Those soulless US motels are good for the soul

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/30/soulless-us-motel-therapy-rest-stop

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I was in California last week, in Los Angeles for a night, where I stayed in a chain hotel in Beverly Hills, and then in San Jose, where I checked into an airport motel. The latter was situated on a traffic island between interstates, one running towards Oakland, the other in the direction of San Francisco to the north and LA to the south.

It was a transitional place, the kind where no one stays for longer than a night or ever returns to, and where, for dinner, you have the choice of walking along the freeway to a branch of Chipotle, or using the vending machine in the lobby. More pertinently, it was the kind of place that features in American pop culture as a rest stop for serial killers, runaways and those with no final destination in mind.

I love these non-places. There is a weird romance to them that, in the right circumstances, makes a virtue of what might otherwise be depressing: in this particular establishment, an ancient communal PC in the lobby and a pool out back, surrounded by a white picket fence and overlooked on three sides by the blank windows of the motel. No one was, or had possibly ever been, in the water.

Related: Hip US motels

There are lots of options these days for treating brain-overload, the feeling of paralysis that is either a side-effect of our speeded-up world or else a basic condition of living, but that either way manifests itself as a weariness with the self.

You can go and sit in silence on a meditation retreat. You can do yoga or pound yourself senseless at the gym. You can pay a therapist lots of money to bear the weight of your baggage for an hour or two.

Or, for $100, you can check into an airport or motorway rest stop where no one knows your name and, relieved of every identity cue except for the familiarity of your own wash bag, stare at the tiny kettle and pre-flat screen TV and for a short while, escape from time and the world.

Chicks away

I drove out of San Jose, 30 miles south to Santa Cruz, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean and borders some of the greatest natural habitats of the west coast of the United States. Studies show that time spent in nature improves our mental health, something I felt strongly in California. Less so when I got back to New York.

In the city, there are rats or there are pigeons, and for a week I have been watching the latter play out an avian three-act drama on the terrace of my 13th-floor apartment. Every day, a brown-feathered pigeon burps food down the gullet of her extremely large baby – so large, in fact, that it must be a teenager.

As the violence escalated and it all went Ken Loach, I wondered if I should be shielding my own baby’s eyes

A few days ago, a dead chick materialised on the terrace floor. A day later, half-way through a feeding, the mother bird started jabbing wildly at her child’s face and whacking it about the head with her wings.

If we have learned anything from David Attenborough, it’s to allow nature to take its course, and so while I stood dithering by the door, I didn’t go out. As the violence escalated and it all went very Ken Loach, I wondered briefly if I should be shielding my own baby’s eyes. (Until I looked down and saw she was more interested in the miracle of her own feet.)

Professional wildlife people take a dim view of anthropomorphism, but there’s no avoiding the read on this scene. Clearly the mother pigeon, broken-hearted by the death of her chick, has lost her mind and is taking it out on the lanky teenager, who I’m hoping takes the hint and leaves home.

It’s a tough town where even the pigeons need therapy.