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Holiday Inn

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Holiday Inn

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Holiday Inn is a recurring venue in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 21, 2025 and July 06, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “At the Holiday Inn, there are Yakisoda noodles and banana cream pie snack pack jellos”; “I was doing front flips on the bed at the Holiday Inn”. It most often appears alongside Confessions, KGB Bar, New York.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: May 21, 2025
  • Last seen: July 06, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Total Nightmare Policy
May 21, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, May 12 At the Holiday Inn, there are Yakisoda noodles and banana cream pie snack pack jellos and krabby patties gummy candies and lances cream cheese and onion dip crackers. All the most disgusting snacks imaginable, and kind of perverted, too. I’m so particular and annoying with my sleeping issues that I always find myself at depressing hotels, even when there is a wonderful home down the road where I am welcome. I need a Big Bed and Isolation. I need Temperature Control. As a child, I liked things such as camping in birch forests and cramped little stone cottages in some village where my parents would find someone on the Internet to swap houses with. Unfortunately, I grew up into someone with severe and undiagnosable sleep disorders, and a taste for adventure that is rooted more in hedonism and less in fresh air. I feel really full and sleepy heading back to New York. Well, things are better than they were. Total nightmare policy. Total, blow up your life brother, policy. I was so addicted to writing in my google docs journal this weekend and now I have a lot of annoying slop to show for it. I call my dad in the sun outside the Starbucks in a Strip Mall. Stop thinking about things in such eternal terms, they tell me. You wouldn’t get in a car crash and say When Can I Go 100 Again, they remind me. Fiction, again - they are talking about somebody else. The idea of compromise no longer makes your blood boil. It’s an unsavory trait that it ever did in the first place. "The other alternative is that I just become a nightmare and you become perfect," I told him. "That is certainly an alternative," he told me. It is 11:30pm, and I am thinking about getting a job. I am thinking about the Current Body Red Light Mask and the Ayede heels from ssense.com. "What if I hadn’t simply crashed out," he said. "There would have been pros and cons to that," I said. There is a fire alarm and mauve curtains and two weird arched doorways because we booked a suite and so the architecture suggests some simulacra of something vaguely Roman. Marble. Plaster cut to look like marble. I go to buy water and they have turned off the creepy lights at the creepy pool. Tuesday, May 13 I was feeling really terrified, if I’m being honest about it. I was sitting on the sidewalk picking at my nails and drinking hot coffee in the hot sun, eight splenda, curdled almond milk. I was voicing concerns in a high pitched voice and I was losing track of the distinguishment between ideas imagined and conversations regurgitated. God forbid I have an original thought of my own - that part wasn't even on the table. It isn’t so dark and depressing anymore. Walk in the rain and everything is so green here. I’ll be back in the city tonight and there are better omens in the astrology these days around things like planes, the return, glass apartments in the sky. He leaves my keys on the bedside table at the hotel, and he’s still asleep when I pack up my things and leave to eat black coffee, turkey deli meat, garlic aioli, marcona almonds. We drive to his parent’s house and he gives me drumstick vanilla ice cream. Working on this laptop, surrounded by all this green. You know that every time you hit this vape it coats your lungs in sweet thick paste, I am telling him, as I hit his vape. The last time I wrote about hitting a vape I received an infuriating pseudo intellectual email about the verbiage "hit" as suggesting a sado-masochistic impulse in our digital age. "I wonder if soon, you'll be saying you 'Beat' or 'Pummeled' your vape?" the idiot email writer wrote. The email made me so mad. You're so stupid, I wanted to write back. We go for a walk in the bright green forest. There is a sweetness here. A coming-back-into-control that makes the out-of-control-ness feel so distant. Escape from Evil and two days later you mistake reprieve for salvation. Unless, you are not mistaken. It really could be that simple. What was it they were saying on The Internet? Break The Pattern Today Or The Loop Will Repeat Tomorrow. What was it I've been saying online? Edit Artificial Intelligence robot voice over text to speech words - "Taking My Party Boy Boyfriend On A Walking Tour Of The Cotswolds." I clarify that I've been defending his honor. We're crushing up the plastic water cups, and the hill is steep up the road. I clarify that there are people of extremes. It was very bad, but now it is very good, I am texting my mother. Honestly, I'm so sick of clarifying anything at all. You're a little more sober with it. You're a little more gentle about it. It transformed in two days. Imagine two weeks. Imagine a year. Imagine rushing even one second. I can control my consciousness. Though, it isn't my consciousness, really, that I've been concerned about. I'm glad we share a frame of mind. This plane is basically empty. Wednesday, May 14 We went to KGB late last night. Thursday, May 15 The woman who does yoga on her fire escape is out there with a cigarette, today. I’m not in a bad mood today. The apartment is a mess and I am concerned about my past. Things become steady, and then even bright. Friday, May 16 Well, I didn't write because I have been busy in real life. I've been imagining an identity rooted in delusions in the secret diary that stays offline. It is not so delusional. I am feeling so sincere. Rebecca is here. My sister is here. We went to KGB Bar and Fanelli Cafe and Funny Bar where we met a Gagosian guy turned AI guy, which I guess has kind of been my career arch too though I am not so pleased about that direction. We went to the party at Bowery where the waiter from Fanelli Cafe was the DJ and I had two vodka sodas then soda water with lime which might be all I do soon, though I keep on having all these cyclical conversations with myself about these things - consumption and gluttony - and there is little that more dull, so I will not bring it up again. I went to the sleep specialist and she giggled when I said I don't scream in my sleep if I am in the company of strangers. That's different but great, she said. Do I control my subconscious, I said. Stupid idiot, she said. I did actually go to all these parties, and I did call him from the bathroom. He'll be back in New York soon, making film and code and learning banjo. It's way better than the alternative, and I do feel very proud this week which is something I have not been able to say in a good long while. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Wednesday, May 21 From 7pm - 8:30pm at The Flea Theater (20 Thomas St) — I’ll be seeing Revolution: The Play. Sophia Englesberg is associate producer, and everything she touches is wonderful. Written and produced by Brett Neveu, directed by Rebecca Harris. The theater is next to The Odeon, so you can get my favorite martini before or after the show. - “Who celebrates their 26th birthday in the alley outside of her hairdressing place o’ work? Revolution interrogates and celebrates the very nature of creating community and building friendships in our ever-evolving, ever disconnecting world.”
Inline links: Revolution: The Play, Sophia Englesberg, The Odeon
Bad Luck Spot
July 06, 2025 · Original source
Sunday, July 6 Summer storm of the nicest kind outside, and I think I’ll leave the lights off. I don't have so much to say about the time back in New York. I came back to the ocean because, of course, this is the sort of place where summer storms are nicer. And I have spent a while, so long really, quivering in this assurance that it would be ok; cling onto this one thing so tightly and then it will be ok, for the sake of this, to lose everything else. Well, there was a two-year-life and now there is everything else. It is not so much that I value peace. I value many, though not all, things before peace. It is not so much that I am gracious or really even care to be. I am being opaque. I was a guest there, for a lot of it. My old life, I mean. And it is not so much that I was too gentle for things like wild dogs and self surveillance. It is just, there were things that were mine first too. Summer storms and lace curtains on the edge of the bed. I did not always view things as possessed in this way though, I realize, now - it's been a few months, at least, of starting to think in terms of what belongs to me. "It is funny when you two talk about raising children on gray rocky shores, because you sure have no problem creating rocky shores," Rose told me in Miami. We'd been up all night,. Poured the liquor from the mini fridge down the drain and stood barefoot in the hotel hallway with a coconut juice, short quick breath. A baseball team had marched down the corridor at sunrise, and it was strange, even then, to watch myself become so shameless. My father video called me from New York, after. His hands made a downhill slope, steep then level, then steep and dropping and; “at a certain point you will not be able to stay,” he had told me. “At a certain point he will deem you problem no matter how determined you are to remain some sort of martyr.” At the end of the world there is a warplane over the graduation and a psychic in Rhode Island and he is screaming about cocks and his mother at a wedding in Michigan and he is screaming because I am opening my own doors at the hotel in South Beach and he is screaming at me in the apartment, later, it did all blur together. He was taking the art. He was taking his ShitCoin passkeys. He was taking his copy of Generative Energy and I was taking cigarettes, a sweater. I was trying not to be so voyeuristic about it. He was trying to use fewer slurs on the phone. I was doing front flips on the bed at the Holiday Inn and yelling: I can’t wait for our dry wedding, dry wedding, dry wedding. And he was saying that he drinks with the intention to forget and so it wouldn't come to all of that. Bad habits, strip mall parking lot and Rose was saying my denial was as deep as his was though, there had always been this thing of performance art. I want to party beautifully until we die, he used to tell me. I want to live like Match Point (2005), After Hours (1985), Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Later, we were walking up spring green hills and he was saying it would be easier, all of it, getting better, getting kinder, getting sober, getting bored, getting pregnant, if I stayed for a while. He wore gym shorts to the airport and returned in a rage. Later, on the floor, tuck my knees close to my chest by the open window and say I love you but my life is so much better when you are not in it and then he'd said how could you. Lie on the floor and he would say I orbit you. Summer storm and I'm texting him like I'm sorry. Because there were many letters and they kept on getting worse. Summer storm in early July and I was texting him even now like, I orbited you too. Iris came over in the afternoon in Miami. I picked her up in the lobby. I dove for his lost coral in the pool downstairs. The skin on my chest burned easily. I lay on the deck of the pool on the roof with a bloody mary that he bought me and that South Beach vibe, sunglasses, beady eyes. Ok intense girl, he said. How are you doing, Iris said. I didn't like the way he was holding you at dinner after everything he did, Iris said. In Rhode Island, last summer, we'd still been talking about things like soulmates last summer and we'd been driving in the rain. There had been a quaker church house, red Talbot sweater, a copper pot that we'd hang in New York but not till later and a little old lady. “You were a soldier wounded in the war in a past life,” the little old lady had told him. She had grabbed my shoulders, all shivering. “And it is a beautiful journey for you and him,” she had told me. “If you are ever pulled apart it will be a difficult and dark journey, but it is a beautiful journey for you and him.” “And so you cannot leave him,” Iris said in Miami. We liked hotels because of anonymity and aesthetic cohesion. He liked me because of blue eyes and devotion. He liked Miami because everyone was packing heat and I liked symbolism, numerology, gnosticism. “I like when things are fun,” I wrote him. “I like when things are fun and sweet.” And I showed up late to some basement apartment back in New York. The funny thing is, I had begged him not to go to that final party. I had begged him not to beg me to come. “My wife should think it's hot if I fight someone at a party,” he said later. “I want to get sober and treat you with the affection you deserve,” he had said, first, a few weeks before all of that. Once, we lived in a glass apartment in the sky. Central air conditioning but the greenhouse roof still made things boil and we'd call it the Boat House like some sort of joke, because floors slanted and careened and because of course, it was the only house. But so quickly, I am taken in as if I’m some sort of orphan. So quickly there are other houses. "He called and sounds like a horror movie, so you should get the fuck out of the apartment," Rose said in the aftermath. And it was Isabel who screamed first and so I did snap then. He is not a horror movie, just a shark or an orca whale or mostly a boy who is not here. Get out if you want to act scared. And so we did take some things and get out. And I did drive down the coastline because I still just could not stay put. It had always been a thing of kind of here, there, everywhere with us. High spring humid heat and there'd been no crocodiles in the river, no liquor at the hacker house, just warm beer and tall trees and broken glass and, “I'm looking forward to being very sweet to each other.” he had said. In the end, it wasn't me who lost my mind. So you were speaking as you two in one when you said you had the real sort of breakdown, the other party goers said, at that last party. I nodded. The party goers patted my shoulders. The party goers wanted no part. The texts were warm and made me ill. They took him out. They took me home. Blue paisley sheets at the home where I grew up and I remind him, for the first time, of the parts of it that were first all mine. Pull the blinds shut tight. Thunder and acid rain. He never bought into ideas of living forever in quite the way his friends did and, “your ideas of eternity become quite juvenile,” he says. Staring at cinched shut cream white shades and, “I’m looking at the ocean right now,” I say. “Don't you want to look at that ocean again?” The rot hits all at once. It smells like sickness and cruelty I did not know could be true. Lying on the bathroom floor - not my bathroom, I have been taken in like I am some sort of orphan, though I feel strangely less orphaned than ever before. I said I will not leave the party with him and so he said he will not ever come home again. There was discretion and bringing in reinforcement and he’d call first, before anyone else, stilted voice, some sort of laugh, he would like to be the one to break the latest news. He would like to be the one to make me guess. “Everyone heard you say that when she was your age you were nine,” he tells me on the phone, later. “That is because when she was my age, I was nine," I tell him on the phone, too. I talk a lot about decadence and gluttony and our no-beliefs-but-pleasure dumb lives but; for me it has not always been rotten. For me it was the opposite or; I could always see all the rot just drifting around in piles of money and provocation and drugs and alcohol and I do think there were the years of just floating, I've been floating alongside all of this rot and shock of all shocks it got sick. For me it has not always been rotten, though. It is very important that I make that clear. I did feel I could float around it. I have always been arrogant in a way. I did sit on the floor by an open window and I did lie in the rain in the night on the terrace. I remember laughing very quietly on the terrace. I remember trying to laugh as quietly as we could. At the end of the world I am working on ontology. Because you always did like to ontologize things, he is laughing on the phone. Because I think six hours in the future and you think in terms of forever, he is saying on the phone. The end of the world is something like an extinction event, abandon your whole entire life, chinook fighter plane carrier streaking over the graduation and, after the quaker church burned down I decided to get out of town. There were other things too. I threw up lobster and vodka after dinner. The dog bit the neighbor. He called because I asked him to and also to say; he missed the dog, and my family, and a little bit me. Psychosis felt like dancing, he tells me on the phone. And you felt like tells me what to do and she feels like take it to the internet, he never had a problem, kicked out of the bar, and then it’s have another baby while there's still precious time. Once, it all felt like lie on a Japanese floor mattress, white arched doorway and we wanted to remember it here and, “I wish I could start it all over before you,” he said. You wake up in the middle of the night in a hotel in the midwest to the sense that you are on the seven hundredth floor and there is no air left. You wake up. But you were already awake then, weren't you? You go to the bathroom, a normal bathroom, normal for a hotel like this. Small, compact, gray, windowless. You close the door, press your back hard against its now steady frame. You imagine that if you opened it again, you would be met with another bathroom just like this. You imagine a million identical bathrooms extending beyond every wall. In the car the next day, you tell him that it’s opposite day. On opposite day, you ask him if he loves you over and over again. You revel in hearing him say no. The charade is comforting. He’s driving recklessly. You drive for hours. The land is flat, his hand is on your thigh, he’s saying things he doesn’t mean and then he’s smirking because you're both in on the joke. He tells you to take her feet off the dash. In case there’s a wreck, he says. You tell him that opposite day is over. “Do you love me?” you ask. “Yes,” he says. “Is it opposite day,” you ask? “No,” he says. “But if it was you’d never know because no means yes and yes means no and…” He finishes explaining the word play. He explains it well. You get it. “Do you get it,” he asks. “Yes,” you say. You don't like these new rules. You are driving too fast, through a field of sunflowers. You think about how you could ask if the sky is blue and if he said yes then she could know that today was a day for telling the truth. You think about what you left behind. “I did not mean to leave those drawings behind at the apartment,” I am saying. The cartoons that he made me and I de-magnetized the fridge on accident and could the drawings be for me, and, “that's ok,” he says. Storm out of another party. He threw cash at me at dinner. Tip over his chair and say the issue is perhaps he never cared and so, it becomes good I was an archivist all along. It is good that nothing bad has ever really happened. He and I walked to the park. The fountain was spraying droplets mixed with rain. The air was sheened rainbow. The bench was covered in packets of ketchup that he was pushing off and down to the ground. He cleared me a seat. We were sitting not in silence, but in conversation that I did not recall even as it happened. “He keeps on taking really somber videos of me like he's already eulogizing me as his Dead Wife," I told Rose on the phone. "Do you know how we could make this even worse?" I asked him. Walk to a circle of wet chalk on the wet pavement. Bad Luck Spot, the writing on the ground says. Plant my feet firmly in the middle, and I wait for the curse to hit. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Sunday, July 6 From 7pm at KGB Bar — I will be reading at Confessions along with Mara Stoner, Sarah Fradkin, John Padula, Cassidy Grady, Annabel Boardman, and more.
Inline links: Confessions

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