Ol' Lang Signs

So the New Year came and went here at the Hotel Idiotica, somewhat quietly according to Yusuf. That assuages my conscience a bit, because to be honest I was feeling a little bit guilty about skipping out on NYE here at the hotel, theoretically the most critical blogging night of the year. I wasn't scheduled to work that night, but for a second I thought about scrapping my boozin' and whorin' for a night of sober correspondence. And although that second passed quickly, it did lead to some very quiet reflection as to just what the hell kind of a place this web-hotel (bhotel?) was occupying in my life, and how was it relating to the actual, physical hotel that I work in, which really does exist (some readers have vastly overestimated my imagination by assuming I was just making the whole thing up).

My relationship to this hotel, and this bhotel, has deepened and become considerably more complicated over the past few months. In a way that doesn't exactly translate well into a series of vignettes about Who Just Came into the Hotel, batshit crazy as some of those may be. And if you, cherished (seriously) bhotel guests, are to understand what goes on behind and before the front desk of an utterly average Manhattan hotel, these are things you need to know. So, in lieu of resolutions, I want to address some behind-the-scenes developments that are driving the unconscious remodeling of this bhotel, and what these trends hold for our beloved Hotel Idiotica in the new year, which will be glorious.

First, the hours of this job are a tad disruptive to my sleeping habits, sort of like how Genghis Khan was a tad disruptive to the peoples of Central Asia. I'm not sure if I've ever explicitly spelled out when I'm clocked in at this job; I work Saturday and Sunday nights from 10 at night until 8 in the morning, and then around 8 hours a day in the afternoon on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons, usually until 10 pm. Staying up all night twice in a row, and then trying to adjust back to a normal snoozing schedule for five days before doing it all over again, is, according to mental health professionals, "unsound sleep hygiene."

And, I'll be honest, its starting to make me tweak out a little bit. For the first few months, I thought I had a pretty good grip on it, but slowly and surely--insidiously is really the only word for it--I'm losing that grip. Who can say where the uncertainty and anxiety of growing up end and the ill-effects of sleep deprivation begin? All I can say is that I think I have a better idea of what women go through with PMS, except I'm not just talking about a few days out of the month (menstruating insomniacs have my deepest sympathies).

So there's that. And this apnea (I dunno what apnea is, but I'm gonna assume I have it) isn't doing any favors to my posting regimen. My "writing" style is probably best described as...finicky. I pretty much just stare at the screen and chew gum or something until God himself tells me what to write. Well, God only speaks to receptive vessels. He doesn't talk to oatmeal. So I haven't really been posting. And then, even though I know this isn't supposed to be much more than a whim, I feel some guilt about not posting, to You and to Qwertye, Muse of Blogs. And no one likes to feel guilty, so I end up playing online Boggle (171 wins, 224 losses), and you end up wondering what happened at the hotel this weekend, and we both end up less happy than we could be. This is the seedy underbelly of graveyard shift hotel blogging. It ain't all like they make it out to be in the pictures.

So I'm hoping that by turning this blog/bhotel into my online diary just this once, I'll evict these here lil' demons that have been refusing to leave the Hotel Idiotica for some months now. To that effect, I'm going to be trying to put up shorter, this-shit-just-happened posts at the expense of turning that shit into gothic comedies worthy of O'Connor or Waugh. If He speaks, He speaks, but otherwise I'll be saving longer pieces for Meet The Idiots features or more abstract posts like this one, god forbid. And yes, sweetheart, I know that's all you ever wanted.