Back in town

After six days in Vancouver and four more in Chicago, I'm back in Minneapolis, exhausted and partly brain-dead. I've been working for almost ten days straight and traversing across hotel lobbies and airport terminals constantly.

At the outset, I always find travel exciting--perhaps because I do it so rarely for work, with its per diems and sense of responsibility. I look forward to the anonymous hotel rooms, somewhat sexy, the strange architectures of new cities, the uninhibited hotel bar. But after a few days I find myself becoming as personless as my surroundings, choosing to remain silent while the television's cable stations talk for me, opting for overpriced room service, etc. I stop reading and writing and float in some autopilot purgatory, 'on' during the day when I need to be and on stand-by at the end of the day.

That changed when I got to Chicago somewhat, as my good friend Mike picked me up from the Palmer House Hilton and we had some beers at the Rainbo Club and I could finally talk to someone and say 'shit' and 'fuck' and we could make each other laugh.

But the days on the road have worn me down a bit. I am so sick of restaurant food and french fries and beer and I am so sick of walking quickly through miles of airport to try and make a flight. I am so sick of the cable shows I watched in whatever city I happened to be in (my favorites were this and this), and I just want to be home.

Now I'm sitting around in this ugly brown barren neighborhood in south Minneapolis and they're drilling in the apartment below me and I am reminded that I need to move soon and I have no clean clothes and my milk's gone sour and I kinda wish I was back in that Sheraton in Vancouver, looking out a wall of windows from twenty stories high at the mountains, neither here nor there.