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By Nines
All right, you cusses, I’m up. This motel has pretentions to hoteltude and always has, but I think the nazis have ruined that for everyone. You are not allowed to smoke in your room. So you go out into the parking lot to light up, and you usually spot a few others looking lost and puffing away when yer about it.
My room has an iron and ironing board, a non-functioning space age halogen desk lamp, a weak little fridge, and an unspeakable nuker upon which I cannot report because short of unplugging it and chucking it out the window I have no use for it. The TV has so many channels it makes my head swim. I fell asleep last night without finding one station worthy of more than thirty seconds of my time — still managed to catch a guy getting sliced in half by a sword, about four case of murdered people arranged artfully at the feet of betrenchcoated sullen people, a few loud arguments, and numerous gunfights. I had to stop on a Steve McQueen car chase to catch my breath.
They should put a scan button on the remote and only make you press when you want to stop it.
Did I mention the hair dryer? The “coffee maker” is ridiculous. I bring my own coffee and I bring my own water and I’m pouring my pure water into these itty reinforced paper cups, running them through it in shifts to pour into my coffee filter and into my coffee jar. So far no major blunders.
But going for a smoke.
I was just out there and I’ve settled for smoking with my butt up against a low cement dividing wall in the middle of things. There was a fellow sitting on the cement staircase near me and another out wandering near the pool. Smokers milling around anywhere that does not count as in the room. I said to the fellow on the stairs near me, “They should make a place for us.”
“Yes.”
I said, “They should call it the VIP table or something like that.”
“Yes they should.”
Just as I said this I saw Jeroen, the organizer, a very nice young man who seems spectacularly Scandinavian to me, and, I’m assuming, his wife descending another cement staircase and making for their car. As they were nearing whatever was taking them to breakfast, up on a balcony above them I saw Henrik Palmgren, who has a Swedish accent even when he’s not saying anything, and his wife, who is one of us Yanks and noticeably blond. None of them seemed to be emerging from their dens for the purpose of smoking, so I headed for the drainage grate to stub out my cigarette and return to mine.
This puts me in full view of a main thoroughfare, where a stunt driver made the most sensational left turn I have ever seen in meatspace, bar none, right in damn front of me. That’s not all. He immediately made another slightly less sensational left into a parking lot across the busy boulevard from where I was standing. The designation for this sector of “civilization” is, truly, “hell”.
You heard it here first.
So I returned to my room filled with contraptions at least as lethal as cigarettes, and I expect actually quite more, to have another chat with my “coffee maker” about the evils of the metropole.
We’re all meeting up later this afternoon about conference logistics, I suppose, but maybe to receive our space alien repellant badges or just to meet to rehearse our conferencely demeanors or to memorize passwords for the purpose of distinguishing good aliens from bad aliens [NSA, CIA, FBI, Space Command, Magick Twelve, Whatnot]. I have to wait till later to find out. I’ll let you know unless I have to sign a secrecy oath, and if I do I will let you know anyway — use my own judgment as to how much will be fiction and how much will be fact.
Be sure to check back for any updates later.
Related Reading:
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part VI: All on Maybe Three Hours’ Sleep
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part V: All on Maybe Three Hours’ Sleep
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part IV: Interlude
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part III: Paint it Black
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part II – Part II – Update
Fear & Loathing in Silicon Valley, Part I: Dear Solarian Hordes
