Then it was off to the airport bright and early the next morning. Onward to São Paulo, Brazil this time –and just in time to stop over there for my old Skull Ring brother Iggy Pop’s upcoming show.
As I drifted off to sleep in the First Class cabin (Scumbaggery has its perks!) on the south-bound night flight from NY, I was glad to finally be on my way home to Brazil, back to Rio and my girl and my kittens and my big black pet vultures roosting under the Jolly Roger flag on my roof.
The minute I got off the plane in São Paulo after a twelve hour red-eye flight, the summer heat of South America hit me in the head like a golden shower from an angry King-Kong. By the time I made it to the hotel that my girl’s friends had booked for me near the festival venue there, I was ready to draw the blinds, turn off the phone, turn on the AC and crash for the next ten hours — which is exactly what I
did.
The next day, I was awakened by my grinning Paulista cousin, Theo Castilho. He’d borrowed some girlfriend’s car and come to find me. We got in the car and drove through the most horrifying bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic known to man for hours and hours, struggling against the foul currents of that apocalyptic urban river of shit to get to the Sao Paulo Hilton where Iggy was staying to pick up our credentials and backstage passes for the next day’s show. Of course when we got there it was the usual Brazilian beurocratic cluster-fuck. Iggy, of course, was nowhere to be found. Smart guy.
Finally, credentials in hand, we battled our way back through the asphalt jungle of São Paulo highways and back streets, honking and lurching through the choking, smoking, bleeting motorized sheeple hordes of hell. Back at my hotel again, I was met by my girl Tali in the lobby.
“Where the fock you been? Do you got my pass for the show?” She hissed after a brief hug.
“I missed you too, baby!” I said as she greeted Cousin Theo with a kiss on the cheek.
She had just driven down from Rio with the friends who had reserved my room there. We took our leave of Cousin Theo and went upstairs to the room. We had to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom so as not to set off the smoke detector place in the middle of that horrible corporate cubicle. I’d already tried unscrewing the accursed surveillance instrument on my first night there — which only resulted in a call from the lobby and a knock at my door. Sometimes ya just can’t win.
Tali’s friends didn’t know it at the time they booked our rooms there, but the place could best be described as The Air Conditioned Nightmare Hotel. The Nightmare, it seems, is part of the Monopoly Board held by a creepy, faceless multi-national hotel chain called IBIZ. What a shit excuse for a hotel the Air Conditioned Nightmare turned out to be.
Like most profit-before-service reptilian enterprises, this hotel chain’s corporate strategy is inhuman and dehumanizing and soul-less at best. These modern new globalist hotel chains are an ugly modern day plague that seem to be spreading across Brazil along with the general cancer of Globalization that’s making the whole world sick. Their business strategy is to create a bland and “comfortable” sterile
artificial enviornment that caters to the lowest common denominator of middle-class bourgeois tastes and then charge abusive rates while effectively isolating their “guests” (ie: prisoners) from all local commerce and culture in order to hold them hostage in a shitty little Pre-Fab cookie-cutter limbo.
Like any would-be monopoly, they’re set up efficiently to exploit their victims mercilessly, charging more than double the local value for basic services and products. Not to mention the exorbitant room rate. What shit. And then you can’t even smoke a fucking cigarette in your own fucking room. To make matters worse, the windows don’t open in these stifling corporate jail cells! And just a couple of miles
away in downtown São Paulo I couldve gotten a much nicer, better-equipped hotel room with a fucking balcony overlooking a green plaza in a nice human enviornment for half the fucking price, right in the middle of everything and walking distance to shops, restaurants, whorehouses, the works.
But no. The ignorant exploited masses of middle-class, mind-controlled sheeple want to feel safe and protected from their-media-warped perception of the real world. They wanna be tucked away safe and sound in some reptilian fairy-tale pink pseudo-gringo air-conditioned bubble. They want fucking Disneyland. And now their brains are slowly turning to mush — just like their gringo neighbors to the north.
Well nevermind. At least I got a good rest there. My jet lag was zero by the time my girl showed up with a bag full of trouble and paranoia and accusations of infidelity to drop right in my lap within minutes of our happy reunion! At least I was well rested for all the upcoming drama. And if I hadda lay up in some corporate Air Conditioned hell for ten hours to get that rest after weeks of work and travel and
people, it was all for the best. Soon enough, I thought to myself, I’d be back home in Rio again, breathing the filthy polluted air of the filthy polluted real world of real people living real lives.
After a raging pre-dawn jealous tirade in which my girl – true to form- yelled and cursed at me so loudly she must have woken up half the other prisoners in that foul reptilian shit-hole, we finally kissed and made up sometime around dawn. Another sleepless night. Great! Feeling repentent perhaps for creating another ugly public scandal over essentially nothing, just some random chick she’d found a picture
of me with, she made it up to me by going off around 8 in the morning to hang with her friends, mercifully letting me to finally — you guessed it — draw the blinds, turn off the phone, turn on the AC and crash for the next several hours — which is exactly what I did.
no images were found
tali has spiritual grace.
@the cat pic: very nice view! sad looking cat tho, lol.