4:45AM Cars whizz past my hotel window. The trucks barrel. I didn’t notice them when I arrived late and settled down for bed at midnight. VROOOOOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM VROOM. I’d like them to stop though they won’t. I’m particular about my hotels in a way that pleases me because these ways are so fully me. I do not stay in boutique hotels in the city. I do not want an experience. I like to stay at the hotels just outside the city limits the hotels with parking lots lined with pick-up trucks and work vans the hotels packed with traveling tradesmen and budget-conscious families. I do not like to stay on the first or second floors. I prefer to walk to my room using the stairs. The stairs always so sterile with the waxy painted rails and cement steps and my feet echo. I like a room with a king bed and a refrigerator and a microwave for my organic burritos that taste like cardboard if you let the directions have their way. If my room joins another room I return to the front desk and request a new room. The thin adjoining doors that can’t separate sound and what else can they not separate? Just a thin door separating me from whoever is in the next room over no no, no thank you. This is a godforsaken city and I won’t have that. And yesterday afternoon I walked the half block from the cocktail bar to 7-Eleven for a coffee and I passed a methhead or whatever they do these days and another one asked me for change as I headed into the store and I told him I didn’t have any which was true but even if it wasn’t he can fuck right off with his choices and he’s the one who ripped my barbed wire fence down in the alleyway that cost me $1800 to put up and another $1800 to put up again and he’s the one who pisses on my pub door the ammonia eats away at the wood and paint and I have to call someone twice a year to sand it down and paint it again so fuck him (but god damnit something comes over me every so often and I fill up a fountain soda of mountain dew—his favorite—and hand it to him with a five-spot cash money when I leave) and into 7-Eleven I step and the kids have gotten out of the high school and they’re all in the store even though the sign on the door says ONLY 2 STUDENTS ALLOWED AT ONE TIME and the employees have barricaded the end of the candy aisle with 5 stacks of full 2 liter plastic soda crates and put cardboard sunglasses display cases on either side and the staff are clearly trying to prevent the candy from being run off with and I go to the refrigerator for my black canned coffee pretending to be normal pretending I’m not looking in the reflection of the glass at everything going on behind me pretending this is all normal the drug addicts and the thieves and I’m in one of the good neighborhoods… and I think it isn’t that god has forsaken this city it’s that we’ve forsaken god. And there is no God there is only the god within ourselves so all that means is we’ve forsaken ourselves. Yes you see when we acknowledge that there is no god and it is only man and what is inside of man then everything becomes more powerful because it means everything is in our hands it means there’s no one to blame. And I’ll leave it at that yes I’ll leave it right there. In this hotel room with the hotel art a photograph of sun dappled water and a painting of sun dappled water and something that may have once been reminiscent of cubism but I’m not complaining because I enjoy them in a kind of perverted way this art has no god in it they are godless paintings and that is why I don’t stay in the boutique hotels I don’t want to experience other people’s god I want to come to this room of nothingness when I’m traveling through I want a vast nothingness and I don’t want to be remembered and I don’t want the place to be memorable I want a bereft room. And I keep it cold yes I turn the thermostat down to 65 and I want it dark the first thing I do is pull down the blinds. And it all may sound stark maybe dark maybe a bit sad but there is a magnificence in nothingness it’s like I’ve made a temporary monastery and I sit in the cold darkness and I think and I think and I think and as the sun rises I make the bad plastic coffee and I shower and I dress and I leave and I never return.
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Perfect! Especially the god part.....stop blaming!