the challenger

This isn’t a story. This is me sharing.

I travel a lot. I don’t talk about it much because my occupation is one of those that fly under the radar by design. Am I a hero?

You decide.

I am a diplomat for the city of Philadelphia. My job is to resolve disagreements before they blossom into full-fledged conflicts. You may not know this but a city can declare war on another city.

“What’s that you say?” you say. “I’ve never heard about a city attacking another city.”

That’s because of folks like me.

You’re welcome.

Last week it was Cleveland. Philadelphia and Cleveland were on the brink of war so they sent me in.

But that’s not what this is about.

This is about things you learn when you stay at hotels.

The restaurants at hotels bring you water without you having to ask. That’s really thoughtful. Humans die without water.
There’s a good reason that men shouldn’t dance naked. The penis is too distracting. Flopping around as it does. You learn this courtesy of the big mirror in the bathroom.
Dreams are longer and more intense in hotel beds. For example last Wednesday night I had a beauty. It seemed to go on forever. In comparison, the running time of the entire Lord of the Rings movie franchise (including The Hobbit) seemed like a flash of lightning. A flash of lighting takes 30 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second). The running time of the entire Lord of the Rings movie franchise (including The Hobbit) is 11.2 hours. That means that the perceived length of my dream was 2,587 years. Seems about right.

So why is this rambling nonsense titled “the challenger’? Because, after years of travel, the rental car agency finally had a sports car on the lot! A Dodge Challenger. With Texas plates no less. When I arrived at the hotel I roared around the entrance four times before stepping out of my car. Dripping of bad-ass. I could only imagine the backstory people had invented in their heads when I strolled into the lobby humming Bad to the Bone.