Calypso(24)

“Mmmm,” I said, my mouth full the way it always is when the server returns.

“Awesome,” I was told. “I hope you’re saving some room for dessert.” This, with the chuckle that means “Wouldn’t it be funny if what I just said was funny?”

The following morning you’ll wander to the hotel breakfast room and tell the hostess that there is only one in your party. She’ll pick up a menu and lead you to your table, asking, “And how is your day going so far?”

“You mean the last twelve minutes?” you’ll ask. “OK, I guess.”

And she’ll say, “Awesome.”

If you’ve come directly downstairs, this might be the first time since last night that you’ve heard this word. That doesn’t make it refreshing. Rather, it’s like being in Alaska and getting bitten by your first blackfly of the day. I am going to be bleeding by sunset, you’ll think.

More often than not, your breakfast room will have a TV in it, tuned to a twenty-four-hour cable-news network. Sometimes you’ll see two TVs or more. At a place I stayed at in Kentucky one year, there were eight. After I ordered, the waitress went around with her remote and activated each one, making me think of a lamplighter, if lamps were instruments of torture rather than things that make it easier for you to see how old and tired-looking you’ve gotten. “People like it,” she said when I asked if it was really necessary at six o’clock in the morning.

You hear this a lot in America, especially when you’re complaining about televisions, or loud music, or, more common still, television and loud music together in the same room. “People like it.”

“Yes,” I always want to say, “but they’re the wrong people.”

On leaving your hotel, you’ll likely be offered a bottle of water, and urgently, by the fellow who just brought your car around. “You’ll need this for your trip to the airport.”

“I’m actually not walking there,” I always say. “This car is taking me, and I should arrive in no time.”

Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don’t think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards carry around their necks in cartoons, lugging them into the mall and the movie theater, then hogging the fountains in order to refill them. Is that really necessary? I think as I stand behind them with an aspirin dissolving in my mouth, fuming.



Should you wander into a shop during your visit to the United States, you can expect a clerk to ask, “So what are we up to today?” “We,” as if the two of you had made plans you forgot about.

“Oh,” I usually say, already sorry I walked in, “I’m just looking around.”

“Awesome.”

If you purchase something, you’ll be asked at the register what you’re going to do with the rest of your afternoon.

“Umm, I don’t know. Buy more shit?”

My friend Ronnie manages a shoe store, so is fluent in this kind of talk. When we’re out together, she takes over, and effortlessly, while I look on, amazed. “Doing about as well as can be expected,” she says when asked about her health by someone who could not possibly give a fuck. Because she lives in California, Ronnie is on the front lines.

“Did you catch that?” she whispered one afternoon in San Francisco. “That salesman just said, ‘Welcome in.’”

“So?” I asked.

“That’s the latest thing,” she told me. “I’m hearing it everywhere now.”

“Should we add it to the list?”

“Definitely.”

“The list” is a growing collection of words and phrases we’d outlaw if given the power to do so. It includes “awesome,” of course, and “It is what it is,” which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see.

“Isn’t that the state motto of South Dakota?” I said the second or third time I heard it.

Some of my additions to the list were things that Ronnie wasn’t familiar with. “We’re all going to the same place,” for instance. This is what novice fliers in group five say when they get caught trying to board with group two. Sure, we’re all headed to St. Louis. The difference is that some people (me) are going to find room in the overhead bins and others (you) are not.

These same passengers can be counted on to catch my eye and moan, “Hurry up and wait,” when traffic backs up on the Jetway.

I cock my head and look at them with an expression that translates to Why is stuff coming from that hole in your face?



Another word I’ve added to “the list” is “conversation,” as in “We need to have a national conversation about_________.” This is employed by the left to mean “You need to listen to me use the word ‘diversity’ for an hour.” The right employs obnoxious terms as well—“libtard,” “snowflake,” etc.—but because they can be applied to me personally it seems babyish to ban them.