Dramatic re-enactment of an actual photograph

The time is 1:18 in the morning. Entered car and successfully penetrated the dirty membrane containing me within Los Angeles around 9 P.M earlier this night and found myself in San Diego something like two hours later.

The drive was already tainted with the knowledge that the passenger seats SHOULD have had the butts of several traveling companions firmly planted upon them, but said companions had, one by one, been diminished by unknown forces. I was doing this Comicon SOLO, and everyone knows that’s how people die. It’s how you fucking DIE. Anyone ever tells you they’re going to Comicon alone, you know they’ve given up, you know they see no future for themselves in a world they clearly feel has already abandoned them. Nobody goes alone unless they have no plans to ever come back.

I was a dead man the moment my foot hit the gas pedal.

Musta been around 11, 11:15 that I found myself approaching the Gaslamp District, bro-haunted host to my many previous stays in San Diego for this annual gathering of masochists, and I wondered “Have I stayed at this Sheraton I’ve been put up at this time around?” The view out my driver’s side window a parallax scrolling of convention halls and the old familiar hotels full of the orgiastic writhing of fans and creators. Is that the Sheraton? Nope. That one? Nope.

A creeping dread starts to set in as I leave that scene behind and continue winding up along the coast. Where the hell am I going? Where is this hotel?

FIfteen minutes later, I pull up to the hotel, and I think there must be some mistake. There’s nothing here but a hotel in the middle of cracked, parched earth, the only landmarks the occasional bleached bones from convention goers foolish enough to attempt the walk this far out. I swear, before going in, I swear the moon laughed at me.

“Can I help you?” asks the valet, a skeleton in rags, all teeth and empty eyesockets. “I’m not sure…” I reply, “I’m not sure I’m in the right place.” He laughs, the sound of dried leaves and sand grinding in fleshless hinges.

“You’re in the right place” he says, and though he has no lips, I know he’s saying it with a smile.

The people that put me up, they brought in other guests, and I somehow, despite the haze of confusion and growing sadness, think to ask if those guests are also in this same place. One by one he tells me no, that person isn’t here, that person isn’t here, nope not that one either.

It’s just you.

I check in, a growing gloom taking me over. I get into my room and the smell of death is in here as well, masked, sure, fresh sheets, sure, but it’s there, just underneath, and the gloom sits heavier on me like a depressed elephants ballsack dropped onto my chest.

I frantically connect my Playstation to the TV. I’ll play games with friends online. I’ll forget where I am, forget that I’m the only one out here breathing the dead up into my nostrils, and I’ll just play. No signal gets through. The hotel blocks the hdmi and now the despair seeps into the last part of me that had been fighting it off for this long. I crawl into the bathtub and weep, curled up in my Playstation’s cables, cradling the console itself to my chest like those sexy nerd people who think that shit is sexy, only it’s even LESS sexy as I do it. Why can’t I be sexy? Why is this hotel so far from everything? I pop another cashew from the forty dollar tin I got from the “refreshment center” and my tears only make it saltier.

Surely day TWO will be better.