And Another Thing
Why can’t I write less than 500 words an entry? No wonder I never update anymore. Has anyone seen the gentleman on St. Catherine who dresses like Spider-Man and dances to a hip-hop beat? What a guy. How about the local sports team? Boy that coach and/or player sure messed up. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, if any of you solve Hapland 3 before I do, we’re not friends anymore. Good night.
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Man Diego
Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been travelling. Okay, not really, but business travel is kind of like real travel, except for the strict scheduling and the limited opportunity for fun, and then again, the expense accounts. California was the destination, specifically the two Sans: Diego and Francisco. I’ve spent plenty of time in SF, so the San Diego part of the trip carried a little more intrigue. I hadn’t been since I was young, and my only memories are of snake room at the Zoo and the row of red Ferarris we found parked on a hill near the Old Town.
The San Diego suburb of La Jolla is your typical office industrial park area, appearing perfectly groomed from any angle of observation. The meticulous grooming serves to obscure that nothing much happens there but the passage of cars. Even still, I found a particular sort of organic Californianess to the whole place. Half the streets have “La Jolla” in the name, so instead of taking the “La Jolla Village Drive” exit from the highway, I took the “La Jolla Colony” exit, and ended up driving up and down the hills of a rich SoCal suburb. Normally I would turn around and get back on highway but I kept driving. The sight of the houses on the steep hills, held there as if by supernatural forces, appealed to me in the way any mountain does. You just want to look even if you’ve seen it before. This suburb was so different from the usual. So pretty, the design so authentic and earnest in what I’m sure is considered a flatly ridiculous postmodern Meso-American style. But it drew me in, and around and around and around I drove, until I’d seen every side street at least three times and decided it was getting dark, and then fought my way back through the maze of La Jolla-named streets.
Without exception, I pronounced La Jolla wrong when reading it (“La Joe-la” instead of the correct “La Hoya”).
After grabbing a snack at a Carl’s Jr (an experience in American fast food I won’t repeat) I found the hotel and checked in. The receptionist in the enormous lobby was a tall, smiling blonde of stunning stature. As she asked me questions, I became unnerved by her perfectly scripted manner. She didn’t even seem human, instead resembling one of those mechanical European robo-blondes from Bond movies. I suspected a speech module instead of a larynx. It’s possible she was plugged in to a wall socket, somehow.
She kept calling me “Mr. Taylor”. Our conversation lasted no longer than two minutes, and when I came back hours later she still remembered that I was “Mr. Taylor”.
The La Jolla Hyatt hotel crawls with businessmen in pressed suits. There is a mood of deal-making in the air. Breakfast conversations are about work and business and the matters of the day, sometimes with people taking their morning eggs with their day planners clutched in the other hand. The restaurant at breakfast is livelier than the hotel bar, even. I sit and eat my waffles, trying to place each overheard American accent to its corresponding region. I’ve got the California regional dialects down pat. New York is easy, as is New England and the Midwest. The South still throws me off—was that Texas or not?
The weather in San Diego in March could be considered equal to a late afternoon in August anywhere else. It’s alternately sunny, windy, cool, and rainy, sometimes on the same day. No matter the weather, it is pleasant. The town can’t be called “lively” but the mood is always up, and the streets teem with possibility. The weather provides an odd contrast to the sensory buffet that is the American business travel experience. The aura of this postmodern colony of simulated hospitality pervades, of each weary traveller laying his head in one of a thousand tiny palaces carved out of a giant piece of stone, each the exact same. But it’s sunny. In that sense, it felt like a permanent Friday. In this picture it is not sunny:
In the absence of the patience to weave this into some kind of narrative, some snapshots from my time in California, two weeks worth:
- It’s been so long since I’ve heard someone say “We would like to take this opportunity…” Going to America always delivers. Fits like a glove.
- Lying on the bed with my eyes closed and thinking about visiting Tijuana. Tourist trap, yes. But Mexico! I’ve never been. Don’t I want to do new things? I’m overcome with fear about poor Mexican orphans with beady eyes, shaking jars containing their own teeth and holding out dirty hands. What’s wrong with beggars and corrupt police? But also: it’s a tourist trap! Nothing but souvenir shops and Tijuana-branded apparel, and who needs that? I deliberated over this for a few days, and my decision against Tijuana came when my instructor (I was there on training), a young Latina, shook her head sternly and said: “Don’t go. Don’t go.”
- For such a hot, peaceful, fun city, with paradisial climate and beaches forever, San Diego is suprisingly asexual. What I mean to say is that it’s not sleazy, like Montreal. It’s happier. Vice feels like virtue in San Diego, whereas here it feels like vice. Everyone radiates the sort of peaceful inner life, that Californian spirit that comes with having never endured the isolation of snow, rain, or economic hardship. You would think in such a place people would be fulfilling their base desires in the streets, but no! It’s quite tame. The bartender at the hotel bar tells me they call it “Man Diego” because of the gender ratios, and that it is not so much of a destination as far as metropolitan entertainments go (the big act in town that week was Dream Theater, I think) but more of a place where gaggles of attractive muppets congregate to have hug parties atop surfboards, bikes, and weird rollerskates that go sideways. (Halcyon is my picture of the Archetypal San Diegan. Except he’s a porn star now, so, I dunno. He must be operating out of LA these days.)
- I have yet to visit a hotel in this world that doesn’t have a Gideons-proffered Bible in the drawer, which is kind of amazing.
- The co-branded bathroom items in my hotel room. My, what names they are given. Some examples: “Renewing Body Lotion”, “Protective Shower Cap”, “Shoe Shine” (n., to describe a microfiber cloth), “Clarifying Shampoo”, “Massage Bar” (soap). The function of the item is explicitly stated, for some reason, even when the function is incorrect. Does shampoo “clarify”, body lotion “renew”? OK I’ll confess the massage bar was pretty great. It had little round extrusions, like Lego.
- Business travel in a place like La Jolla seemed to me not about sleep or accomodation, but more of a theme-park type experience, by design. Each time I’ve stayed in a hotel I’ve wondered the same things. Do I need someone to hold the door open for me? And valet parking. How is there this persistent myth that parking my own car is so inconvenient that I’d need to pay someone to do it for me? Could it be that valet parking is merely one of the enduring falsehoods of the good life, and that valet parking is actually not convenient at all? Why is everyone calling me “Mr. Taylor” and in general walking on eggshells around me, when it is clear that I don’t want that, and nobody wants that? And they make it seem so natural! But how many massage bars and rejuvenating lotions and morning papers and types of melon in the continental breakfast do you need, exactly? Weary travellers could not be demanding this level of servility and tiresome benevolence that is so total, so all-knowing, and so inescapable that all traces of humanity are wiped out, could they?
The answer is yes, according to the executive from Indiana I’m chatting with at the bar, who now lives in Hong Kong and is staying at the Hyatt for a month. To her, there is a clear gradient of quality to the hotel experience, and insisted that these things mattered greatly even though an inexperienced traveller such as myself might not realize it. My instinct was to write her off as a case of terminal bourgeoisie, posessing standards both unattainable and of fractal-like infinity and complexity (”This shampoo doesn’t say ‘clarifying’ on the label! Room service!”), but she had a point. She was staying there for a month, and halfway across the world at that. It’s not the European backpack trip or the crash-on-a-couch visit, which is the only kind of travel I’ve done. It’s a month of hell. You’re away from all your comforts, your habits, and your friends, and you want only to be given exactly what you think you want, and then left alone, but not all the way alone in case you want something else.
- And yet: pulling up to the parking lot attendant in the hotel lot, a Mexican guy with an American accent asks my room number and my name. When my results come up in the computer, he turns to me with a goofy grin and says in an exaggerated Canadian accent, “get out der for some sunshine, eh?”
- Driving back to the hotel from the training centre, the freeways are clogged for miles. The lumpy landscape of San Diego offers stunningly great views, with the proviso that each view lasts only for the single second it takes to crest each hill and begin descending the other side. The “Zen view”: a view that catches your eye for a second before it is lost. Rising into a nice vantage point over the highway, I watched the cars on the road, swelling and pulsing in rhythmic gasps. Set against the backdrop of the empty sky and the San Diegan horizon that never ends, I began having rather conventional ruminations about the Size Of It All, of these millions of little cars scurrying around and how small they were. It brought back a memory. When Kevin and I had gone hiking in the mountains of Balestrand, Norway, and at the end of a long day we noticed a spot on the trail where thousands of ants were crossing our path in a neat line. They were moving in both directions, and were not startled when we got close. Looking to the left, we saw an enormous anthill. It was the size of a beanbag chair, and shaped like a volcano. The ants were crawling across the trail by the thousands, into the thick brush, and up the side of this giant twig-and-dirt structure they’d built, and finally into the tennis ball-sized hole in the top to join their brothers in the colony. I’d never seen so many sentient beings in one place. It throbbed and hummed with life. An anthill that large must have taken them years to build, and it occured to me that I could destroy it in about thirty seconds with a rock, a tree branch, a bucket of water, whatever. My human body and mind could come up with thousands of ways of demolishing that anthill and they wouldn’t stand a chance. I stood for a minute watching the ants cross the path in a neverending stream, this immensely complex hive mind moving in perfect sync, and thinking about how probably some jerkoff tourist would come along and destroy that anthill, some college kid wanting to show off to his friends, or a park ranger wanting to make the trail more attractive. Or maybe it would rain for a few days and it would be washed away. And it didn’t matter, because the ants would just build another one, as big as the first. We kept hiking, we saw a few more anthills, smaller ones, but not much different. Giant ant metropolises. And back in San Diego, the endless procession of cars on the highways, stretching out for miles and miles on their way to the anthills, our cities, made me wonder whether there’s a hotshot tourist out there somewhere, watching us right now with a rock in his hand knowing he could destroy everything we’ve built with a single throw.
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