Down and Out in Melbourne

Analects 7.16  

The Master said, “Eating plain food and drinking water, having only your bent arm as a pillow – certainly there is joy to be found in this! Wealth and eminence attained improperly concern me no more than floating clouds.”   

    I awoke on the bathroom floor… again. The nice thing about sleeping on a bathroom floor is that even if it is dirty, one can shower as soon as one awakes. My present bathroom floor, being in a defunct hostel in Melbourne which was housing squatters and crusty backpackers alike, was most certainly dirty. Anyways, I showered and stuffed my sleeping bag in its sack and prepared to leave the hostel. It was five am and all was silent and dark. All was sleeping. I had been following this routine for the past few weeks. Sleep on a park bench until two in the morning. Return to the hostel. Sleep in the bathroom. Wake up. Shower. Jump the train turnstile and head to the city square. Take immense pleasure in a one dollar 7/11 coffee. Catch some of the Australian Open on the big public screen. Read some Mark Twain. Take a nap along the Yarra… yada yada yada. Repeat.   

    Living a life without money was exciting… especially as a suburban white boy who was never truly very destitute. In many ways I learned more during this brief episode of my life than I ever did in a singular upper division humanities course. For example the following. When I first arrived in Melbourne I used to jovially drink cheap bagged wine and socialize with paying travelers at the hostel. In the following days as they learned that I was secretly sleeping on the bathroom floor our relationships soured. Why? I wasn’t any different than the person they thought I was before they realized I was sleeping on bathroom floors. It was almost as if money made the man.  

    Such a lifestyle lent a lot of time for museum exploration. There was a campaign during those summer months for free admissions to all public museums and boy did I take advantage. The Museum of the Animated Image had small rooms with couches where one could stream nearly every Australian work of cinematography known to man. I watched a lot of aboriginal made movies as well as learned a lot about the fight for aboriginal civil rights. I also slept a lot on those couches. Not having a patterned place of sleep is all consuming.  

    Eventually all good things come to an end. One day the negligent managers of the hostel fled with some of the business money and the proper owners came in to settle the place. The new guy in a charge was a large and tall boorish man donning a fedora. He quickly realized what was going on and began questioning all guests about their payments. When my turn came, I had no good response to how long I had been staying there other than I had been paying daily. Luckily later I played the guitar and sang and the boorish fedora’ed man was deeply entranced. As we slept that night, he drunkenly woke everyone up individually in their beds to ask if they had paid for the night. When my turn came around he said, “Hey I like your music” and I got a pass. People respond differently to those who speak to their souls. The next day, counting my blessings, I left.  

Anyways, Confucius is right. Money, especially when ill-gotten, is a poor mark of morality and the learned.