Pennsylvania

I’m sitting in a hotel in a suburb of Philadelphia. It’s a Hampton Inn. I had to come here to my company’s headquarters after I quit my job for a new better one to tell the people here all the same things I’ve been telling them from SF for the last 3 years: you guys suck, I deserve more money, and someone at a another company is going to recognize that soon. Soon, in this case, being 2 weeks ago when I got a nice offer from another company and resigned.
Back to beautiful Morrisville PA…
The accommodations are hard to describe. Off white walls, lightly stained wood furniture, and typical hotel room lamps scattered seemingly at random.
It’s how I imagine someone would choose to decorate a room if you opened up their skull, poured some bleach and Novocain in, then stapled it back up and asked them to shake their head to mix thoroughly. Post-​Lobotomy or maybe PoLo for short.
I went to Kohl’s after work because I forgot to bring anything to wear on my business trip to the Spa and Fitness Center here. More on the Spa and Fitness Center later…
So I bought some shorts, a t-​shirt, and a pair of 60 $ sneakers at Kohl’s. I know I know, why would I buy 60 $ shoes for one night in a shitty hotel when I have perfectly good sneakers at home?
Well it’s not really fair for you to ask that, I mean how do you know I have perfectly good sneakers at home?
Well, you were right, I do. But I bought them because when you’re alone in a weird small remote place, without any real options to do anything except work out, and you don’t have anything to work out in, sometimes you do crazy things.
At the counter when I was checking out, the women handed me a piece of paper with my receipt and said:
woman (I think): «Here are you 10 Kohl dollars. You can use these next time you’re at Kohl’s.»
jake (me): «But I have been to Kohl’s exactly once in my life previous to this. And I was 17. That means this has to last at least 9 years to even have a statistically significant chance of being worth more than the $.005 I could get recycling it»
woman (I think): «It’s good for 12 months»
jake (me): «Can I just give it to you since you work here, and you can totally use it for yourself. I’ll give it to you for 5 $!»
woman (I think): «You’re an angel! Don’t let my manager see!»
And that’s how made 5 $ today I wasn’t expecting to make.
So really, I guess those sneakers were only 55 $. Moral #1 of this story: There really is such a thing as a free lunch. If you spend 55 $ dollars first. And you don’t mind explaining low grade statistics to cashiers. And there are morally bankrupt Pennsylvania cashiers Johnny on the Spot with a Linc (a five dollar bill).
So back to the Spa and Fitness center. Please realize, this is not the name I gave to the Spa and Fitness Center, nor would I name it that if given that exalted responsibility. I would probably settle on or around
«Concrete and Mirror Room with Treadmill and Small Trampoline».
I think this how they make superheroes out of 14 year old girls in the Ukraine. If all I had to look forward to was doing gymnastics on steroids in a room like this I could probably learn how leap small buildings, rotate my torso 360 degrees, and win Gold fucking medals at the Olympics too. But I digress. There were no steroids and no Olympics in my future.
I ran for an uneventful amount of time and for an uneventful distance. People kept walking by the Spa and Fitness Center and looking at me with either disgust, confusion, or a psychotic combination of the two.
I’m so glad to be leaving this place tomorrow morning. The only people I talk to when I’m here are people from work or the crazy people at the front desk. And I think the front desk people might all be raging meth addicts. They checked me into the hotel in like, 8 seconds last night. My workouts are confined to a glorified solitary confinement unit. The water from the tap in the room tastes like dirt. Like actual real dirt from the ground. I had at least 4 different conversations with people from work today about Deer as pests in their yards.
How do people starve in this country if we have places where Deer are PESTS in backyards?
By the time I walked back to my room from the Spa, I had the overwhelming urge that I was breaking down. I felt like someone HAD poured bleach and Novocain into my skull. I knew I needed to get out of this place. It was ruining everything I love and hate about me, which is maybe the worst possible thing I can imagine having to go through and be cognizant of. I have a name for this affliction, and its name is: Pennsylmania.
May the morning come swiftly, and the cab for the airport punctually. Or else I might just go drown myself in the office park pond across the street with all the Geese and water dyed toxic-​chemical blue. What a fitting end it would be, dead in the water, just like my soon to be ex-​job, my soon to be ex-​company, and this whole damn suburb.