It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Saturday, December 4
The first sign Front Desk Manager Brandon screwed up the schedule and didn’t have me down to return to work tonite was Amy all but fainting when she saw me walk in the door…The second clue was Chris being on the schedule, with yours truly still on vacation…By chance Chris was in-house and Amy called him and said Sparrow’s reported for duty…Chris said he was pleased to leave it to me, he didn’t particularly care…All right, left to me I’m going to work…I mean, I drove in and don’t really want to go home because that would throw off ol’ Sparrow’s treasured sleep patterns…Now, if Chris had said he didn’t want to lose a night’s pay, well, I would’ve left because this was Brandon’s screw up and ol’ Sparrow would’ve been paid anyway, but he didn’t care.
Only one email really pertained to yours truly, the one concerning a regular guest named Scott R, who’s been permanently banned…No reason was given, but it’s not hard to imagine Scott – who’s had a head injury and isn’t quite what he used to be mentally – getting snitty about something or another…Some research showed he visited while I was gone and while there weren’t any notes, the remainder of his stays for the month were canceled.
About 0100 some dufus calls looking for a suite…He sounds young and dimwitted and after I tell him all we can do is either a room with one king bed or two queen beds he says he’ll take both of them…I quote him an out-the-ass rate of $400, plus tax, for both and he says sure and it was hardly the Upset of the Year when he never showed up.
Regular readers of this crap know you get this from time to time and I’ve never understood why…What, do they all die on the way in???…Or who in the hell gets their jollies booking rooms at hotels and not showing up???…Or maybe they decided sleeping in the car is really the better value…It’s really no skin off my nose; it was a slow evening and our final two rooms were not otherwise in demand and while I did get his last name, I didn’t even write it down and certainly didn’t bother with a credit card.
There are four kid hockey teams in-house and some dads were in the lobby when I arrived, a jumbo-sized bottle of booze on the table…One guy started in on a story – probably not for the first time – about how a Corvette he was watching for his brother somehow got moved from his garage to a nearby lake…Alligators were involved…Later, as the group was retiring, he came by the front desk for something or another and I asked if he rode diesel submarines back in the day because alligators and retrieving a car from a body of water are not unfamiliar elements in stories by smoke boat sailors, but he said no.
Ol’ Sparrow was ready to get back to normal with a nice 10-hour session in the sack, but not yet…The diet has been lousy since Monday and the body is still rebelling and yours truly was up about 1500, far from rested but not even a patented Sparrow Roll Over (SRO) produced more sleep…The cat seemed to sense this and hopped down from my back and bumped my face urging me to get up and that sealed it.
On the other hand, the prospect of the first morning routine at home in a while is nothing to scowl at, either…I made some tuna salad – tho yours truly was too lazy to hard boil some eggs for it, tho some mixed nuts were thrown in – and I got the sheets and table cloth and some other things washed and all in all it was an agreeable afternoon and evening.
The Portfolio continues to go down harder than a whore with the fleet in, down about 10% from its high last summer…All is lost.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: The Sleep Log will return tomorrow.
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The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
It was inspired by the 19th-century British novel of the same name.
Gaylon’s books can also be found at The Reading Salon.
