I HATE EVERYTHING

It's no secret, I hate a lot of things—children, babies, near-strangers hugging me, cheap flip flops, anything made by Budweiser, cabbage, the country of Italy (it's mutual, so this is okay), Zimmer & Kohl contractors, Celine Dion, abbrevs, hollow Easter bunnies, that "snooty section of town", racists, Mexicans, homeless people who really aren't homeless, midgets who refuse to wear costumes daily (come on, you're already so small and we're already laughing at you anyway, go ahead and put on a lion costume), Minnie Driver, Andie Mac Dowell, Reeboks (have always thought they sounded like a synonym for vomit—"I just Reebok'd that corndog from lunch."), Gregory and Appel Insurance, Discovery Benefits, etc.

But as I woke up this morning, I realized there was one more thing to add to my list—hotel rooms.

Everybody has a different bitch against hotels. Most center around the level of cleanliness or the level of ejac smeared on everything in the room or discourteous staff.

None of these are mine.

Cleanliness is cleanliness. I found a half eaten rotisserie chicken under my bed in St. Louis one time—and this was after I had already spent the night in this hotel room. Was I mad? No. And now I can tell everybody I found a half eaten rotisserie chicken under my bed. Who else can say this?

As for the level of ejac on the pillowcase, pillowcase, nightstand, alarm clock and evvvvvvverything else—eh. Who cares? The world is covered in jizz. Anytime we stay at a hotel we just happen to be sleeping in the Hall of Fame of Spunk. Consider yourself lucky. If you're in a hotel room right now, you could be rolling around in Giovanni Ribisi's ejaculation. He was good in that one movie.

The staff is the staff. You put a bunch of high school dropout lunkhead whippet do'ers together in one facility and you're lucky if it doesn't turn into a prison.

My complaints against hotels are in the following areas:

The Decor
All hotels today look like they were decorated by the same unimaginative white man. Beige walls, non-descript everything, fake plants, paintings that nobody would ever hang up in there home except white folks, etc.

This needs to change.

One time I stayed in a hotel shaped like an abstract turkey. It was circular. It was odd. It was awesome.

Why don't more hotels do this? Yes, they can claim cost and blah, blah, blah. Shut up.

Make me a hotel where each of the rooms has a theme. Go over to the non-white sections of town and do some damn shopping. I want to stay in the "El Paso Suite". I want stay in a room where the only thing separating the bedroom and the bathroom is a beaded curtain. I want to look fondly at little brown people statues riding donkeys and pricking their fingers on cactuses on my damn coffee table. I need to see Aztec wallpaper border on the walls and sombrero ashtrays on my nightstand.

Get me some velvet paintings, some mirrored Scarface mirrors, some phones that look like giant lips and white furniture trimmed in gold beading.

I'm the traveler, you owe me some entertainment dammit.

The Pillows
Too soft? Too firm? No. My problem is too many.

Every hotel now has 30 on the fucking bed. You can spend money providing us with 29 pillows we're never going to use, but I make a request for some mirrored tiles on the ceiling and you scoff?

How about this—just have a vending machine in the lobby that works with your keycard. You use your card to select the two pillows you want—D1 Soft, B4 Semi-firm. Two. That's all you get. No more. You want more? Go sleep in a fucking Sears.

The other solution here is dragging your pillow from home. Right.

The car ride alone would rob me of whatever safety and comfort I would have bringing my pillow. Odds are I would be taking it in a rental car that has either had children (grubby little germbags), old people (shitty big germbags) or the morbidly, morbidly obese (they all masturbate when they drive) in it.

No thanks.

The Shower
I want hot water that is going to scald my skin off. I want my back to look like I've been in a mobile park meth fire.

I think every hotel has to, by some stupid ordinance, limit the temperature of their water to, "The temperature of a grown man urinating on me."

Fuck your tiny soaps, let's work on getting the temperature up to "The temperature of Satan urinating on me."

The Lamps
Just quit. I am in a hotel room this very minute with six lamps. SIX! Why?

Who is going to a hotel room these days and setting a mood? Are we making out in our high school girlfriend's basement? Where is the Dave Matthews button? Will she enjoy this strawberry truck stop condom I picked up? Shit, I hear her dad.

I can never figure out how to turn these lamps on. Is there a wall switch? Is there a knob I'm supposed to turn? While I'm trying to figure them out, I've stubbed a toe and dropped the beer I'm trying to keep cool in the undersized ice bucket. (Just give us coolers already.)

And the lamps that have the plug-ins for your cellphone or laptop. Fuck these. 9 times out of 10, I plug something into them to charge. Only to forget you have to turn on the lamp in order to get that cell phone, iPad, iPhone to charge.

To paraphrase Brick Tamland, "I hate lamp." And while we're at it, "I hate hotel."