The curtain is open and the sun struggles to fight its way out of the mid-afternoon clouds of my hotel room. I have a lovely view of the back parking lot and townhouses beyond that. Getting out of work at 2 pm is nice, but there is still 5-6 hours of reports to write so I pull up the chair at this desk and begin working the keys. The sun warms the room so much so that I put the air conditioning on. The cool air is blowing across my face, the way I like the vents on airplanes. That is my life…enjoying the cool air from vents of what basically amount to large-scale petri dishes. Every desk in every room in every hotel looks the same. This is my makeshift office. I pull out the portable laptop screen to save time from the constant minimize/maximize/minimize…and get into 9 spreadsheets, 1 at a time, laboring through each one, bored to death. This does not resemble, at all, the office at home where I feel comfortable and insulated from the bullshit of work, where I can leave work behind and focus on getting the words down. But I make due. It could be worse. This week I watched folks in an industrial laundry facility where almost every job in that site is a full-on ball-buster. I cannot imagine how tired those people must be at the end of the day. Everyone was cooperative except for a couple bad apples, which you will find anywhere. There was nothing inspiring about this site, nor the area & town around it. I don’t like being away from my family, but seeing new places is interesting to me and these last 2 states I’ve been to really don’t interest me at all – it’s just like home: gray, never any sun, cold and straight shitty. None of my travels for work have come close to the bar I have set for my time in the southwest – that amount of sun almost naturally replaced my mood stabilizers! I digress, but the sun just went away and its fucking gray again. I can’t remember the comedian’s name who once said, referring to constant gray skies, they want to slit their wrists, not to harm themselves, but rather to just see some color. I hate gray. This analysis of this company has led me back in time to my manual labor days that I spent from 15 until 34 years old and the suck-ass jobs I had pale in comparison to this type of labor. I don’t know what these folks earn, but I do know they put in one hell of a shift each day. Some of the jobs there, I couldn’t or wouldn’t do, I’d rather do a faceplant into a Corvette’s windshield. That’s just me, tough labor is not for me; I respect the hell out of those folks who do. I’m much more comfortable behind this hotel desk that I want to get all rock-star on & break into kindling, then create my own fireplace in this shithole. How some hotels have the balls to charge $200/night & have rooms that I want to destroy for the room’s sake, is beyond me? Don’t get all uppity and give people this shit, fuck off elitist large hotel chain…fuck it, I’m putting this desk to death with my steal toe boots. Suck it desk, you just got served. I’ll pay the damages, all $9 dollars to replace, I’ve bought sturdier wood in the hobby store when I was a kid trying to fly kites. Kindling.