Another H------ Inn, Mountain Time Zone

Two years ago, when I started seeing America by business travel, I thought Hampton Inns were adorable and clean. "Everything is in lowercase, like my old website." Friendly reminders on how to live temporarily in a cinder box cube are everywhere, followed by a period:

recharge.
road warrior.
condition.
moisturize.
clean your face.
clean your body.

Now, the pictures of happy travelers everywhere look like post-operative photographs of corporate lobotomy victims. I've memorized all the sentence fragments, and they're not funny. The breakfast food was once good: french toast sticks and waffles! Now, you can show up at any franchise in the U.S. and expect to see a yellow circle of cheese with bacon bits on it. Some days they call it an egg. Some days they call it a bagel.

The crowd at free hot breakfast always conists of upscale retirees and frayed businessmen with laptop bags--triple and double my age. If I ever saw a person within 5 years of my age alone in a hotel, male or female, I would marry it to prove we were real.

The lobby reeks of force-fed CNN, just like most airports. But morning CNN is about thirteen times more pornographic than midday CNN (today: GATORLAND FIRE!). Glorious Soledad and her beauty school colleagues have been painted to resemble giant blowup dolls, with plasticized, iridescent lips that scream, "I am an orifice!" If you accidentally look up at the screen, all you see is lips, lips, lips, moving in time to second-nature newscaster cadence, their changing curvature radiating bright, white studio lighting right back at ya through hundreds of thousands of miles of cables.

Now, muffins and yogurt. Since the sun has come up, I can see snow-capped mountains over the Sheraton next door. Not much after this, I'll do some kind of work and will try very hard to do it well. When you travel like this, you don't see America. You see how America works. It's not particularly nice, good, or even noble, but it's good to know.