lobotomized. I don’t think they actually have been lobotomized but there’s just something odd about seeing people walk around grinning like idiots. I made sure not to talk to any of them. Mormons have a reputation as being a bit more out there in terms of what they believed, but really if you look at any religion objectively you’d think the same thing. If I hadn’t grown up learning that God made people out of clay and told a guy to build a boat that could hold two of every animal in the world I’d think all of that sounded pretty crazy too. Of course, if logic was your biggest concern it seemed like you’d be better off giving praise to Zeus. Objectively speaking it’s all pretty out there but Mormons rigorous recruiting and alleged refusal to let their members go put them further out there than most. Naturally, such reasoning didn’t stop people from believing and funding their big impressive churches but hey, for all we know God is a flying spaghetti monster so really there’s no such thing as too far out there. Regardless, after wandering around a bit I was able to find the hostel. It didn’t look like much but actually wasn’t too bad inside and I was relived to see that they seemed to focus on making it more about being clean than homey. Too often these kinds of places tried to be homey instead of being clean which in turn means they pull off neither and you had to wonder what you were doing in a place that felt like a hobo’s garage. What was different was that pretty much everyone here was permanently living out of this place which made it just one step above a homeless shelter. When I talked to some of these people I got the sense that living here just sort of happened to them. They certainly didn’t mean or plan for this to happen. But things happened the way they did and because they didn’t really have anything else going on they ended up here. I suppose it’s not that much of a surprise. As I had found out, the road to nowhere leads you exactly where you expect it to. Is this what I was in store for? Much like these people, I hadn’t intended on being at this hostel but here I was. I was also just sort of out there, drifting along, with no plan and no purpose. I had nothing going on and no plans of getting anything going. Evidently I was on my way to living at a hostel just hoping that the grocery store in walking distance had my favorite canned soup on sale that week. Maybe this is all that I was ever going to accomplish with myself. I had dropped out of college and given up on living in Chicago and quit my perfectly acceptable job in LA so maybe this is all there was for me. Maybe leading a life that had no purpose or direction was all I could do. Maybe living in a place where people were stabbing each other because one guy thought another guy stole his towel was the only sort of place that I could be. I didn’t think I could get any lower. And I didn’t want to give myself the opportunity to do so.