Couchsurfing, Craigslist & Hitch-hiking/existenial migration

COUCHSURFING The website is a forum where people all over the world (in countries Americans might never imagine have thousands of participants like the Middle East for example) have profiles on which they tell varying things about themselves; most fundamentally what kind of sleeping arrangements they can provide and to whom or how many and these same people do or may use other's profiles to send the message of where they are traveling and what kind of sleeping arrangements they are looking for and with what kind of person. In this way I am able to find at best free accommodations for sleeping and at the very least Strangers who will meet up for coffee or a beer simply to connect with a fellow traveler. For some the thing is just a kind of loose excuse for meeting new people and taking part in an ever shifting community. For now; couch surfing is a likely way to save money and meet new people who know the place you are visiting better than you do. It's also a way a person like myself might use for "karmic" exchange in a sense that people have done me so many good turns that I want to both pay it forward and even consider staying with someone paying it forward in that, if I am the best guest I can be, I contribute to the community and the project (the website and all that has arisen from it in countless people's lives). As something that is in some ways auxiliary but other ways irrelevant, I would like to quote Orwell at length here, for Down and Out in Paris and London captures some of the spirit that spurs people to surf couches and also speaks indirectly to the other themes and concepts that I mean to have, in the end, treated in great detail: "For after all, where is the real need of big hotels and smart restaurants? They are supposed to provide luxury, but in reality they provide only a cheap, shoddy imitation of it. Nearly everyone hates hotels. Some restaurants are better than others, but it is impossible to get as good a meal in a restaurant as one can get, for the same expense, in a private house. No doubt hotels and restaurants must exist, but there is no need that they should enslave hundreds of people. What makes the work in them is not the essentials; it is the shams that are supposed to represent luxury. Smartness, as it is called, means, in effect, merely that the staff work more and the customers pay more; no one benefits except the proprietor, who will presently buy himself a striped villa at Deauville. Essentially, a ‘smart’ hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want…. I am trying to go beyond the immediate economic cause, and to consider what pleasure it can give anyone to think of men swabbing dishes for life… I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think… “The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned you’… Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. Foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest among them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions." --> Jim Gaffigan: (couchsurfing)/hotels/ “you can’t get somebody to take a used mattress but we’ll pay a hundred bucks to sleep on one for a single night” CRAIGSLIST Hitch-Hiking --> Hitch-hiking Note: Where to put this?/to talk about it on it’s own? I would like to briefly talk about my history with it and make light of it in general, touching on a little of the literature and history of hitch-hiking in America/literature. As I state in Hobo reflections, recognizing poverty in the other is significant but not always the signifier for people’s empathy. What about a more general need? Beyond the obvious (he needs a ride) I need to think about this. But the empathy that come from a motherly/fatherly instinct is notable. She picked me up because she has a son and wouldn’t want him to be left stranded. Also, she finds him attractive, or they want company in driving, or he is curious and curiosity is the strong motivating factor for them pulling over. Or they feel obliged in some way; guilty even. These must all be further examined. The hitch-hiker, unlike the rider, wants and needs to be seen in order to obtain what defines them. A hitch-hiker might not want to be seen by everybody but they must be seen by at least one person who is willing to give them a ride if they are to be a hitch-hiker at all. The hubs where people come and go from on the road are also down and out centers of workers. Rideshare and forums. Street credentials. Guatemala When I hitch-hiked there I did so only once. I was conflicted about doing so for obvious reasons. The poverty really. All those drivers going all day carting whole pick-up loads full of people who could scarcely afford it; the drivers themselves making next to nothing at the end of the day with maintenance and gas. I remember my house-mother talking to her daughter and saying what a good day their son and father had. They had made almost 7 dollars that day. It was anthropology that made my choices for me, as it so often does. I figured that as a gringo people could decide well for themselves if they wanted to pick me up knowing I must have come all that way from somewhere and somehow and with every sneaking north thru borders and risking their lives in doing so there is no way I came by such means. I was just outside of a town, I can’t remember where now. I walked along the road so there would be no mistaking that I was headed for a long haul. Across the street from me there was a small parking lot. In it there was a pick-up truck with men-workers obviously, construction maybe. They were looking across at me, pointing from time to time and laughing. One might imagine, still new to Guatemala, I felt a bit awkward. I tried not to resent their jeering but nevertheless I felt a small victory when a semi-truck pulled over within fifteen minutes or less. I climbed aboard. It was an older Guatemalan man with his boy who must have been 10 years old. My Spanish was terrible so our conversation was very limited. At the time I regretted this but it seems of no consequence now. I did something that I feel, almost regrettably, would have been pathetic in the U.S. I offered to share my peanut butter and bread, the only food I had on me. They nodded yes, and I made several sandwiches for each of use. Their gratitude made my heart heavy. I don’t remember much else, it must be in my journals somewhere. We parted with smiles and waves and many thanks for their generosity. I don’t know why they gave a gringo a ride; there must be so many people they see along the way; citizens of their own country who struggle under the same yoke of extreme poverty. I walked across the small winding median where the tiny highway diverged in separate direction. Across the street was a bus station. I boarded a bus and continued on my circuit. Halloween. The first time I hitch-hiked in the U.S. was the second time I ever had. The dorms. Halloween. Drunk as a skunk after midnight. Milwaukee. Stepping out with a rowdy crowd on the edge of the street. How are we going to get back to the dorms Bianca? I wildly throw my thumb up towards an approaching car. He veers and stops beside us. He drives us all the way to the dorms. Why? ++EXISTENTIAL MIGRATION With existential migration we are probing into the least liminal trajectories of travel as traditionally taken to expose a deeper impetus in people as a causation to relocating than necessity. So taking this on one hand, assuming even the most conservative circumstances for a person to move from one country to another, for example, have unspoken psychologies motivating them, we move to the other end of the spectrum where instances perceived as necessity or choice are measured very differently.