My name is Chris.
Me llamo Chris.
Je m'appelle Chris.
Меня зовут крис.
انا اسمي كريس
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
- Pablo Neruda
Me. From Minnesota. Now a graduate student in Beirut, Lebanon.
(who lives the most amazing life ever.)
Smoking apple sheesha in dark Cairo cafes with my boys. Dancing Salsa and Tango, although I suck at both. Tearing off skin while freebording with Erik in MN suburbs. Rolling the mean streets of Beirut with my habibi Bahaa and his crew. Guzzling wine at Georgian supras, even if I can't understand toasts that deep. Hitchhiking with Kurds across Turkey. Getting altitude sickness with Jake at 14,000 feet in Colorado. Riding across the Turkmen desert in the bucket of a tractor, fending off cobras and tarantulas. Shaking hands with the tallest man in the world in a dark circus tent. Getting my photo taken with the leader of the Hell's Angels at Sturgis. Staring up at a tapestry of stars from the back of a pickup while hitching Montana sans destination. Feeling a horse gallop across the Kyrgyz countryside with wild dogs at our heels. Sharing vodka with a silver-toothed Azeri while crossing the oil fields of Azerbaijan in a Goldeneye-type Soviet train. Frequenting horse races with the deaf in Tibet. Hitting on old ladies while riding my bike across Iowa. Crossing from Africa to Asia by ferry with Ben to buy bananas. Panhandling with homeless folk, back when my name was "Charm". Midnight picnicing out of Soviet SUVs in Uzbek farms with Chechs. Listening to glorious Spanish poetry being recited by my great aunt Teo. Paragliding with Dani and Erik over Colombian coffee plantations. Emborrachandome off of fermented and carbonated mare's milk in the steppe of Kazakhstan. Scuba diving in Grand Cayman with stingrays and Mr. Dean, my favorite high school teacher. Chowing dog shishkebob with the rice-patty minorities of Yunnan province, China. Surfing Mexico's frigid pacific coast with exiled Israelis right before fleeing for safety back to the American border. Partying with my fellow couchsurfers in Quito, Ecuador. Being detained at the second holiest Islamic site in the world, Jerusalem. Riding moped-powered boxcars down traintracks through the Colombian jungle with Josh and Karen. Bobbing like a buoy in the Dead Sea, Jordan. Watching tall sailships bob around Auckland harbor while pretending to be a retarded Dane, shortly before begging a bus driver to pull over so I could chunder all over the pavement. Driving 15 hours across the Jordanian desert with my ALP2 peeps, only to come upon a tree. Watching raindrops from the window of a broken down bus in province unknown, China, for three days. Dodging Druze hunter bullets with Lana in the Shouf, Lebanon. Being banned from Syria and Iraq.
2009/07/08 01:34 I suppose lying in knee-high weeds during tick season isn’t the smartest of things to do, but there’s been worse. Peaking out from a clearing in the bush, the only thing separating us from our getaway was a dusty dirt service road, one that is frequented by our armed boys in blue. I looked at Andrew, told him that maybe this is sort of a bad idea. Just maybe, I repeated. He agreed. We didn’t move.
To our left was a watch tower and bridge, and parked in front of it was a white Ford pick-up, the vehicle and color of choice of the men whose job it is to stop us from doing what we were having second thoughts about doing. Getting to our getaway vehicle meant crossing in plain view of the tower, a choice that could put a quick end to our weekend. We decide to retreat deeper into the weeds away from view. Standing up, we pace back and forth contemplating our plan of action and whether it is time to abort. Defeat meant returning to our regular program, admitting that we had both been domesticated so far into the system that we could no longer just do the things we wanted to do, regardless if the law says it’s right or wrong. But, jail isn’t where I need to be, I said. I have a career to think about. Andrew replies, jail isn’t where I need to be either. I have medical school to think about. Despite our futures being on the line, we both knew the other one wouldn’t back down. It’s just not in us. So we crawl back into the low weeds. Sometimes it’s better to approach the world with reckless abandon. Live in the present. Pretend you’re dying tomorrow. That sort of thing. I pull a tick off my face, squish his head with my fingernails. Finally, we see the smoke of an approaching getaway vehicle. I tense up, all white-knuckled and shit. Andrew says, let’s take that one. I tell him, hey, we have no idea where it’s going. Why would we get on that one?
But I guess that’s the point.
We jump out of the weeds, backpacks in tow. Running, we cross over the service road and the first set of tracks and a couple piles of wood and head straight for the train, which is picking up speed and charging through the yard. While running, I count the bolts on the wheels. Three. Someone who knew a guy who knew a guy that lost his legs under a box car, he once told me, if you count four lugnuts, it’s going to fast. We scan the train up and down for a rideable car and there it is, a grainer. My hands find the rusty ladder hanging off the side, and I look over the edge of the noisy thing, which is filled to the top with chopped wood. I jump in. Andrew follows closely behind. Being on top of a filled car, in plain sight, we realize how likely it is that we can be seen by one of the towers. It’s still daylight out. The sun smiles at us, I think a bird winks too. I look at Andrew, and I tell him to bail. He peers over the edge, and looks back, shouting, it’s going to fast. Shit.
We lay down flat and motionless, me faceup, Andrew facedown. The wood digs into my back, the dust settles on my lips and makes its way into my lungs. Andrew’s coughing. Nobody on the side of the train can see us, we hope. Then the train starts slowing down. And as it does, all the cars start to smack into one another, one after the other, and you hear the clack come down the line, louder and louder until it hits your car and you jolt to the front of the car from the impact of the brakes. My heart starts racing. I know that if they saw us, they would just stop the train and our little piggy would be waiting right there for us, maybe even with a coffee in one hand, the other on his holster. Fortunately, the train picks up speed again, the cars spread apart again. I can start breathing again. The jolt knocks more dust into my throat. The wood is soaked in oil and some sort of preserving chemical, the rank smell of which is intoxicating but relaxing, maybe something like diesel gas. We start passing under overpasses and realize that we are visible to pretty much anyone driving over the highway at that time. 280, hwy 36, the train rides under all of them, and each time we hold our breath and hope that no silly motorist looks down at the train. One phone call would not only involve the railroad police, but the city police, because in all reality, what good samaritan would know to call the Burlington Northern Santa Fe security office and not just 911? We must have looked like fools glued flat to the top of a train car that’s snaking its way through St. Paul and across to Minneapolis, but the sky, oh, you should have seen how beautiful that sky looked. Sometimes it’s hard to appreciate. When your heart settles down, when the fumes are absorbed into your bloodstream, when the wind blows the dust off your face, when your breathing goes back to normal, you begin to watch the clouds just like you are supposed to, you attempt to make sense of their shapes, remembering how when you were little you were supposed to find objects and things in the shapes of the clouds like the kids did in cartoons and movies and books but to you, they all just looked like clouds being bent and blown in different directions. Forced creativity, you thought. This one is a car, this one is a train, this one is a corner cubicle with a broken office worker popping his Lithium and wishing he had just ridden boxcars with wanton abandon before the mortgage and the shit-wife and the little kid with a D on his report card cloud. The sound of the wheels rolling over the track provide the background music, hell it’s almost rhythmic, it’s almost meditative, it’s almost medicative. I count out loud, count the seconds in between pumps, count and watch the sky, maybe counting backwards, maybe counting forwards, it’s all the same.
Time passes, clouds pass, I lift my head and look ahead and there’s a police officer sitting at an intersection. The train slows down. We’re done for, I think again. It’s all over. We speed back up. I push my stomach back into my abdomen and we pass the cop by. The anxiety that fills my body up to my fingertips every time we slow down, it’s overwhelming. It’s like a rollercoaster that goes on and on, a meditative roller coaster with pulsating elevator music and a big blue sky and tree bark and bird feathers falling onto our faces. We push on and on, and we slow down again, and this time, I see it. More police, more warehouses, a humongous trainyard that goes as far as I can see, definitely the biggest one I’ve ever seen, surrounded by fences and warehouses labeled with curious three-letter acronyms. We pull through most of it, and then there are birds-eye cameras hanging from the overpass 10 feet from my face, looking right at us. Andrew gives it the thumbs up. I welcome my new friend to the car who I call anxiety attack, I’m planning my escape route to the bluff that’s 100 feet away, I’m wondering if they’re licensed to shoot at trespassers, picturing myself sprawled facedown on the tracks tasting the cold iron ties as a bullet burns in the small of my back and blood pools on the ground around me, my glassy eyes growing emptier and emptier. We’re so screwed I tell him.
The train stops.
We wait silently.
Nothing happens.
We bolt. We run as fast as we can, by this time it’s dark, and I can see them searching the cars with flashlights. We run through a field, run to the highway, run and run and run. More police to our left, so we run to the left. More police to the right, so we run back towards the yard. Why so many police, I wonder? We’re both sweating, panting, my side aches. We stop, catch our breath. Then I see it, there, on a white sign off to the side of the trainyard. “Property of U.S. Navy. No Trespassing.” Aw dang.
2009/06/26 16:36 I'm back in Minnesota!
Three months in Beirut.
2008/12/09 23:30 So it's almost been three months. It seems like longer. Somehow I thought I'd been here four months, until I actually checked the calendar. Wow. I have a long time to go. Life here is difficult. When I came, lots of people seemed dumbfounded why I would actually CHOOSE to be here and not just stay in America or go to Europe. It didn't make sense to them. I thought I knew a secret about Lebanon that they didn't, something that maybe they had slept through without realizing it. I thought I had an insight into this country or society that was unique, but the longer I've been here, the more I understand why people were saying that. Everyone is dying on the inside. My baker broke down crying to me, telling me she hates life. When I asked my doorman one day how he was, he started crying and saying "really bad," then wiped away his tears quickly and refused to explain, telling me, "no, I'm okay, everything's okay." Bahaa admitted to me he was depressed. Lana tells me she's lost. Her mom is screaming at her that she has no reason to be alive anymore. My landlord is afraid to leave our neighborhood. She's left Beirut probably less than 10 times in her entire life. A soldier I met told me he's going to pay to be smuggled into America.
Inside the dense concrete mass that is Hamra, my neighborhood, it's almost impossible to see the ocean. I actually only see it maybe once a week and usually at night when it's pitch black anyway. It's inaccessible, there are no views from the buildings, from the jungle of wires and everything else. We have no sidewalks either because of misguided building planning. Everyone has to walk in the streets. The traffic is terrible. There are no laws. Did I mention that? There is no law. My favorite question to ask people is what would happen if they killed somebody in the street. The answer is always nothing. Who would do anything? What could they do? How could they stop you? It's amazing the things we take for granted.
Classes are okay. I've finally found precisely the things I'm interested in, and that has made me feel more guided in my studies. There are three things that I love to learn about - 1) sociolinguistics, or in other words, how language affects how people construct their societies. For example, the history of Turkish. 2) cities, the history of cities, how cities are planned, things like that, how and why they form in the places they do. How those formations affect society. For example, the planning of Beirut was overseen by French policy analysts who suggested that the national university be divided into small campuses spread around the city so that students couldn't mobilize. The french were always worried about students. And when the city got so dense that students couldn't go from campus to campus, the quality of the university fell, and the universities that had unified, such as mine, became the best ones. 3) Gender stuff. The reasons why men act like men, the reasons why women act like women. That's interesting to me. Machismo, feminismo, the works.
I think if I just keep focusing on these three things, I'll stay sane. The depression around me won't get to me. I'll be able to find the positive side of life here. Sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy up on the 7th floor of that ugly building, alone in a room, no company. I want so badly to have human company but i can't bear to let myself out. Almost a month since I've seen Bahaa. I just got a TV finally. That helps. I keep reading, keep writing, writing lots of poetry. Reading novels, language books, planning tramps around the world. On the weekends I do my trips outside of the city and it feels so nice to leave, to smell the fresh air, to get away from the raw butcher shops and clothing stores and broken concrete and expensive prices and all that. This place is anarchy. It is pure anarchy in every sense of the world, how humans would organize themselves if there were no government, no law, no nothing. You can do anything, be anyone, buy anything. Bahaa's dad has ivory statues and alligator skin korans. You would never imagine an Armani shop in a country where the average person brings in $6,000 a year.
So I guess the world keeps spinning, the unseeable waves keep breaking against the coast and life in Beirut still coasts along, creeking and cracking, its edges frayed. Here's a broken society. Here's a broken country. It's nothing I've ever experienced, pure social dismay. Constant bullet holes are a reminder of that. One of the smallest countries in the world, and suddenly I find myself locked in now that I'm not allowed into Syria. Stuck on an island and the tide is coming in. In it's brokenness you find hope, you find love and beauty and these little things you would never notice in another city. Suddenly, when you see a plant or a flower you realize you haven't seen one in weeks, and it means so much. A lizard, a dog, a cat. You notice everything that isn't gray or honking. An old woman, her face wrinkled, an old man with a cane and a suit. The rain sounds so beautiful when it covers the sounds of the city. The crying mosque, the ringing churches, the airplanes overhead. The city becomes a city, it's larger than life, it grows in and out of us and becomes us. There's no escaping it. There are no suburbs. There are no yards and gardens and getaways and driveways. Everyone is in it.
I miss home, I miss having a normal life or at least a comfortable life. I miss being able to see fields and fields of crops, I miss hitchhiking across states in the backs of trucks and watching the stars streak by. I miss camping on beaches and feeling dirty and just not caring. I miss not knowing where I was going, sometimes not caring. I miss bars and Perkins, I miss our dogs and my fish and our house. I miss Christmas and snow, everything, everything. Sometimes I think the biggest pain I have is feeling displaced, out here punishing myself when I had everything so simple, when life was, and is, so easy back home. Feeling so displaced about who I am and who I'm to become, where I'm to go with all this. A career? Are you kidding me? I haven't even hitchhiked to Alaska yet! I haven't even crossed South America, I haven't even paddled down the Amazon. I haven't learned Russian yet, I haven't studied Buddhism in a monastery in India yet, I haven't learned how to plant rice in Burma, I haven't fallen in love in Paris, I haven't become a racecar driver or an astronaut, I haven't rafted down the Colorado river or become a surfer or professional hanglider or a miner or a fisherman or any of my other dreams. A career sounds like suicide to me, a suicide I'm postponing. Why the hell would I ever do that? Every job I can think of makes me want to throw up, throw up everything I've ever taught myself about life and about finding my own happiness.
2008/12/09 14:14 So i tried going to syria yesterday. but it sucked. By 8 am I was already out the door on the way to the bus station, and it took about 25 minutes of fighting with different cab, minibus, and bus drivers before I finally settled on taking the bus for 12 dollars. I went and sat down, and it was only about an hour and a half before we actually took off, including the half hour of fighting between the bus driver and a group of british tourists who tried getting on at the last minute and then were pissed off about not having seats. Well, there's no other bus. You can either stand or stay in Beirut. They decided to stay. So we took off, and a few people on the Syrian-filled bus cursed foreigners in general, and a Lebanese guy tried to defend them (they're no different than us!) but it was enough to make me feel relatively unwelcome. We stopped for lunch about 3 minutes from the border which took another half hour, and after getting stamped out of the Lebanese side of the border, I realized the bus had left me. So I hung around and stopped a minibus of Syrian migrant workers (all these workers are in construction in Lebanon - they're the equivalent of Mexicans) and they smelled terribly but I waited for another hour or so for them to get their asses all in the minivan and finally they took me the 7 km to the Syrian customs. I arrived there at 2 pm, put in my application for the visa, and waited 6 whole hours. It got dark by 5, and it was sooo cold. There was no heat in the building. I played video games at the duty-free shop and ate at a cafe, but it was a long long six hours, and i spent most of it in a plastic chair across from the soldier. Every half-hour I got his attention and asked him if they had accepted my application, and he just raised his eyebrows, which in syrian means 'no.' When I arrived there was an American girl who had been waiting 5 hours, and she was accepted, so I was hopeful. After the 6 hours, I checked back again, and he finally said, "they didn't respond to the request. You can't get the visa." I was so angry. I went and talked to his commanding officer, and he said he was sorry and that it wasn't their fault, it was the fault of the ministry in damascus who gives permission. They said i had to return to beirut. There were some american friends at the border waiting for their visas, and they got them within two hours, and together we drank a bottle of wine while i bitched about the syrians and how i spent my whole day there on the border. Then I stopped a taxi with a really mean and vulgar driver, and got him to take me back to beirut for 10 dollars. Next to him was a really sweet older shiite woman, and i think she liked me because of the way she looked at me when she got out of the car and said bye and touched my hand and not knowing what else to say, she said 'merci!' Merci for what? I don't know. But it was sweet. The taxi driver spent the whole two hours back bitching about how i was ripping him off and then bitching about americans and everything else, but when the lady got out she looked at him and got so serious and said 'keep an eye on him.' He got really nice after that. I arrived back home at midnight and fell asleep right away. One day ruined.
