier. The suffocating gasket on my used old dry suit not making my hangover any more pleasant. I followed him to the edge of the river. Crystal clear glacial water rushed over sticky volcanic rock, plunging over the horizon line a few meters away. I placed my kayak where he showed me. "You are going to want to catch this eddy, then two good right boof strokes and you will be fine" he said, my brain straining to translate his Chilean Spanish into my native tongue. I nodded, and slid into my small bright yellow banana shaped Fenix kayak. I had seen his line, and the one after his, but to say I was confident would be to lie. In truth I felt nothing. No excitement, no fear, no apprehension, but I knew what I had to do, and would do it. I clipped on my pumpkin colored helmet and tightened the straps. My right hand gripped the paddle, while my left entered the frigid water and began pushing me away from the safety of the shoreline and into the surging current. My boat scrapped free from the rock and I launched into the water. I grasped my paddle tight and took a few strokes, but not enough strokes. I missed the eddy, but hardly noticed. I raced toward the lip, the horizon, the abyss. Sliding to the lip, I reached forward, my paddle gripping the edge. My arms flexed tight, and for a moment I left the water. I fell through the air, staring at my landing, a boiling froth of air and water exploding together in large boils. The boils reach up to catch me in a soft embrace as I took a stroke to gain some momentum. I was at the second drop in an instant and pulled another hard right stroke. I emerged from the boils at the bottom screaming for joy, one eye sneaking a peek at a large cave on the left. The others returned to their boats, and we left the falls behind, to disappear down the river, to for a moment, escape. 

There has been a theme in my life of frustration. The ironic thing about frustration is that once you realize how frustrated you really are, it is pretty damn frustrating. Thankfully a steady diet of kayaking, drinking, working, and doing everything in my power to escape has left me very much free of frustration for the last month. Surround yourself with people you love, give yourself an option to escape and life becomes pretty wonderful. 

"You see the thing about philosophy is that it is just a big circle. You can argue everything back to contradict itself. We as humans are inherently wrong, because all we know is what we perceive, and perception is easily fooled. There is no point, but to say there is no point, is pointless" I said, the southern Californian moonscape flying past the window of my brothers early two thousand's Mazda sedan. My brother was jumped in, "Yeah, but how does thinking like this help you?" He had a point, you have two options in life. One: realize that everything is false, hypocritical, pointless, curl up in a ball and give up, or two: Find a mentality to make the most of life, to live without fear, to live knowing that this is it, accepting that fact, and truly living. 

It is easy to forget with our cars, clothes, and colossal cities, that we are animals. We as a species have evolved past our own good. Instead of look for food, procreating, and taking shits, we destroy what is around us in the name of progress. Progressing toward our own destruction, living in a very false sense of reality. 

The city seemed to be drowning, it seemed to be sinking back into the ocean which it overlooked. Decrepit buildings sat sadly staring out into the vastness of the sea. Trash blew in the strong ocean wind, colliding with overturned ocean freighters, still lying unmoved since the tsunami. Her hand felt warm in the cold sea air. "After the tsunami they built these new buildings, and it really improved the area, don't you think?" she asked. I nodded yes, but continued to stare at the ten other buildings not yet repaired. "When did the tsunami happen? Yesterday?" I asked. She shot me a annoyed look, "Five years ago more or less." Five years and nothing had changed. The sea had tried to remove this eye sore from the earth but had not yet succeeded. It had been not more then a few hours since I came red eyed and yawning from the seven hour bus ride of Pucon to Concepcion, but now I felt the need to leave as soon as possible. I had come to see Fernanda, my girlfriend of the last few months.  However  I was learning that maybe this had not been the best of my ideas. We left the ocean, and sped through more trash covered streets, past smoke stacks poisoning the air with thick black smoke, and hundreds of graffiti covered buildings. Sad looking people roamed the streets, the sky a dreary gray, the sun trying valiantly to break through. The apocalypse had already happened it appeared. As we pulled into a dirt road boarding a row of uniform houses smashed together in one long line, large black barred fences guarding each one, I asked, "Have you lived here your whole life, I mean in the same house and everything?" She slowed the car to a stop in front of one of the houses and pulled the key from the ignition. "Yeah, it would have been hard to move" she said as though there was nothing weird about living in the same house for twenty seven years. A car door, gate, and garage door later we were inside her house. A few hours later we sat down to dinner with her parents, Fernanda whet from the beautiful independent twenty seven year old I had come to love, and reverting back to what I imagine she must of been like as a seventeen year old as soon as her parents opened their mouths. It seemed that in front of them, the hopes and dreams she had shared with me were actually not that important. 

Cultural differences is what she calls it. I say you can only use your culture as an excuse for so long, after a certain point you have to take responsibility. She has told me of what she would like to do with her life, how she would like to change, be free. The chains of comfort however are hard to break. To escape your situation, you must put forth and effort to change. With one life, and maybe seventy years if you don't drink or smoke too much, there is only so much you can do. It is easy to forget that there is and end to this. To life. When we loose sight of our own impending mortality we loose our opportunity to truly use the opportunities we have been given. I choose to live a life where I can wash all my clothes in one load, and know that I have never paid for a single one. I choose to live a life where I wonder if my money will last long enough to buy food next week. I was raised in a middle class family with parents who taught me to do things for myself and because of this I have been given a opportunity to do something great with my life. 

I still have not shaken my love for drinking too much. I still have not yet reached my dream. I still have not come to terms with my own mortality, but these things give me the motivation to live. My faults give me the motivation to change. I am no longer frustrated, instead I have accepted that change takes time, and as long as I am working toward my dream then I am okay. While I still believe that this word is a very fake annoying place to be, this line of thinking does not help me get to where I want to be. I will work, I will enjoy my time, and I will drink, and hopefully I will have enough time to realize my dream.