just words

I am typing this from a desk in a 7th-floor room of a Hilton hotel in Cleveland, Ohio. If I look up, I can see myself typing on the massive mirror on the wall that the desk is pushed up against, a common hotel-room trope which I don’t quite understand. I am trying to imagine the use case for a mirror in this spot, but all I can think of is some incredibly vain middle-aged dude typing up a very serious work email while furrowing his brow and sucking in his cheeks and occasionally glancing into the mirror imagining himself the star of some experimental avant-garde film in which people send each other lots of emails and the central themes of the movie are something something modern loneliness and technological isolation, and I don’t like it. Family Guy is playing on mute on the television in front of the bed. The desk is littered with random stuff, including two room keycards, a black wallet with the little red-cross emblem on it, an empty coffee thermos, a half-empty bottle of $7 Smartwater, one word, a pack of Lucky Strikes with two cigarettes inside, an empty bottle of Mountain Dew, which is my weakness as of late, and my dark canvas messenger bag, the contents of which have spilled out on the desk, including my little bottle of Famotidine Acid Reducer, because my heartburn is out of control, a small blue notebook I use to take meeting notes in, various pens, a small Ziploc pill baggie inside which are vitamins including fish oil, which I don’t think actually does anything, Extra Strength C, B12, and some other one I forgot the name of, all of which I take daily for some reason, even though, again, I don’t know if they actually do anything and am inclined to believe the whole vitamin-supplement thing is a huge scam, also, on the desk, there is a green lighter emblazoned with the image of a sheep with very big bloodshot eyes whose wool is actually not wool at all but lots of little marijuana nugs.

 

There is something ghostly about hotel rooms. I’m not sure if it’s all the tan walls and the white popcorn ceiling combined with the off-white drapes that sway eerily due to the below-window AC units that are always there, or the fact you know that several people have been here before you doing who-knows-what, little traces of their presence all over the place, like little dents in the walls and cuts in the tacky nylon carpet and sometimes their lost belongings like in the bedside-table drawer near the Gideon’s Bible that looks like it has never been touched by living hands, or perhaps it’s all the weird subtle noises, the little mechanical clicks and eerie creaks and low-freq buzzes and distant children laughing and faint shouting from down the hall and bumps in the night that you really hope are just people fumbling around in a nearby room and of course the footsteps from the floor above, which can sound quite creepy indeed, like someone has somehow managed to unlock the many locks you very deliberately locked and is now in your room just creeping around in the little vestibule hallway area between the door and the main room which you can’t actually see into due to the angle of the hotel bed which is always too fluffy and the pillows just don’t work for your head no matter how you position or stack them, so you’re constantly kinda low-key worried if someone is in the room with you even though you keep telling yourself that that is ridiculous but you check a few times anyway, and of course all the other voices you hear just right outside your door when people are talking and walking through the halls at three in the morning like what the hell are you doing just go to fucking bed already, damn. And it doesn’t matter the location or the star-level or how lavish the furniture is, hotel rooms are always haunted. Hotels are like room graveyards or something, where the spirits of rooms once called home go when they die, when they’re abandoned by their families, or something, they are uncanny representations of what I would call “real” rooms, which are rooms that are inviting and feel like home. And it may be obvious to say but hotels do not feel like home, and their stairwells and long hallways are liminal as hell, especially at night. That is all I have to say about hotels.

 

Naturally, considering all this, I try my best not to spend too much time in hotel rooms, so when I’m on business trips, like now, I pretty much find any excuse I can to get the hell out of those rooms, which is exactly what I did today when a co-worker of mine invited me to a baseball game, and although I’m not a big sports fan, I of course took him up on the offer almost immediately and off I walked to the Progressive Field baseball stadium to meet this coworker, happy to put the ghosts of dead rooms behind me.

 

And, to my surprise, the experience was not entirely terrible, the baseball thing, that is.

 

It's hard not to get swept up in the energy of a packed baseball stadium, what with all the screaming and clapping, and the three seconds of Blitzkrieg Bop playing seemingly at random sometimes, and all the people diving into each other to catch foul balls like they’re little shooting stars or something, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar licks blasting seemingly at random too, and the announcer guy shouting play details and player names and promo offers in that epic announcer voice that somehow sounds the same as every other announcer voice somehow, and the little samples of Disturbed’s oh-ah-ah-ah-ah and Blur’s woo-hoo blasting seemingly at random sometimes as well, and the rows and rows of massive LEDs flashing text during home runs and double plays and triple plays or just whenever a player does anything at all, and of course those brave souls in the giant hotdog costumes doing the floss atop the dugout between innings. The whole thing swept me up, it really did.

 

It was three-zero Cleveland, by the end of it all. And on my way out, I bought a gift for my son back home, a TeenyMates Superstar Collector Set which includes 13 cheap little plastic baseball guys, a small puzzle, and a bonus exclusive MLB PURPLE LAVA umpire, that I think my son will just love, then I gave a homeless dude a cigarette and walked back to the graveyard where dead rooms go to rest, which is right by an actual graveyard, and I thought, as I passed the actual graveyard, I thought to myself very clearly, like, "I don't want to die," and then I thought, very clearly, "I am grateful to be alive," which is something I don’t often think about, at least not so overt, and it’s not like I’m depressed all the time or anything, although a lot of my writing may make you think otherwise, but I’m really not, I just hardly ever say or think stuff like, “wow, I am actually grateful to be alive right now, in this crazy world with all these big buildings and all these baseball people walking around just having the time of their lives and I feel like I am actually part of something here like there is some greater sense of community just washing over me all because of this here baseball game with the dancing hotdogs and announcer guy that sounds like every other announcer guy and seriously life is just so fucking beautiful and crazy sometimes when you stop to think about it for a second."

 

So yeah, maybe I like going to baseball games now, I don’t know.