I had a
long business trip to Cambridge coming up, and all of my usual haunts were
either sold out or prohibitively expensive, so I decided to give the Residence
Inn a try. As the name implies, this place
is designed to approximate someplace one would actually reside, rather
than stay for a couple of nights. This
means that many of the rooms, like mine, include kitchenette areas, and that all
the frou-frou one might find in a
boutique hotel – the in-room yoga mat, the bedside luxury lifestyle magazines,
the hip bar and eatery – have been eschewed in favor of more practical features,
like ample power and USB outlets, and a laundry room, and a “mini-mart” just
off the reception, where the road warrior may find 24/7 fortification. “Consultant Functional” would be an apt way
to characterize this place: it’s where the young, sleep-deprived MBAs go after
sitting in meetings all day to work on slides for the next day’s all-day
meetings.
Yesterday morning,
I headed down to the breakfast room around 6:40 (early breakfast room opening hours
being another CF benefit). Several
people were already sitting and eating: indeed a few consultant types, an (out
of place) family of four, a pair of guys speaking German. The ubiquitous CNN feed was glowing on the large
flat-screen facing the entrance, and for once the “BREAKING NEWS” in the fire
engine red banner wasn’t crying wolf. Someone
had fired many bullets into the audience of a country music concert in Las
Vegas. By then, the death toll stood at
20, although the local sheriff’s redundant comment that “we have in excess of
more than 20 victims” suggested that the tally would get much grimmer soon. A shaky mobile phone video, shot by one of
the poor souls at the concert, played in a nightmarish loop.
Perhaps, a
few years ago this sort of scene would have made people stop and gather around
the screen and watch and shake their heads.
But this one, layered onto all the others before it and the ones almost
certainly to follow, had become simply part of the ambiance of America
in 2017. We all sat and ate our breakfasts.
On CNN, one woman’s repeated screams rose above all others, then fell
into a dissonant weave with Lana Del Rey, whose voice came through the hotel PA.
