If I told you there is no space for dinosaurs in this hotel hall, but for smaller things, you'd believe me. Check-in time abides a strict 1pm but check-out is a free for all, leaving hours jammed and then drained of the same personage perusing infected stucco all weekend long.
Off the freeway, where we're positioned, the ocean screams its bulk formed in waves doing their thing over and over, as if they've been doing it before us, or as if we'd better acknowledge they have. People do this too - through reservations at the better hotels miles down the freeway. Snazzy bell hops & concierge lounges stocked with exorbitant snack options - you think as I do: this breed of hotel shirts the chests of isolation.
If you're dissatisfied we could find other places, vacancy now a click's distance to a people who've been purpled to simplicity because of it. Between firebrats, powder-posts, cuesheets & logfiles this world can be a buggy cluster.
But we stay.
We manage the mess in the hotel hall.
It's okay, it is all of it, always, okay.
Okay is a solution refined to moments you define courage as misspelling your own name on important forms,
or using a date passed years ago.
The storm is made boring
by a meteorologist
who is in all facets
in each capacity
for all measures,
(even those outside his scopes and beacons)
okay.
You are gaining clarity on the formation of goals as a concept though you've yet to set some. So you stay in hotels like this one.
In three out of every four rooms here wives feel waves of indiscernible disgust at the heap of husband beside them. Their belches, flatulence, enormous misfirings, and paunchy complexions; each a page in the evidence ledger of men settled into their lives' recliners comfortably.
Sent to rattle the ice machine A Kid finds lucidity. Because the frozen spheres offer a range neither Fahrenheit nor Kelvin, A Kid's free to posit possibilities about the waves - that
They might be portals to another place.
They might be speaking in eternal aquatic code.
They would be fun to walk on.
On the beach A Kid hands searocks to each beach
goer. They think he's being silly or charming, but really he's showing them the simple volumes they miss in the adult scurry.
There is a Bible (placed by the Gideons) in your room's dresser. I heard the tome creak with a haunted grammar. Something is afoot - the pages are marred and printed with only one verse - Romans chapter 3 verse 19 - over and over it does its thing across the marred and printed pages.
To most patrons this would be fodder for a call to the front desk extension 101,
but not to you.
You're a tolerator.
Tolerator of the looping verse. Tolerator of the dingy stenches, the spotty internet preventing your escape from the horrid basicness of the night's and all other nights' predictability. You the lounging tolerator of the wave that is now coursing its chart to your room, room 202, the one with a view of nothing; the wave that reminds you of the subdued timeframe your life encompasses and that any wasted notion, even one so much as the thought spent to reserve one room at the rate of $108.91 per night is a vast undercutting of your strident spirit's effort to appease the forces that brought it
here.
To this hotel
where complaining of the wave
is pointless as A Kid
thinking it might be fun to walk on top.
The both of you know there's a grand conspirator, one greater than the Lobby Manager, who splits the wave and loops the same verses over marred pages with intention.
But you'll never meet it her or him, it her or him stays hidden, in all the crevices you've not thought to look. In those moments of embarrassment felt 100x more by you than by others, in the span of rooms not reserved, in the ritzy hotels down the freeway, but most of all in the tidal wave in the hotel hall. In each room here a savior and a victim, for each role they play many feelings, and for the many feelings a few forms of
relief & release.
You'll integrate with time.
You'll find a new needle in your boot to be bothered by with time.
With time you'll do so many things.
I held humor in a fragile terrarium
staged before a crowd of zero.
The shattering was made easier to process with the absence of audience. But if they had been there, if you had been there, you might now know me better. You might better understand these strange inner motivations vomited to the outer. Adversaries are mine to uphold, conquer, and gaze back upon as muted titans stripped of agency like chimes in windless climate. I have atrophied before private hurdles. I have gleaned great taste from sensible portions and have exhibited my entrails atop the stealthiest barricades.
If you can make it to the complimentary breakfast you'll note: eternity in a place offering complimentary breakfast is still eternity. By morning the hotel staff will have swept the wave's wreckage to a spot near the span of rooms they stopped booking eons ago.
Yes the Spiral Eyed Doomape will swallow us. He will not even need to chew.
The rocks in the parking lot gray around 6, check out before then or else become witness to the world's most average subtraction of color. Collars line the shirt because they must, wisdom is a trap set to snare the collective us
who grab for it through our various carnivals of behavior.
See, the Spiral Eyed Doomape still comes,
he even waits til you say you're finished,
but still:
try to tell me this isn't important.
Try telling me that after anything.
Tell me while obtaining ecstatic apex with your intertwined lover as together you tempt the angel sphere and tickle heaven's ceiling.
Try to look at me and actually explain in a tongue not foreign from my own while gazing upon a moon slung high among dreamers' cables that each small and timebound moment is not the celebration of a collective
confusion.
My only confession to you is this: I never heard it coming. I never allowed the clock's obnoxious tick to penetrate my more than able hearing, because I always thought it did that for you.
We leave.
We cancel the requested wake up call.
