Story
and Dream
A
Hotel 500 Stories Tall
Yes,
there are hotels that are 500 or 1000 stories tall. When you take the elevator it goes so fast all you can do is hold
on to the wall of that elevator and hope you’re not going to die---- It goes so fast. You can check into the hotel.
You look over the edge and you don’t know how far you are from the
ground. These are very tall
buildings. Over the edge of the balcony
at the check in center is a drop of perhaps a mile of space through other
hotels and shopping centers. At one
time you were promised a place up there in a building, perhaps 100 stories up,
where there were long term apartments and extended stay hotel rooms. You argued with the man and pointed out that
you had been promised a place. Over and
above it all is the daily conflict of a big city: the blood on the pavement in the morning, the blood all over the
face of a man who sits on the curb. He
has been hit or slashed, and he just sits there. A Buddhist next to you with only optimism and love points out
that that is the location of a future restaurant. “They’re going to build a restaurant there,” he says, as if he
cannot see the blood on the fellow’s face.
People with money. People
without money. The gap between the rich
and the poor. The racial conflict. Racial mixing and how people are in favor or
against that. Over and above all of
this is the hotel complexes area, buildings 500 to 1000 stories tall. There was a wedding at a Radisson. Radisson is very much typical of this kind
of place, a place where people can relax and play games, but not on the ground
floor. The mezzanine. A lounge where people hear music playing. You sit down with a relative in a hotel bar,
and two women sit nearby. After
overhearing your conversation with your relative, these women are
scornful. “They don’t know anything,”
says a woman. It seems that if we knew
something, I thought, we would be ambitious.
We would want money and love and sex.
We would be exchanging ideas about how to use connections and how to
meet people who might be influential, who might help us get what we want. But neither you nor your relative are
married, and a prosperous life based in the suburbs seems a million miles
away. Yes, there are hotels. There are gift shops selling postcards. As you walked closer to the ocean, one man
said to another outside of an expensive hotel, “Check out time.” The implication being that this is a big
hotel, this planet, and the homeless themselves are the ones who have checked
out. Were they forced out of the indoor
hotel? Or did they leave
willingly? You hear a story of an
alcoholic who froze to death in a bus shelter one winter night. And for some of them, there is no way back
in. They are either in or out. This society, as of 2009, has no room for
the weary, no rooms for the suffering.
You need money. “You’ve got to
have some money in this land of milk and honey.” As you pass some homeless fellows at the salvation army, they
turn to each other and laugh. You are the
fool walking past, thinking that he is somebody, when in fact he is on the path
to homelessness, according to these fellows who are down on their luck. In a smaller city you walk past homeless
people, but they grow very angry if you do not acknowledge them. “Look at me, look at me,” they shout. Meanwhile the gap between the rich and poor
grows ever-wider. As our society grows
toward another kind of civil war. All
corporations are hotels, with a hoteling function, providing temporary spaces
for you to be, while you get some work done.
Offices are not permanent. Most
offices are cubicles. Some cubicles are
reserved for you only for 1 or 2 days.
I overhear someone being fired, or who has just been fired. Is there an overlap between a mafia and an organization
or a corporation? Corporations need
money to live. Corporations are living
things. Living beings. Money is the food, the life blood, for the
living being, for the corporation. But
in another sense, we are living within a shopping center. Is there a way out of this damnation, out of
this shopping center? We all are under
an obligation to make a living, or die.
People don’t like to see someone relying on government money. So we are within a system of selling. We are within salesmanship. We are in a shopping center. Turn on the TV set, and all you see is
advertising. The advertising often is
based on insult comedy. Or desire. The main character goes through the
corporate world as a warrior. Knowing
that his every move might be monitored.