I must step outside for a moment.
There.
I hesitate to begin speaking about this place, because it is not clear whether it exists after it has been described. Actually it isn’t clear it has existed anyway, because it is still an imaginary place, I think.
It’s called The Conceptual Youth Hostel.
This place I mention reluctantly is a zone where experience does not necessarily turn into capital. Perhaps I could call it the domestic space of the foreign; so domestic as to be the region of the singular, unexposed and unopen; but composing and housing an experience of being an alien, being exposed.
That is what is so particular and jarring about a stay at the Conceptual Youth Hostel. It isn’t empty; it stores its occupant’s experiences, and they aren’t carried away with him or her in some sort of backpack bank. Curiously, these experiences also do not remain in the bunk, on a bulletin board or in a free box for the next visitor. And they are never for sale. I don’t know why I am telling you this.
Last night I sat on a stool down in the Hostel bar, where awkward conversations take place, full of silent pauses and shifts back to one’s own propriety or property, back to the golden bubbles in my meaningless mug of beer. And the shiny coins I had left out on the counter as a tip.
I am not sure why, maybe I was drunk, but I felt a feeling growing inside of me, some kind of half-formed idea was forming, and it was that I really wanted to hear about the experiences of the others slouched in the bar; why did you come here, to the Conceptual Youth Hostel? If I were to share my tales, wouldn’t we all get to benefit, or would you take advantage of me?