I've been away on a trip for work (see previous posting) and have just settled back into the routine at home. Traveling takes a lot out of me although it is fun to sit in a hotel room and have a big screen TV to myself and not have to listen to Futurama or Family Guy episodes all night (fucking Netflix!). Sure the episodes can be funny but I get tired of that crap after awhile. Sometimes I just want to reach into the TV and throttle Peter Griffin (although I do wish I had a friend like Bender I could hang out with).
Despite the much coveted solitude and (sometimes) amazing bathtubs, hotel rooms really aren't my favorite place to be. Invariably, they all end up being the same - despite the price.
The wi-fi is always too slow and unpredictable - even when you're paying $10 per day for the access - and the marble-looking counters in the bathroom are always flecked with specks of stone that if you stare at long enough turn into small dancing elves and gnomes. (Try it) Of course, the same thing happens in the cheesey fake wood panelled elevators, except the imagined figures in the wood grain look a lot like Munch's The Scream.
The carpets smell like steam cleaning detergent, the toilet paper chafes (do they make 0.5 ply?) and the TVs just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger but there's still nothing worth watching on them.
I usually spend half the night wrestling with my Sleep Number bed and, like Goldilocks, trying to distinguish which is the hard pillow, which is the soft pillow and which is the just-right pillow. Invariably, I end up so thirsty and exhausted I stagger down the hall in my PJs to get a Coke from the vending machine that promptly eats my change and delivers nothing. Suddenly that $5 bottle of room temperature water is looking really good.
Out of boredom, I usually end up searching through the room trying to find the Bible that is usually stashed in one of the bedside table drawers. (It's kind of like that game in kindergarten where you have to find where the teacher hid the blue bug statue.) I've always wondered why there are Bibles in hotel rooms. Personally, I don't think the Good Book makes for light bedtime reading. Why not Goodnight Moon or Green Eggs and Ham? I mean - the Bible - REALLY!? Do only heathens or people in need of "saving" stay in hotels? Maybe we're all cheating on our spouses and a glimpse of the Bible will lead us down the right path. Or maybe everyone staying at a hotel is really lonely and unbalanced and finding that Bible (rather than a rope, gun or knife) in that drawer is going to make all the difference.
RIGHT!
I guess what freaks me out most about hotels is the other people staying there. I can hear them all around me. That flush of water in the night, the slamming doors, the blaring of TVs or bursts of laughter or yelling through the walls, the pounding footsteps up above. I wonder why they're there. It can't be for the same reason as me (no one else could be that lame). Are they running away, visiting family, vacationing, enjoying a dirty weekend or weekday?
In the end, I usually fall asleep out of exhaustion around 2 a.m. Inevitably, I wake up in the morning in a fog, not having a fucking clue where I am. The Sleep Number bed has usually deflated in the night, trapping me like some brain addled turtle in the middle of the bed. I manage to swim my way out of the king-sized pit only to be inundated with about 50 different images of my half asleep, scare wig self - because hotel rooms also have WAY TOO MANY mirrors!
I'm glad to be home.
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