In Lileks World...

You know that scene in "American Beauty" when Kevin Spacey reflects on the plastic bag blowing in the wind? That's Lileks World. It's a world full of stale old cliches - Innocent-Yet-Wise Children, Loyal Dogs, Near-Mystic Old Folks - that take on new "significance" because none other than James Lileks is pontificating about them.

A blog from March 29th about an abandoned Howard Johnson's in Cleveland is a perfect example. Let's count the tired old boilerplate, shall we?

We’re used to dead motels, but dead high-rise hotels are something else. This has the look of something from “The Road,” with its apocalyptic sky and forbidding sense of abandonment and dread: what horrible thing could have happened here to make this place die?

The terrible economy? Better, cheaper hotel options? Movies aren't real, Jimmy; they're just make-believe.

Just knowing it was a HoJo builds all sorts of backstory into the place – the brochure with mutton-chop’d men enjoying fried clams in a restaurant with the family, little Johnny and Suzie making snaggle-toothed grins of glee over bowls of ice cream; the picture of the swank lounge, everyone swaddled in dim light and whiskey hues, perhaps an out-of-focus couple dancing in the background. The crisp sheets, the toilet sanitized for your protection and no one else’s...

The true mystery of Lileks is that he is a cliche who talks about cliches. "Johnny and Suzie"? This is being self-consciously generic. What's with the "and no one else's" - is that so profound I'm not getting why it was included?

The reality: businessmen in brown polyester, with a few strands of hair plastered over his bald pate, Harry Mudd’s accountant brother, checking in, taking the elevator up, opening the room, smelling the smell of soap and legacy cigarettes and bleach, testing the bed, opening the window and looking out: that’s always what you do when you get the room.

Ah, "the reality." This perfectly illustrates the fractured nature of Lileks World. On the one side is the sunny, happy, nostalgic past that he so desperately yearns for, but beneath it is an equally fictional "real" world full of Mad Men-style depression, emptiness, cigarettes and dust.

You go as far as you can and you look out the window and you crack the window and light a cigarette.

Yep, that's right - it's "the REAL past," so everyone smokes. EVERYONE. If you don't smoke you're some kind of secret queer. Plus this sentence looks like it was lifted straight out of Ernest Hemingway.

Well, here we are. Cleveland for God’s sake. Then you turn around and look for something, anything, that’s different, but nothing ever is. There’s art where there’s supposed to be art and there’s a desk where there’s supposed to be a desk and there’s a bathroom and a big mirror, and the guy in the mirror never seems entirely happy to see you here, does he?

This is meaningless. Who thinks like this? It's even worse because the creator of this world, James Lileks, was never a traveling salesman in the 1960's. He's a boring newspaperman/blogger in the 2000's. This is stuff he's dredged up from movies and Dashiell Hammett novels.

You sit on the bed and turn on the TV, and if it’s the seventies you lean over and turn the channels yourself, chunk chunk chunk chunk. There’s always something in the two-to-four range. Never had a room where there was a two and a three. Never had a three, come to think of it.

I love how he says "you," as though we can all picture ourselves in this shadowy re-enactment of the past.

Seven hours later with a belly full of steak and Chivas you return to the room and fumble with the TV – hey, it’s Carson. Crap, the monologue’s over. Wobby-aimed pee, brush and a gargle, bed – oh, crap. Wake up. One day these places will have alarm clocks. You call the front desk, and it’s that guy who watched you when you came out of the lounge and said “good night, sir,” and you try not to slur a request for seven.

Wow, JOHNNY CARSON! Unfortunately not every night of Carson was worthy of inclusion on those "Best of Carson" DVD's. But in Lileks World, he's at his most hilarious every night. And really, who HASN'T gotten stumbling drunk while you're staying alone at a hotel on a business trip? Show of hands.

You wake and leave and never go back. The little room in the sky where all this happened is gone now; they demolished the building, and no one will probably ever stand in that precise spot by the window and smoke a cigarette and think: Cleveland.

I think I'm going to cry. So he starts out dreaming of that idyllic past from the Howard Johnson's brochure, then gleefully tears it down to present that terrible image of the lonely traveler taking a wobbly pee in his bathroom with the big mirror. And... now we're supposed to be sad that the scene won't be repeated, over and over again, throughout eternity?

This is a man who, deep down, hates his life, or hates SOMETHING.