dream_hotel epitome of incomprehensibility The staff mean to be helpful, but it's just too much. I don't want every framed picture I'm bringing individually wrapped. I don't want the earrings I made covered with pottery glaze and fired in a kiln - for some reason, this makes one earring hook white and the other black. Both were silver before. 250421 ... e_o_i The night before last. I'm at a conference, looking for a bathroom. I turn a corner into an opulent room with high ceilings that's decorated with colorful pictures of elephants in the style of an Indonesian batik. The walls look like marble. In my amazement, I forget my quest (so no haunted toilets to spark dream_conversations - that will be the next night). "If the hall leading to the washrooms is this fancy, what's the rest of the hotel like?" I wonder. I see a sign, a metal plaque on the wall: this hall is the Elephant Room. An apt designation. Then I see another sign printed and mounted on a sandwich board rising from the floor. The name "Trump" stands out. That sours me on the hotel; I presume the rest of it will be rich-looking but ill-made. And that's not exactly true - it's just that the rooms and rentable suites all have strange names. I AM impressed - some are larger than regular apartments and cost several thousand dollars. I want to both see them and write down their names. For the second goal, I get out a lined notepad I brought to the conference. I have some idea now that I'm dreaming and I won't be able to keep the paper I'm writing on once I stop dreaming. But then I think I'll be OK if I write fast enough. I do not write fast enough. The only suite name my waking mind remembers is the one that struck me as ungrammatical: "two Armenian small houses." "Typical," I think. "The Trump team is making fun of the size of another country's houses, but they can't get their adjectives in the right order." (I like how I assumed the Trump was Donald and that his prevailing fault is putting adjectives in the wrong order.) 250712 ... e_o_i edit: suites that cost several thousand dollars PER NIGHT. (Probably I got this idea from a Gazette article with pictures of hotel suites catering to Grand Prix guests: large, fancy, nice to look at but not worth staying in, IMO.) 250712 ... raze somewhere in latin america, after sampling three red pills offered to me by a famous actor in the back of a cab, i return to the hotel i've made my makeshift home. i can't recall the six-digit code that lets me into my room on the eighth floor. in the absence of an elevator there are stairs that function more as a strange series of ramps or ridges. on each level i walk past two paired-up people suffering from some unstated illness. the symptoms grow more severe the closer i get to the top floor. at the summit of it all, we become the animals we always were. a black lab allows me to eavesdrop on his interior monologue. he thinks about dying and leaving his companion to fade away without him. they sink into shallow water until a woman wraps each canine boarder in a towel and offers comforting words. compassion won't be enough to keep death at bay. but it beats indifference every day of the week. 251202 what's it to you? who go blather from