Food Flying Breakfast and the Music that Drove Me Mad

A Marriott breakfast is a thing to behold.

Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” plays mercilessly in the lobby of the hotel albeit at 7:00 in the morning even though it is not Jackson himself zinging it over the speakers but a Jackson imitator- an hour or so before the unremitting sun begins to burn through your clothes- alternating with simulacra performances of much too familiar Beach Boys tunes. Occasionally a genuine Aretha Franklin ditty is thrown in to imbue the musakical soundtrack thunderously wafting through the large space perhaps with a modicum of authenticity and plant the notion in your brain that this is not really a form of mind control.

Ah, morning in Irvine!!! The entirety of Orange County appears to be  cloaked in a kind of moaning soft rock subtext that is not all that “sub” and sort of bangs you over the head wherever you happen to be, with melodies mainly from the nineteen fifties and sixties that were better left behind; the ubiquitous soundtrack however seems to fit perfectly in some truly terrible way with the huge sunglasses everyone wears to stave off early blindness. You are assaulted with this noise at all the big box stores and some little ones too; it becomes impossible to grab lunch or find the kind of tissues or toilet paper or SPF 1,000 sunscreen you seek while these cacophonous beats drill through your consciousness.

A typical day: I exit the elevator with its sonorous ping way too early  as I do each morning, nod in the direction of the unusually friendly and alert front desk folk and bop through the lobby to the sound of knock-offs from the “Thriller” album, not fully awake yet, not entirely clothed, but yearning for one of those frozen undersized bagel look-a-likes and tiny packets of solidified cream cheese or hardened dollops of jam similarly wedged into foil; from a distance the thing on which these odd condiments land resembles a bialy gone very, very wrong or a weird, uncooked donut, but close up it tastes sort of like one of those stiff, round objects found in the supermarket frozen case minus the highly chemical, vaguely onion flavor that makes these soft sponges of re-heated ice chips almost palatable when you prepare them at home in your toaster oven. Be that as it may, I devour the repast in about two bites and thank my lucky stars for the cappuccino impersonator that accompanies this meal because at least it looks like the real thing. The word that most comes to mind in this neck of the woods is “cardboard,” because it’s all recyclable.

After a couple of days of this sad though exciting ritual of unappetizing food and rousing music in a scene peopled largely by bright-eyed-bushy-tailed corporate conference attendees roaming around in identically colored pale blue shirts with an assortment of ties and slightly glazed stares, I have all but forgotten that low fat double chocolate muffins exist and that there are aromatic beans sitting in huge barrels three thousand miles away at Zabar’s, giving off a pungent, mouth watering scent of real coffee as a suitably classical piece on low volume gently nudges the background, and that there are  lines of slightly edgy shoppers cracking cynical, funny jokes with the servers and looking comfortably scruffy; that it may even be raining or at the least cloudy and that all this exists as we speak, as I type, as Marriotts all over the globe begin to serve their version of breakfast.