Haunted by hospitality

Studio apartments are jail cells where you’re the inmate and the guard at the same time. I had to let myself out for the night. I’m getting no sleep. My cats sleep 20 hours a day except for the early morning stretch between 12 and 4 when they train for an MMA tournament and the Kentucky Derby.  

I booked a room at a Comfort Inn. Such places still exist. Hotels have drawn back behind the curtain; you don’t see or hear much about them anymore. A whole sector of the economy sprawls beneath the average view. Especially the middling and lower end of hospitality, formerly respectable middle- and working-class accommodations. Chain hotels that cropped up in the early 20^th century to meet the travel needs of family vacationers and businesses. With standardized amenities and aesthetics that now emanate rootlessness and abandonment.  

The hospitality industry also supplies jobs. Plenty of people work in hotels, motels, at tourist attractions. A marginal class with nothing to do but serve us when we want to move outside our normal circuits, feel like a different person, feel like no one.  

All the labor and infrastructure we assume will be there for us any time we want a diversion. If not for the winding highways and buildings outfitted with plumbing and electrical systems, if not for the cleaners and front desk attendants working through all shifts, I wouldn’t have been able to leave my apartment and spend the night in perfect isolation and anonymity.  

When you stay in a hotel, you transform into an abstract version of yourself. A unit within a unit within units. Your features dissolve in the expertly designed blandness. What’s left of your history unravels.  

I’ve already forgotten what the sky was like when I drove to the Comfort inn. But I can recall the man at the front desk; round with a red face and long white hair in a ponytail. The kind of guy who looks exactly like what he does, another example of the mysterious accord between organism and occupation in a world supposedly governed by chance. 

Comfort Inns offer king-sized beds with oddly small pillows, a desk, two chairs. A bathroom with towels and a shower. A television in the center. The lighting was better than I expected. A little dialing and I had the room glowing with a hint of honey.  

Cable television has also receded from view and given ground to streaming entertainment and digital communication platforms. Channel surfing has been replaced by scrolling. 

With cable, you can move laterally across channels, but you can’t move vertically in time. You must watch the show when it runs, and if you want to record and replay it, you use a vcr, another archaic piece of equipment. The time slot of a show used to matter. Now, the release of a show or movie comes closest to synchronizing an audience, but immediately after, the program is available for individualized consumption. 

MTV still plays, along with other antiques of an outdated media complex. The music video represents a moment in the growing capture of artforms by the visual medium. A moment that has left us. It was said at the time that video killed the radio star; today streaming content has killed the video channel. You can still see these ghostly channels flickering in the hollows of commercial networks that have been outstripped by more advanced travel technology.  

As everyone with a smartphone now stars in their own reality show and watches everyone else’s, cable television’s steady expansion of programs based on apparently real people prefigured the total inclusion of raw lives into the spectacle. Now the watcher of cable reality shows dates and derealizes himself, stepping back to a time of less comprehensive programming and surveillance.  

Cooking shows and contests feature regular people pitted against each other for short-term glory and gain. Now the gameshow is digital technology and everyone is a contestant, with every statement and act competing for attention and money.  

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I lay on the roomy bed and let the idiocy of the television soothe me. I imagined giving up and watching my way to the end. Television puts me into the atmosphere of a rest home; when it plays, it’s as if I no longer need to work, or even think. Everything has been done by someone else, and I’m only here to be amused, to forget ever having existed.  

(The underappreciated ambiguity of the television concerning its role in cushioning the lives of those who’ve aged out of active participation in society. The frail and sequestered elderly have little else but television for steadying and anesthetizing themselves. Entertainment not only fills in the free time of workers, it blunts the demoralization of those who no longer work at all.) 

The night passed, I slept through it. I woke to a sunrise of faint purple coloring the sky just above a horizon of beige buildings and grey trees. A parking lot quiet except for the morning rush of trucks on the highway. I could’ve had breakfast at the Inn. The eggs and sausage looked like chew toys so I got a coffee and checked out.  

Back to the apartment. The hell of not sleeping. I have a bottle of Zzzquil that says it’s non-habit forming. Good to know. If I drank a bottle of Zzzquil every night for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t mean I was addicted. I’ll give it to my cats.