Right now, I’m enduring the hotel’s complimentary breakfast buffet—a smorgasbord of culinary crimes. The eggs taste like embalming fluid. The sausage options? Cardboard links and tasteless pig patties. The cubed potatoes resemble theater props, the kind the stage manager warns the cast not to eat. The cook and host, a sweet elderly woman tethered to an oxygen tank, lumbers around, clearing plates and chirping, “Everything okay, hon?”
Across the dining room, bulky adult couples methodically shovel down their flavorless morning feed. No one speaks. Some glare at their plates, seemingly aware that they’re consuming their own slow demise but unable to stop. The breakfast is, after all, complimentary. Seconds and thirds are inevitable. Everyone over forty has a belly, a limp, and a persistent cough. Not a mask in sight. Either I’ve stumbled into a dystopian health experiment or a baffling live-action Kafkaesque Rockwell painting.
In the last twelve hours, I’ve seen more pregnant women, stroller-bound babies, families with children, and Lutheran priests than I have in four years in my urban Denver neighborhood. As I write this, more parents with children arrive. I’ve never seen so many kids—some teenagers still in their pajamas while their parents, clearly beaten down by life, inhale pancakes in silence. Elsewhere, tiny tots excitedly discuss swimming in the hotel pool after church. Who swims anymore in hotel cesspools? And Church? It’s Saturday. Wait, maybe they are Seventh-day Adventists. I mean, they can’t be Jewish, they’re eat Cardboard links—plus it’s Wyoming.
Holy cow. Two parents beside me are talking about tonight’s Sadie Hawkins dance at the high school. Am I in the 1960s? No, it’s 2025. Double holy cow—more priests just walked in. That’s four. What’s happening? Are they onto me? The cowboys at the next table eye me suspiciously as if I’m about to detonate my laptop. Maybe it’s my unruly hair. Or perhaps it’s just that I’m the only person here with a computer, clearly out of sync with the rhythm of this fertility cult disguised as small-town America. More families flood in. Who the hell breeds anymore?
And then it dawns on me: I’m the problem. The outsider. The anomaly in this wholesome, all-American diorama. Suddenly, I feel an inexplicable urge to convert to Lutheranism. Seventh-day Adventists isn’t possible, but Lutheranism, I could swing that. Then, I’d find my place in this peculiar world. And maybe, for once, I’d belong. Perhaps I’d be less judgmental and more accepting of my fellow human beings.
I eat the tasteless patty, retreat to my room, and watch a rerun of Family Feud - All the way through, beginning to end. The Johnson family from Topeka won. And I’m happy for them. Truly happy. And I don’t judge them for making fools of themselves on some stupid game show. Then, in a moment of enlightenment, I think, maybe after church, I’ll take a dip in the hotel pool.
In Wyoming, where the wind blows the sunsets away, all that is left are your bones......