The loneliness of hotel rooms

A good question to ask before you start a career in corporate business is, are you lonely in hotel rooms?

I have stayed in too many hotel rooms, often of unaffordable quality, expensed, and each time I am dead and alone at night. I turn on the television: CSI is the only thing worthwhile. If I ever remembered to bring any I’d put out trinkets and things that remind me of home. The TV is placed one unit of distance away from the bed. The desk is placed double that distance. The architectural intent is to create a standard room. But regardless of this homogeneity, humans have a basic inability to sleep in new places, sleep being a time of vulnerability and mammals needing a particular brand of sleep in which the entire brain shuts down. Never mind the lack of personality or that the locked room is to a cell what the bed is to a cot.

Cribs, the MTV show, is unimaginably depressing: By and large the homes of celebrities look like hotel lobbies. Who could live there? They must not. Too impersonal. Like hotel rooms with slightly better decorators. Who could live there without dirtying the walls?