Paean to a place where nothing quite happened.
I will attempt to draw you into this narrative moment: It’s incredibly warm today, a Kansas warmth, warmth that is almost airless. On the corner across from our building, the hirsute, nonverbal saxaphonist has taken up his usual place; he fills the street with his sort of ambient sacharine interpolations, playing familiar tunes with a dawdling slowness. He plays the Paul Desmond song “Take Five” as if he were slurping in a spaghetti noodle, afraid to get any sauce on his chin.
What am I doing here? I am working. The romanticism of the moment is a comfortable figment; I have sensed, just now, beauty in a most banal instance of existence. This is an history of time’s platitudes. I return to the nook that overlooks the valet, sitting down at the desk and reading. Later, I cross the street to Rudy’s Pizzeria, and they give me a styrofoam cup full of crushed ice. I park the simonized red Lexus SC 430. Nothing is going to happen tonight. I know this.
It occurs to me I am aggrandizing what might be seen as my last few days in the state I grew up in. I already see myself as having left a month from now. I see myself living in Mar Vista.
I attempt to mentally reduce it. This is simply the undercurrent of treacle that flows through my heart. But it is quite comfortable. I am comfortable just now in a way that I haven’t been in more than half a decade. I return to the nook again and begin reading Philip Roth’s Everyman.
There will always be something to be unhappy about. This is a simple truth of being. Tonight I work with Brenda, one of the assistant managers of TEN/Jayhawker, our restaurant/bar; she is typically incompetent, and is thus often seen as my nemesis. This is exemplified tonight by the brief and astoundingly opaque exchanges I have with her.
She manages to offend me over and over without ever knowing it; explaining it to her would be too much like explaining some philosophical notion of a godless universe to a toddler, so I can’t do it; she would never see it coming. (Brenda, to paint her for you in an abbreviated way, is a woman with dyed blonde hair in her late fifties who used to manage a bar called The Jetlag, and who everyone secretly calls “Shakes”; she is ascerbic, feeble-minded, and manages to ingratiate herself to helpless and typically handicapped old men with a shit-eating smile and a maternal way that is almost always obtuse and unwelcomed; she has the wherewithall of a decapitated chicken and belongs in a luxury hotel like a Hot Pocket buffet.) As I am standing at the front desk she approaches with a mindless cockeyed smile and says, “I’m going to miss Brandon.” Where this topic came from, I don’t know. She is remeniscing over Brandon, who will be leaving the hotel at the exact same time as two other employees, one of whom is me. Brandon hates her. She says, “That big nerd! I’ll miss him.” It is perhaps the blackness that becomes my heart around Brenda anymore, but she seriously lacks anything resembling a social consciousness: I am Brandon’s best friend. It’s such a ridiculous statement it startles me. She will miss Brandon? Her stupidity in these situations is at once awkward and insulting and unfixable. I feel for a moment that she has made me the outsider to a friendship that is obvious to all sentient beings. Does she not realize Brandon and I have known each other since having the same advisor base at Jardine Middle School? Does she have not the slightest clue that her approaching me with a maudlin statement like that is much like a clown in full makeup moving next to a widow at a funeral and making a caricatured sad face? Does she commenly suggest fond farewells to people she knows nothing about, and to whom her only caring inquiries about his father’s cancer were sickeningly facile and unwanted? She is just too dumb to understand anything of what I consider to be meaningful, and so there is nothing to be done. As I have said, she is like a child. My anger could only be translated to her in the most literal terms, and as such is completely useless.
Tonight she also responded thusly; I said, I wonder what [guests name] does for a living? She drives a red Lexus that’s incredibly nice, and she has a decal on her back windshield that says she belongs to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. She’s been here almost every night for the past two months and always orders room service. “I don’t know,” Brenda said, her grin a grim prelude to something imbecilic. “Maybe she’s a stewardess.”
People depress me. They see little and think about less. I can hardly but tolerate someone like Brenda, yet when she realizes a month from now that I have also left this damned hotel, she will likely sentimentalize my time here, perhaps simply grouping me in with Cody as a weekend morning worker who was always joking. Perhaps there is a bliss to ignorance, right up until the point when someone murders you.
But I find myself, at least for the moment, more at peace with all this. I’m leaving, and I realize it is not at all an escape from stupidity, but a reframing of it. There are things of much more importance. One should not become addicted to exploring natural hatreds. There are better and more satisfying forms of catharsis available.
Nothing is very new here. I will, in some strange way, still miss it. When I go out again later in the night to retrieve a valeted car, the air is cool and smells like cedar chips. The lights in front of Liberty Hall are on, making a pretty chiaroscuro of the columns that frame the mezzanine. A man walks by me with a German Shephard who kindly touches his nose to my hand. It is nothing. Much more than this awaits me, and I deserve more. Tonight, though, I should tell you, it is not so bad.
What am I doing here? I am working. The romanticism of the moment is a comfortable figment; I have sensed, just now, beauty in a most banal instance of existence. This is an history of time’s platitudes. I return to the nook that overlooks the valet, sitting down at the desk and reading. Later, I cross the street to Rudy’s Pizzeria, and they give me a styrofoam cup full of crushed ice. I park the simonized red Lexus SC 430. Nothing is going to happen tonight. I know this.
It occurs to me I am aggrandizing what might be seen as my last few days in the state I grew up in. I already see myself as having left a month from now. I see myself living in Mar Vista.
I attempt to mentally reduce it. This is simply the undercurrent of treacle that flows through my heart. But it is quite comfortable. I am comfortable just now in a way that I haven’t been in more than half a decade. I return to the nook again and begin reading Philip Roth’s Everyman.
There will always be something to be unhappy about. This is a simple truth of being. Tonight I work with Brenda, one of the assistant managers of TEN/Jayhawker, our restaurant/bar; she is typically incompetent, and is thus often seen as my nemesis. This is exemplified tonight by the brief and astoundingly opaque exchanges I have with her.
She manages to offend me over and over without ever knowing it; explaining it to her would be too much like explaining some philosophical notion of a godless universe to a toddler, so I can’t do it; she would never see it coming. (Brenda, to paint her for you in an abbreviated way, is a woman with dyed blonde hair in her late fifties who used to manage a bar called The Jetlag, and who everyone secretly calls “Shakes”; she is ascerbic, feeble-minded, and manages to ingratiate herself to helpless and typically handicapped old men with a shit-eating smile and a maternal way that is almost always obtuse and unwelcomed; she has the wherewithall of a decapitated chicken and belongs in a luxury hotel like a Hot Pocket buffet.) As I am standing at the front desk she approaches with a mindless cockeyed smile and says, “I’m going to miss Brandon.” Where this topic came from, I don’t know. She is remeniscing over Brandon, who will be leaving the hotel at the exact same time as two other employees, one of whom is me. Brandon hates her. She says, “That big nerd! I’ll miss him.” It is perhaps the blackness that becomes my heart around Brenda anymore, but she seriously lacks anything resembling a social consciousness: I am Brandon’s best friend. It’s such a ridiculous statement it startles me. She will miss Brandon? Her stupidity in these situations is at once awkward and insulting and unfixable. I feel for a moment that she has made me the outsider to a friendship that is obvious to all sentient beings. Does she not realize Brandon and I have known each other since having the same advisor base at Jardine Middle School? Does she have not the slightest clue that her approaching me with a maudlin statement like that is much like a clown in full makeup moving next to a widow at a funeral and making a caricatured sad face? Does she commenly suggest fond farewells to people she knows nothing about, and to whom her only caring inquiries about his father’s cancer were sickeningly facile and unwanted? She is just too dumb to understand anything of what I consider to be meaningful, and so there is nothing to be done. As I have said, she is like a child. My anger could only be translated to her in the most literal terms, and as such is completely useless.
Tonight she also responded thusly; I said, I wonder what [guests name] does for a living? She drives a red Lexus that’s incredibly nice, and she has a decal on her back windshield that says she belongs to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. She’s been here almost every night for the past two months and always orders room service. “I don’t know,” Brenda said, her grin a grim prelude to something imbecilic. “Maybe she’s a stewardess.”
People depress me. They see little and think about less. I can hardly but tolerate someone like Brenda, yet when she realizes a month from now that I have also left this damned hotel, she will likely sentimentalize my time here, perhaps simply grouping me in with Cody as a weekend morning worker who was always joking. Perhaps there is a bliss to ignorance, right up until the point when someone murders you.
But I find myself, at least for the moment, more at peace with all this. I’m leaving, and I realize it is not at all an escape from stupidity, but a reframing of it. There are things of much more importance. One should not become addicted to exploring natural hatreds. There are better and more satisfying forms of catharsis available.
Nothing is very new here. I will, in some strange way, still miss it. When I go out again later in the night to retrieve a valeted car, the air is cool and smells like cedar chips. The lights in front of Liberty Hall are on, making a pretty chiaroscuro of the columns that frame the mezzanine. A man walks by me with a German Shephard who kindly touches his nose to my hand. It is nothing. Much more than this awaits me, and I deserve more. Tonight, though, I should tell you, it is not so bad.