September 26, 2016 scottcjones 2Comments

My father and mother arrived on Sunday to drop off the paper at the hospital. My father was obviously excited. “I found a place that sells it for $6 instead of $10,” he said with pride. The $10 Canadian price of the NY Times vexed and mystified him on a very deep level. I knew the place where he’d gotten such a discount: the dimly lit convenience mart on Davie Street that had about a hundred hookahs in the front window, all decorated with dazzling sprays of rhinestones. I told him the store had been closed the year before for selling black market handguns. “Who cares if they sell monkey…

July 20, 2016 scottcjones 4Comments

I recently had to collect a stray package from the UPS store. I headed for the West End, where the yellow note that UPS had left on my front door directed me to go. It was a balmy weekday afternoon. Strong sunshine, but not too strong. Canadians like to stroll on summer afternoons. They seem to have no destination or purpose. They don’t walk, per se; more accurately, they drift. They pause at random moments. They gaze up at trees as if they’ve never seen trees before. I know West Coast Canadians now. They’re lovely, but most have static in their heads, like TV’s without signals. Or they’re…

May 13, 2016 scottcjones 3Comments

I flew to New York City the first week in March to attend a VR conference at the New Museum on the Bowery. I’d booked a room in an upscale flophouse on 29th Street called the Ace Hotel. The Ace’s Expedia reviews were decent enough. And it was on the east side of midtown, which would make it easier for me to get to CNET, which is also on 29th Street. I had an appointment at CNET later in the week. (This is why.) (more…)

May 12, 2016 scottcjones 4Comments

I’m 47 years old now. Hard to believe, I know. Though I still look like a sweet little man-angel—for some reason I’ve got the drum-taut, dew-dappled skin of a pre-teen Swedish boy—it’s official: I am really fucking far away from being young. But I am not old, of course. I am ripe. I’m mature. And I’m also immature, too. A few marginally keen observations: I have this new kind of crepe paper-like skin around my eyes, particularly when I squint. I am horrified when I see it in photographs. Is that Burgess Meredith? I wonder. No, Scott; it’s just you and your newly wrinkled visage. Also: As we…

February 25, 2016 scottcjones 5Comments

The Englishman and I exchanged business cards, wished each other well, said goodnight. As soon as he was gone, I felt a tiny tickle of excitement in the top part of my stomach. I was alone, and that tickle was my body’s way of telling me that I was happy to be alone again. Was it typical for me to feel excited like this after a seemingly harmless chat? It was. It’s always been this way for me. Once, after a business meeting in a hotel barroom in Vancouver last winter, I stopped off in the lobby Men’s Room and caught a glimpse…

February 15, 2016 scottcjones 3Comments

From what I could tell the Englishman was a thoroughly decent man, decent all the way down to his English bones. Had it occurred to me that this situation—two strangers having a drink together in a casino shaped like an Egyptian pyramid—might turn into some sort of sick, twisted, perverted encounter? Yes, that had occurred to me. All my life I’ve thought that even the most innocuous situations are going to somehow turn into sick, twisted, perverted encounters. But the truth is this: very few of the situations in my life that I’d thought were going to turn into sick, twisted, perverted encounters actually turned into sick, twisted, perverted…

February 10, 2016 scottcjones 5Comments

My cab ride with the Englishman and his stylish cardigan was quick and painless. One of the things that I actually like about Las Vegas—maybe the only thing that I actually like about Las Vegas—is that the airport is bizarrely close to the city itself. From the airport to The Strip takes only fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes, if traffic is congested. The Luxor’s main entrance was, like all things in Las Vegas, oversized and melodramatic. It looked like a shabbier version of the backlot of the 1963 film Cleopatra. But the entrance was also somewhat rundown in small ways. Several overhead lights were burned out; bits of…

January 22, 2016 scottcjones 8Comments

The first week of January 2016 I traveled to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. It was only my second CES ever. My first was seven or eight years ago. I’m not sure that Las Vegas is the best place to get the new year up and running. The tech industry seems to think it is. The company I was working for had booked me a room at the Luxor, which is the hotel-casino that, from the outside, looks like the illegitimate child of a pyramid and a horny disco ball. When I deplaned at McCarran, it was obvious that everyone in the airport was there for CES. Lots of backpacks,…

February 20, 2015 scottcjones 8Comments

I brought reading material with me to the ER. All my life I’ve habitually brought reading material—usually an excess of reading material—no matter where I’m going. I can’t even run a simple errand without having at least one book and two or maybe three magazines on me. It’s something I learned to do as a child, back when we lived in a small house in the woods in Upstate New York. Living in “The Woods” meant that I spent a significant portion of my childhood—maybe 20 or 30 percent of it—in the boring backseats of cars as my parents drove us to nearby cities—either Rome (20 minutes), Utica (45 minutes) or…