Nurse the Hate: Welcome To Hell

It was supposed to be a good hotel.  Despite the newish carpeting and new logo slapped on the front of the building, it still boasted paper thin walls and hallways that acted as loudspeakers.  The power must have gone out at some point during the night.  The digital clock flashed “12:00” with urgency, sparking the room with red light every two seconds.  What time was it?  The sound of retching was so close he feared that someone was barfing on his bed.  It must be the room next door.  The adjoining door between the rooms provided the same sound buffer as a beaded curtain. 

In between the deep barfing came a conversation from someone else in the room.  The voice sounded middle aged, but the lingo was an odd gumbo of street references that sounded as if they had been culled from NBA player’s social media posts from 2006.  He was on his phone.  “Yo Mikey G be trippin’ yo!  You see how he be frontin’?”  Meanwhile a deep guttural “Bleahhhhh!!!!” followed by liquid hitting liquid came from their bathroom.   The man talking into the phone ignored the barfing.  “You going to Tokyo?  Today?  Bro!”

The man on the phone hung up his call and switched over to playing music.  He called out to his hungover companion.  “No talking during this!”  The sound of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” came shrilly from a phone speaker.  The man from the phone call began to sing, but didn’t know the words and couldn’t stay on pitch.  This resulted in a scat singing style accompaniment to what might well be the worst rock song in the world.  “Jussss a smah tah gaaahhh…  Nevah mumba meeba da wahhhh”  He struggled over to look at his watch on the nightstand.  It was 9:07 am.   “Dohn stah… Believin…”

He considered alerting the guests next door that he was still trying to sleep and perhaps they could be more empathetic to others.  The best tactic that came to mind was banging on the wall and screaming “Shut the fuck up you stupid hillbilly!  You fucking piece of shit!  There are other people in this hotel but you, you goddamn assholes!”.  That did seem a bit confrontational and likely would not result in the two to three additional hours of sleep he was hoping to secure, so he stared at the ceiling and stewed.  “Dohn stah… Believin… Maba donna moby a loooo”  It was perhaps the longest three minutes of his life.

When the song mercifully ended he thought “what did this asshole put next on his dream playlist?  It’s got to be terrible.”.  He laughed out loud when the familiar “boom boom… bam” of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” warbled out of the phone.  The man next door was excited now.  “Dude!  Dude!  This is my jam!”.  He thought about what kind of SUV the guest next door drove here and calculated the likelihood of a Calvin sticker peeing on the side window or maybe an arm flexing gun rights sticker with American flags festooned on it.  By the elevator there was a fire hose and axe behind a glass cabinet.  He could calmly walk down the hall, break open the glass, grab the axe and attack the people in the next room.  There wasn’t a jury in the land that would convict him. “We will!  We will!  Rock you!”  Fuck this.

He showered as quickly as he could, tossed his meager possessions in his bag and wheeled out of the room.  He took the elevator down to the lobby with two shivering kids dripping water on the floor, the kids already taking advantage of the bleak indoor pool by the unused out of date workout facility.   One of the kids sneezed with an open mouth.  He needed a coffee, maybe a breakfast to try and right the ship.  The hotel had a restaurant, the opaque named “Seasons” that appeared to offer legitimate meals.  The hostess indicated he could sit anywhere he pleased in the bland surroundings.  She dismissively gave him a menu and walked away.  He sat by himself without another soul wandering into the room.  Five minutes became ten.  Nothing moved.  There was no sound.  It struck him that perhaps he had died.  As it wasn’t a paradise, he had gone to hell.  It was as he had always suspected.  Hell was like a three star hotel in the Midwest.  Eternity would be a long time.   

Nurse the Hate: Repeating History

While I find it extremely interesting that the President of the United States has essentially decided that he is no longer bound by the law and is an autonomous ruler of the nation, much like a King, it is not nearly as interesting as the reaction from “the people”.  As far as I can tell, no one cares.  There is absolutely no discussion of it in my workplace.  I don’t hear any of my neighbors express even the slightest concern.  Maybe it’s fatigue from the continual barrage of outrageous rhetoric and outright lies from the White House, but The People just can’t seem to engage.  The reality TV show guy is making a move to be a dictator?  Huh.  Hey, did you see Game of Thrones last week?

I remember studying history in school.  Whenever we would learn about Nazi Germany, or Fascist Italy, Spain, or whatever authoritarian ruler you want to insert into the discussion, I would always think “How could those people have let that happen?  What a bunch of dopes.  It was so obvious how that was going to end.”.  Yet, at this moment in history, it’s enlightening to see how it happened.  It moves slowly with deliberate progress.  Three years ago if you were to say “The President will openly defy Congress, place his cronies in position to subvert the laws, claim to be totally exonerated from all wrongdoing when an investigation shows the exact opposite, prevent anyone from seeing that full report that supposedly exonerated him, prevent anyone from looking at his financial dealings with foreign adversaries with which he has an unexplainable chummy relationship, send his personal attorney to meet with Ukraine to have them investigate his political opponent, provide no open communication with the free press, and continually undermine the pillars of our society via his rallies and Twitter outbursts and you will think it is normal.”, you would say “Get the fuck out of here!”.   

Yet, that’s where we are today.  Things that would have been considered krazy with a capital “K” a couple of years back don’t even get anyone’s attention now.  The propaganda TV news network provides talking points for the sycophants.  “Why should he have to show his tax returns?  He was a private citizen then!”  (Ah, because of his murky finances and confusing influxes of cash when no one would lend to him maybe?)  “The economy is doing great!”  (Oh, I guess there’s no need to follow the Law of the Land since my 401K earned an additional 3% while this guy was in office.)  “Investigate the investigators!”  (Oh, you mean punish anyone that dares to question the President, especially if they find something?  That doesn’t sound like Haiti or anything…)  Build the wall!  (Ah, the brown people are the root of the problem!)   “The investigation failed to turn up anything!”  (34 indictments, sweeping Russian effort to aid Trump’s election, obstruction of justice, continual lying from administration about pretty much everything, but beyond that, nothing.). 

Maybe after 2.5 years of “holy shit, what did he do now?”, people are just fed up with the entire thing and got tired of paying attention.  It’s like when you are in Vegas.  In the beginning it’s awesome, all the lights and noises.  Then at Day 3 it becomes sensory overload and the #1 goal is to just get out.  You'd rather sit quietly in your hotel room than have to walk through the casino to get to "Raffles", the delightful coffee shop.  It will be interesting how this all ends up.  It seems like The Bad Guys are more committed to winning.  They don't care about anything but themselves.  They appear willing to do absolutely anything while The Other Guys get their dicks kicked in playing by the rules.  The Bad Guys are laughing it up while The Other Guys keep helplessly yelling “Hey!  You can’t do that!”.  Meanwhile the masses watch Netflix and assume none of this will impact them down the line.   “Hey, Trump just said he should get two bonus years in office because that investigation was a distraction.”  

What’s that?  I was watching Hulu… 

Nurse the Hate: Spontaneous Human Combustion

You don’t hear much about spontaneous combustion these days.  I’m not talking about the inner workings of an engine.  I am talking about someone bursting into flames and leaving nothing behind but a small pile of ash and a discolored patch where they had stood.  Spontaneous HUMAN combustion.  Maybe with climate change this has become less common.  It seemed to happen every now and again in the 70s and early 80s, in what I think was a pinnacle for unexplained occurrences.  That was the time of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Moth Man sightings.  In one year at Garwood Middle School we lost two kids to spontaneous combustion, though neither at the school itself.

This kid named Mark disappeared one week in October.  There was a hastily called assembly where the students gathered as a stammering vice principal gave way to a shell-shocked science teacher named “Mr. Y” that attempted to hammer out how an otherwise normal kid could just burst into flames while sitting in a bean bag chair playing Atari “Missile Command”.  It didn’t make much sense to me and made even less sense to Mark’s Mom who went from “steadily sniffling” to “openly wailing” when Mr. Y made the point about how when Mark burned it was mostly from the inside out.  I didn’t know what to make of it.  I began to consistently monitor my own temperature hoping I wouldn’t burst into flames in front of everyone at the cafeteria.

I had forgotten about it the way kids do.  Children are resilient in that way.  One day the buzz is about Mark catching on fire for no reason and the next is about if there was going to be a food fight on Friday.  We really knew how to live in the moment back then.  I was doing a group project with this girl named Jaime.  We were building a scale model of the Globe Theater.  How that helped me understand what Shakespeare was all about, I don’t know, but that was the assignment.  It was me, Jaime, and this guy Jim that was really handy.  Jim built balsa model airplanes, so essentially the project was Jaime and I watching Jim build this replica Globe Theater (with working trap door no less).  We were a few days out from finishing and Jaime didn’t show up at Jim’s house for our final push.  We couldn’t get anyone to answer the phone at her house and she didn’t show up at school on Monday. 

On Tuesday our teacher, Mrs. McClintock, called us up to her desk.  She was a big woman with bad teeth with an affinity for The Royal Family.  She lowered her voice.  “Boys…  You will have to finish the project on your own.  Jaime isn’t coming back.”  What?  Jim asked.  “Did her family move or something?”  Mrs. McClintock was stymied.  “No…  No…  It was like what happened with Mark.  She’s gone.  She’s gone.”  At this point I was freaking out.  “Jaime burned up like Mark?”  The whole class stopped what they were doing and stared at us by Mrs. McClintock’s desk.  All the kids started talking to each other, wild animated conversations.  Mrs. McClintock struggled to regain control.   There was so much noise that our vice principal came down the hall to sternly take over. 

“Quiet everyone!  Quiet!  Yes, Jaime was found burned up inside her bedroom last night after roller skating.  There is nothing to worry about.  I have been in touch with The Authorities, and they said these are extremely rare occurrences.  You all have nothing to worry about!”  It was at this point I saw his eyes drift over to Mrs. McClintock.  They exchanged a glance that said to me that they were both worried.  Very worried. 

Yet, things calmed down like they always did.  We put up pictures of Mark and Jaime in the entrance hallway of the school.  There was a brief ceremony where the pictures were dedicated, and the band played Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4”, hardly appropriate but it was the only song the band had learned competently to that point.  Mark’s parents were farm folks.  His Dad had a collared shirt on that fit, yet he still looked uncomfortable.  His mom just sat in the wooden fold out chair and cried.  Jaime’s parents stood stiffly.  Her father put his lips together so hard that they turned white.  He wore a black suit and had shiny shoes.  I remember how the glint of the tuba reflected on the shine of them.  And then it was over.  We went back to doing things 6^th graders did and forgot all about them.

I was thinking about the entire episode today.  It was tragic, but maybe most tragic because those kids just got forgotten.  No one ever brings them up to me anymore.  It is easy to understand why people forget about the past, especially when it is so painful like that.  It’s human nature to move on, to put that in a box and seal it off, try to minimize the pain.  Then again, maybe the reason no one brings it up is because I just made it all up.  It’s hard to say.  Even I’m not sure if it happened or not at this point…