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For the most part, I don’t remember things. My memory is not so much vague as it is glitchy; a generally blank screen that sometimes blinks to life and performs basic recall tasks. With scarce exceptions, my recollections are so inaccessible to me that they are more like the memories of a person I have never met or spoken to. Once, while rewatching one of my favorite films, I found myself wondering what its lead actor might be like in real life. Several scenes later, a revelation jolted me: I once flew cross-country to have lunch with that man, interviewed him about his life for two hours and had my 1,400-word summary of the experience published in a magazine. Geotagged iPhone photos are often some of my only clues that I have been somewhere or done something; I cherish them as proof that I, at one point, left my house.
In February, it was decided I would once again exit my house: This time, I would spend a week in California, living out of a converted camper van, in pursuit of the aesthetic fantasy known as #VanLife. Living full time out of a vehicle has become aspirational for a subset of millennials and Zoomers, despite the fact that, traditionally, residing in a car or van is an action taken as a last resort, from want of other options to protect oneself from the elements. The Department of Housing and Urban Development characterizes vehicles as places “not designated for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation,” and because of this it counts people who live in them as members of the “unsheltered homeless” population. But it is ordinary to use some specially designed vehicles — R.V.s, say — as a regular sleeping accommodation, so HUD also advises that whether a vehicle-dweller counts as “unsheltered” is, to some extent, at the counter’s discretion. I would be encouraged to see myself as well sheltered for this week.
I had nearly embarked on a different odyssey — one better suited to someone with a poor sense of direction, who is terrified of driving — except I blew it for myself by being too enthusiastic. Before the #VanLife idea was settled on, my editor dangled a different concept in front of me: I would go to a guitar-shaped hotel and write about it. “LOVE hotels, please send me on any assignment that is based around being in a hotel!!!” I emailed back. But justification for a writer’s passage to the Guitar Hotel at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., in the mind of my editor, required some fashion of explicable premise: a field expedition to ascertain, through observation and reporting, the precise nature of the guitar-shaped hotel’s symbolism, for example. His vision encompassed such concepts as “American dynamism” and “the decline of the guitar.” It incorporated the word “hegemony.”
“E.g.,” read my editor’s email, veering occasionally into Latin. “Etc.”
“Can’t a person just go to a hotel and have a great time and learn a very small amount, for work?” I wrote back, ending all further discussion. I couldn’t wait to get to this hotel, and witness firsthand its resemblance to a (large) guitar.
