Dearth Valley

I know Friday the 13th was yesterday, but I think they're a day behind over here in Nevada. They seem to be a day behind evolutionarily, too. There is a dearth of intellect here. I'm too exhausted to belabor this point, but let me regale you with a brief story of how my night ended.

After driving out of a star-covered Death Valley, I headed an hour away toward the hotel I hadn't yet checked into. Let me digress momentarily to mention the splendor that is Death Valley. Being there feels like roaming around in a giant, real-life Roadrunner cartoon. The place is straight out of the imagination of Chuck Jones. As I was driving out of the park, speeding along in the dark inside my rental car from ACME, any moment I expected some mishap to befall me; a treacherously placed black hole; an inescapable oil slick; a terribly timed trip-wire that would ignite the wick of a rocket which would blast me and my vehicle to smithereens. The tragedy, as it turns out, was waiting for me at the hotel. A premonition came to me, as I neared the 20-mile mark, of some vague problem that would interfere with my ability to do the last two things that remained - shower and sleep.

I pulled up to the hotel and immediately sensed something was wrong. The outside looked like it had been decorated by a special-Ed art class from a local elementary school. There were aliens with improper proportions, weird UFO's glued onto the walls at odd angles, and far too many green lights (which I think were supposed to be tractor beams). I shrugged it off, parked the car and entered the check-in office. The check-in office, I came to find out - after the poorly installed dangling door bell made a hideous, nails-on-a-chalkboard type sound - was connected to the home of the proprietor of the establishment. An older woman emerged from her couch, slowly (both in movement and aptitude), existing somewhere between male and female, white trash and meth-head (what's the difference?). I think she had been drinking. I hope she had been drinking. She appeared to be on some very strong prescription pain-killers. She had two black eyes, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. She spoke like a time-lapse photograph. I gave her my name. When I spelled it, she recited back a set of letters I had never given her. I corrected her and she replied with an entirely new name. Thinking she might be hard of hearing, I annunciated more clearly and showed her the confirmation email on my phone containing my name. She took the phone, read my name, but then uttered a third, still unfamiliar name to me. She was the most complete marriage of dumb and ambivalent I've ever seen. 

Much like Stone Cold Steve Austin, the Texas rattlesnake, she gave me her bottom line: there was no vacancies. "Actually," she said, correcting herself, "there is one room we have. The sink and the tub is backed up." That would kind of interfere with my plans for the night, I told her. After a series of questions, mostly about how this could have happened, she started glazing over. I stepped outside and called a nearby hotel. It turned out they had a room available. 

I'm too tired to go on. My interaction with her ended when I thanked her for her help as she was speaking in slow-motion on the phone to my booking representative, spelling her own last name over and over.

Something went wrong when I saved this post and I lost the last two paragraphs I'd written about what happened at the second hotel. Oh well, fuck it.

Goodnight.