Tag Archives: hotel

“You Ruined Yellow!”

Cast of characters:

  • Eddie:  My first Chicago roomie who I found on Craigslist 7 years ago.  I don’t see him very often anymore, but he’s one of those friends that will always be there… one of my favs.
  • A full cast of random extras.

Historical context:

  • My favorite color is yellow.
  • My favorite number is 11.
  • I was in Vegas last month.
  • I lived in Chicago for 6 years… a Chicagoan at heart.
  • I die in dreams sometimes, and when I do, it’s always from being shot.  Other locales where I have been shot and died… in an outhouse in rural Spain, in a long, dark blue hallway in the Amsterdam airport, and under an overpass on John Nolan Drive in Madison, WI.

The dream:

This is not a fun one, folks.  I had this dream a few weeks ago.  It is still crystal clear in my mind.

I entered a fancy hotel in Las Vegas with my fellow assassins.  I don’t know if we were good or bad, just assassins.  I was with a handful of men, all dressed in black suits and wearing black sunglasses.  I was also wearing a black suit coat, skirt, and sunglasses.  I had on a black wig… a bob.  The hotel lobby was cozy and dimly lit and had dark red velvet curtains lining the walls.  The chairs and couches in the lobby were also dark red velvet with gold rivets.  The carpet was a deep red paisley.  There were people lounging around the lobby, both sitting and standing.  We walked through the lobby to check in at reception.  We knew that we had to be very careful during check in so that no one became suspicious about who we were and why we were there.  The group of men (5 or 6 of them) checked in first.  They were all going to be staying in a suite.  They checked in with no problem and without eliciting suspicion.  They walked away to the right, and then it was my turn to check in.  I was staying in a standard room next to their suite.  The man checking me in was tall and thin, with short sandy blonde hair.  He was wearing a button-up white shirt with a pin-striped vest and black pants.  I also checked in with no problem, until the very end.  When the man handed me my key card and told me my room number, he looked me in the eye, and I knew that he knew we were up to something.  I was so nervous that I had been detected as an assassin, but I tried to brush it off as nothing.  I turned to my right and walked to the elevator.

All of a sudden we, my fellow male assassins and I, were in a ballroom upstairs.  It was a very bland and large ballroom… white walls and ceiling with beige swirly carpet.  There were several round tables with white table cloths set up at the other end of the ballroom.  It was as if all the round tables were pushed against the back wall to create a big empty space in the middle of the room.  There were several metal and beige chairs sitting around the tables.  The ballroom was set up to hold a conference of a few thousand people.  Behind us, there were a few long tables against the wall, covered with white table cloths, with a few leftover appetizers… little sandwiches on silver colored plastic trays with white doilies.  My fellow assassins and I were standing in front of the long tables, relaxing and talking.  We were all dressed casually… the men were wearing white t-shirts and jeans.  I don’t know what I was wearing, but it wasn’t my fancy suit.  We were waiting to carry out or mission… the assassination of a lot of people.  All of a sudden, the room was “full” of people, and by full, I mean that there were about a dozen other men milling around the long tables along with us.  We were chatting and making small talk, when one of my fellow assassins screamed “DOWN!” and all the assassins hit the floor.  All of a sudden, the guns that we had hidden in the fake trees on the other side of the now much-smaller room started shooting the other men in the room.  We all knew that, after we heard the eleventh gun shot, all the other men in the room should be dead.  I laid on my stomach next to one of my fellow assassins who had short brown hair.  He and I looked at each other as the eleven shots went off, counting each one silently together, one by one.  After the eleventh shot,  we all looked around at our fellow assassins, before slowly standing up to assess the situation.  All the assassins had survived the shooting, and it appeared that all of the other men in the room were now dead, as planned.  As we became more comfortable in our belief that all the other men were dead, we started talking in normal voices about how to get rid of the bodies.  That’s when I turned around, and then everything moved in slow motion.  One of the bleeding men on the ground was not dead, and when I turned around, he was standing there holding a pistol, pointing it at me from about 5 feet away.  He was a small, middle-aged man with brown spiky hair and pale skin.  We was wearing a bright yellow t-shirt with some sort of red emblem on it.  He was bullet-ridden on the left side of his body and held the gun with his right hand.  As he began to collapse back to the ground, he screamed at me, “YOU RUINED YELLOW!” and then shot me six times on the left side of my torso.  I fell back and stared at the white ceiling, speechless, as I started to bleed to death.  All of my fellow assassins were standing above me, screaming at me, trying to save me, when I closed my eyes.

When I opened my eyes, I was sitting in the front seat of the right side of a bus against a window.  It was pitch black outside, and we were driving down an endless street in Chicago.  The bus driver was just driving straight, with no reason to stop.  There were no street lights or any signs of life outside, just blackness.  The front of the inside of the bus was bright red, and the side walls of the bus were bright yellow.  The bus was well lit inside.  Next to me, in the aisle seat, a woman sat.  She was my friend.  I was wrapped tightly in white gauze, but my gunshot wounds were bleeding through the gauze.  I was dying.  The woman and I were so sad, but we had come to terms with the fact that I was close to death.  I looked across the aisle and saw that Eddie was sitting in the aisle seat on the left side of the bus.  I walked over to him and sat in the window seat next to him.  I leaned over and laid in his lap.  He put his left arm over me, and we both started sobbing.  The sadness we felt was overwhelming.  After a few moments, I died.

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Mexico’s Killer Catfish

Cast of Characters:

  • Jess J. – BFF in Madison, WI.  We’ve probably traveled to 20 countries together, no joke.
  • Cardinal Jessica – One of my BFFs who I met about 10 years ago.  She was the door girl at the best bar in the world, the Cardinal Bar, in Madison, WI, where I spent a large portion of my time in the mid-2000s.  We both then moved to Chicago, where we became great friends.  She now lives in Minneapolis.  We have traveled together to five countries… and counting!
  • Jackie – A current co-worker… the “dark-haired ginger.”
  • Sarah M. – A current co-worker.

Historical Context:

  • Jess J. and I traveled together most recently to St. Maarten last year.
  • Cardinal Jessica and I traveled together most recently to Mexico earlier this year.
  • I love Mexico!
  • I used to go fishing for catfish with my dad in rural Wisconsin.  I haven’t eaten or touched a catfish in probably 25 years.
  • We have a lot of meetings at work, and Jackie always seems to be the one taking the notes.
  • Sarah is in charge of our loyalty program at work.

Wednesday night’s dream:

There were three separate parts to this dream.  The dream started in a hotel room in Mexico, though it was a pretty accurate spacial depiction of my last room in St. Maarten.  I was standing there alone, in anticipation of Jess J. arriving.  It was very dark, and I had all of the curtains closed (in real life, I never close the curtains wherever I am at any time of day).  I knew she wasn’t going to like the room.  I went outside to the beach.  It was cold, windy, and gray outside.  I was overlooking a gray, choppy ocean, and there were sticks and seaweed littering the shore.  The beach was empty and the air absolutely silent, though there were waves crashing ashore.  I knew that Jess wasn’t going to like the beach either.  I went back into the room, and Jess was there.  She said that she was fine, but that she wasn’t going to leave the room.

Flash to me standing in a different hotel room in Mexico.  I opened the safe and took out my credit card statement.  I saw that there was a charge on my visa for another hotel room in a Mexican beach town farther south than where I was staying.  I looked towards one of the beds, and Cardinal Jessica was there packing.  I asked her about the charge, and she said that the charge was for the place she was going to stay later that night.  I asked her to please put that room on her own credit card, and I reached into the safe to pull out my phone.  I told her that I’d be happy to call the hotel for her since it only cost me $0.50 per minute in Mexico.

Flash to me laying on a lounge chair in my bikini in the middle of our Traveler conference room at work.  It was our real conference room at work, but it was located in a hotel in Mexico.  Jackie was standing at the white board with a blue dry erase marker.  Sarah M. was sitting across the table from me to my right.  We were meeting to discuss whether or not to make one of our clients a member of our loyalty program.  We were brainstorming pros and cons.  All of a sudden there was a slimy, wet catfish lying on my stomach.  I was grossed out and didn’t know why there was a catfish there.  It was squirming around.  All of a sudden, the catfish was soft and velvety, and I started to pet it.  It inched its way up to my chest, and then out of nowhere, it lunged towards my neck and locked onto it, sucking harder and harder, trying to swallow my neck.  I grabbed it with both hands, trying to pull it off, while screaming to Jackie for help, over and over again.  She said that she couldn’t help and that we had to get back to business.  I just kept screaming and eventually started to suffocate.  I woke up from my dream choking.  How pleasant.