Third Night in the Hotel
Tonight is my third night on my own in the hotel. There is no bar in the hotel (which is probably a very good thing, given past experiences of the kind of people that frequent hotel bars), so I'm hanging out in my room, tinkering with stuff on the laptop, and drinking a cheap bottle of wine I bought in the supermarket across the road earlier.
I'm slowly going stir crazy.
I wasted the greater part of this evening dicking around with an installation of the Ghost blogging platform on a virtual machine in “the cloud”. I had grand pretentions of building my own castle on the internet, but as the evening wore on, the task of migrating the content across from Blogger, to Wordpress, and on to Ghost became fraught with difficulties. After a couple of hours, I threw my hands theatrically in the air, and deleted everything. Of course nobody saw me do it, because I'm sitting here on my own – which begs the question of why I did it in the first place. I think we'll move on.
You might think – being on my own in the hotel for night after night – that I would become the social butterfly on the internet – catching up with friends, writing emails, and having nonsensical instant messaging conversations with anybody and everybody. Quite perversely, the exact opposite has happened – I haven't really communicated with anybody at all. I watched a couple of movies on the first night downloaded from the internet, and became quite depressed about the entire state of the movie industry.
I thought I might download an independent movie, and saw one with a cover plastered with film awards. I can only imagine they were car park badges at the various awards dinners – where the attendees are essentially buying the fact that they were there. Anyway – the movie was utter crap. It seemed a wannabe movie director had hired a few friends who had never acted before to take part in perhaps the most wooden snooze-fest ever made. I almost began gnawing my own limbs off.
You know how some movies are so bad they are good? Well this one wasn't.
The entire movie could have been cut down to an estranged son going to stay with his Dad, shouting at him a bit, grabbing the maid's boob, the maid running off, and then the movie ending.
Anyway.
I just turned the hotel room television off. It's very rare that I watch television while away – and tonight kind of proves it. I left the news channel on for half an hour earlier, until it had repeated the little news they had to report several times, and then switched over to a cooking show. A few minutes into it I found myself being sucked in – and caught myself before my entire brain turned to goo, and poured from my ears.
I'm now sitting in silence again, listening to the drumming of my fingers on the keyboard, and the pitter-patter of the rain on the window.
This blog post must rank as the most successful post about nothing in particular ever written. Quite how I've managed to go on this long is a minor miracle really. I seem to be talented at waffling on about nothing in particular – perhaps I've missed my calling. I think it might be better for all concerned if I stopped now, and read a few blog posts by people who actually have a life at the moment, rather than continue to witter on and on.