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Jolted awake from semi-slumber by the ebbing needle-sharp whine of an orbiting mosquito. Awake long enough to phase in the snickering tones of the canadian girls wittering together fourfold in the bunk below. A poor consumptive wretch from across the room wheezes before an alarm clock rings deep within an absent traveller's bag.
It is 2am and I am due to embark on a 20hour, cross continental flight early tomorrow morning.
- Yes Inn, Causway Bay, Hong Kong.
Clearing grounds for the vacuous, pampered and at times the deranged. Metropolitan backpacker hostels. Asylums of banality catering not perhaps for the kind of nomadic weirdos you may expect. Those weatherworn souls that hunker down alone at the bar with a glint in the eye and a story to tell. This would at least be interesting. Instead, these places seem to cater for an altogether different herd. The backpacker. A generic kind of early twenties borgeoisie jet-set. Witless and annoying, scrawling badly spelled and mindless facebook-meme philosophy on walls, opining amongst other things, the attainment of true 'freedom' through the loss of 'everything'. This, and other cod-ascetic horseshit, mined from social media on their I-pads and kindles while sipping franchised coffee in their sweatshop kaftans and havaianas flipflops.
As with many aspects of popular middle class youth culture, it's not the message that grates. Trite and and cliched it may be but the idea of living with less clutter and focusing more on the things that matter in life is an honorable sentiment. Instead, it's the bare-faced, swaggering hipocrisy that is so irritating. Less, an elephant in the room, more Dumbo, feet up on the coffee table, pissing on the tv and smearing dung over the walls. Dung about 'losing oneself to truly find oneself' or some other piffle.
Pass me the rifle. There's precious minerals to be extracted from them there ipads. And in any case, we all know what airborne parasites large mammals bring.
Some snaps...
In music related matters, keep an eye out for Swedish producer Oliver Nelsen. This remix of Kim Cesarion is audio-crack. WARNING: You may develop a habit.
