Things Here Are More Difficult Than You Imagined, Reality Is Painful 💔

the motel room, or: on datedness

I.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! Student loans just started back up!

Help Khalid Sisters in Gaza not to be Homeless

Hello Dear,

We, (Najwa, Jana, Farah, and Maryam), are the sisters of Shaheed Khalid Saed Ash-Shawwah, who was martyred on 07/31/24 along with Al Jazeera correspondent Ismail Al-Ghoul and his colleague, photographer Rami Al-Rifi . Khalid was our older and only brother and he was a great support for us and others. As you may heard Khalid’s story in the news, he was bombed while he was riding his bicycle coming back from delivering food to our old and injured neighbors.

Before the IDF forces killed our brother Khalid, they forced us to evacuate our house and left everything behind. They then destroyed our house and our father’s restaurant. We had to move at least 10 times since every new area we seek refuge to gets bombed.

Currently, the 4 of us and our parents, are living devastating and sad life in a bombed room in Gaza. It is extremely difficult for us to get the basic needs of food, water, and shelter.

We sincerely hope you can empathize with our dire situation and consider supporting us. We are raising funds in order to be able to pay the rising cost of basic necessities in north Gaza. Our family is large and the cost of survival in north Gaza is astronomical. If you have anything you can spare, we implore you to support us. From where you are right now, you personally can help save our lives in north Gaza.

Please donate and/or replog 🥺🙏🇵🇸

gofundme.com

Donate to Help Khalid Sisters in Gaza not to be Homeless, organized by Nesma Khazendar

Hello Dear, We, (Najwa, Jana, Farah, and Maryam), the sisters of Shahe… Nesma Khazendar needs your support for Help Khalid Sisters in Gaza

Please reblog our post, follow us @khalid-Sisters and boost our posts, and repost the link to our campaign across all your social media.

Your generosity has the power to make a significant difference, and will give us hope that there will a better future waiting for us once the war stops.

We ask God to bless you and your families and to protect you all from all calamities and to never make you feel or go through what we are going through.

Vetted By: @olagaza @tahseenkhazen, @determinate-negation @northgazaupdates

Hi

I hope you are well

I want your help

Support me for treatment , if you can 😔💔

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #567 )✅️

Vetted by @90-ghost

gofundme.com

Donate to Help me and my family to get treatment and survive, organized by Othman Jehad

I am one of the most affected people in the war on Gaza (dream, future… Othman Jehad needs your support for Help me and my family to get tre

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #567 )✅️

Vetted by @90-ghost

so my life is once again in danger

I'm a venezuelan refugee in Spain since 2019. My focus was entirely on escaping and staying in a safe country. When I got here, I got the help of an accountant/manager to work legally. I'm an artist who makes fantasy creatures in polymer clay.

He committed fraud in my name without telling me and refused to take responsibility. I was penalized to pay €8600 for his mistake.

I'll add the whole explanation after the read more because you need context to understand what he did.

And now if I can't pay this thing, my residence will be taken away.

I've tried so hard to raise this money. More work, more marketing, preorders, asking for a loan, but nothing has worked.

I have until next month to pay it so I can renew my residence.

All I wanted was to do things properly. I thought seeking a professional to handle the legal aspects of my single person business was the right thing to do. I thought I could finally breathe after being treated like a criminal for years in Venezuela, when all I want is to make my silly little figurines and be queer in peace.

I need to take care of my babies (cats) and my parents who are still stuck in Venezuela. I only make enough to live + take care of them, and it's become clear that I can't raise this money by work alone.

So please, any help is appreciated. Reblogs too. I also do drawing commissions. I'm so incredibly embarrassed to make this post, but I'm desperate. I don't want to be deported. I don't want to be an illegal alien. I don't want to live in constant fear again.

thank you for reading!

this is my commission info

and my Ko-Fi:

Ko-fi

Buy Mar a Coffee. ko-fi.com/marlikesunicorns

Become a supporter of Mar today! ❤️ Ko-fi lets you support the creators you love with no fees on donations.

Extra information needed to understand what happened exactly:

In Spain, you need to pay a monthly fee of €300 in order to run a business. This goes to the Social Security.

The fee is mandatory, but the government realized it was unfair to charge it from the beginning to a freelancer that's only starting. So they established a reduction of €240 for new entrepreneurs, for 1 year. After that, they'd slowly raise it.

They also gave benefits to people living in certain areas, especially small towns. The fee reduction extended for 6 extra months with this, but only applied as long as you continued to live there for 4 years.

I lived in a small town for 1 year. Then I moved to the closest small city.

But this accountant guy asked for this 6 month extension in my name without my consent.

So then the government demanded I pay the whole €240 for each month ever since I started working. I went through all the legal processes to ask them to review this decision but it was impossible. They ignored everything. It didn't matter that I only received the benefit for the 1 year that I would've been given anyway for being a new freelancer. It didn't matter that I would never be able to afford to pay this in the 15 days they gave me.

If that wasn't enough, I got sick with covid twice, and missed 4 months of work in total, months I got 0 income because they also won't ensure me until I pay the thing. So those fees were also added to the debt + late fees that continue to grow.

Summary: Basically he promised the government I'd live in a small town for 4 years, and when I moved before then (because I had no idea he had done this) they demanded I pay back ALL the benefits they had granted me in the past year.

Welcome ♥️

I hope you are well too I am 👍

Muhammad from Gaza, my father Three children I write to you with a heavy heart and an urgent request for help. My family is in a very dangerous situation due to the ongoing war, and I have started a GoFundMe campaign to save them. Can you please share my campaign post from my profile? Every share can be a lifeline for my family. 🙏 Feel free to share it on any other social media platform if you wish.🇵🇸🍉❤️🍉

gofundme.com

Donate to Help support Muhammad and his family in Khan Yunis, organized by Alexandra Beck

Hi, my name is Alex, and I'm raising funds on behalf of Muhammad in … Alexandra Beck needs your support for Help support Muhammad and his fa

AM DONE

Also this has definitely happened multiple times

Read it once in your life, and never regret it. ✋✅

Do you feel bored of the posts asking for help from Gaza? You’re right, but imagine our situation as we live this war day after day for 13 months. Do you think we’re tired too?!!

Asking for help is not easy; it’s very embarrassing, especially for a family that used to live a decent life. My husband and I completed our university education with distinction, worked in respectable jobs, and were used to helping others, not asking for help. But the war has turned our lives into a nightmare; we lost our home, our sources of income, and even our ability to provide the simplest of needs.

I'm Hanan. For the past 13 months, we have been struggling to get healthy food and medicine for my child, whose weak body was attacked by infection, and for my elderly mother-in-law, who fell into a coma for several days and almost lost her life due to anemia caused by our inability to provide healthy food, as prices have risen more than 10 times. Now, we have run out of everything. While you are reading my message, my family and I are trying to survive amidst all kinds of suffering.

What was once a beautiful dream and reality has now become a nightmare. Starvation is one thing, but starving, freezing, and being forced to flee in the middle of the night when tanks suddenly arrive in your area, running for your life and your family’s life under fire, leaving behind everything you built over the years, and returning after 5 months of suffering in displacement and tents to find that your home, where you lived your happiest moments, is nothing but rubble, is something completely different! 💔😓

Can you feel my broken heart now? Can you imagine what I’m going through at this moment? Everything I am living now cannot be described with words, and every moment here is filled with pain and fear. We desperately need your help, as we live in hope of escaping Gaza to save our lives and live safely away from the explosions.

You might feel powerless to stop this genocide, but you can certainly save my family. We appeal to your compassionate hearts to help us escape this catastrophe, which the human mind cannot even fathom.

Please share our campaign with your family and friends. This will help us reach those who can help us directly. Be the reason to bring hope back to our hearts ♥️✨

gofundme.com

Donate to Donate to Save Hanan Al-Salout's Family in Gaza, organized by Gregory Lewin

I am an American, Greg Lewin in Minneapolis, who made contact with a… Gregory Lewin needs your support for Donate to Save Hanan Al-Salou

$14,100 USD raised of $30,000goal

Or donate via PayPal

I will be honored to follow me on Instagram

Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #152 ) ✅

Vetted by 90ـghost Click here ✅

Updated on 3/12

Dear Friends, 🌷

I know you share my story out of love and humanity, and I am truly grateful for that. 🙏💚

The painful truth is sharing alone does not feed the hungry or provide medicine for the sick.💔

Cost of a bag of flour is $300 which is the main source of food for my family and is needed weekly just to make bread. We live in a tent my child trembles from hunger and cold, and all I can do is pray. 😥

Please, don’t just watch or share. Even a small donation could be a lifeline for a hungry child or a suffering patient. 🙏

Don’t close your eyes to our suffering. We are calling upon your humanity.

The last donation 20 hours ago!! 😓

Thanks to your generous donations, we were able to buy some essential necessities that we couldn't do without, despite their high cost. A heartfelt thank you to everyone who contributed to feeding my child, even with a piece of bread 🙏💚. Your generosity gives us hope in facing these indescribable catastrophic circumstances 💔.

Our hope for survival comes from the generosity of your hearts. Your donations are the lifeline that keeps my family standing strong, They are our only source of income. Every contribution brings us closer to securing food and medicine for my family. Please, don’t leave us alone; your compassion is the light that dispels this darkness. ✨🫂

The countdown for the deal has begun and it will start tomorrow at 8:30, but no one will know if he will survive or not because Israel will commit the biggest massacres against civilians on that day, so I ask everyone to donate so that I can stay alive and get out as soon as possible.

Please donate

🌿 My Name is Rola, and This is My Story 🌿

I never thought I would be writing this. I never thought I would be begging for help just to keep my children warm, just to feed them one more meal. But here I am, reaching out to you, because I have no other choice.

My name is Rola. I am a mother of two beautiful children, and before October 7th, we had a life filled with love and laughter. We had a home. My children had their own room, filled with their toys and drawings. We would sit together on our balcony, drinking coffee in the early morning light. We had dreams, just like any other family.

But in an instant, it was all gone.

A missile struck. The earth shook beneath us. The air filled with dust and fire. My husband and son ran, stumbling over each other in terror. I stood frozen, the ringing in my ears drowning out my own screams. Our home was shattered—windows blown out, doors ripped from their hinges. And when I looked outside, our neighbor’s house, a place that once echoed with children's laughter, was nothing but rubble and ash.

That was just the beginning.

The bombs never stopped. Every night, I held my children close as the sky rained fire. The sound of explosions mixed with the cries of mothers searching for their babies in the darkness. I covered my children, whispering words of comfort, but how do you comfort a child who is terrified of dying in their sleep?

We had to leave. We walked away from everything—our home, our memories, the warmth of our life before. My children left behind their favorite toys, their books, their safe space. Now, we have nothing.

No home.

No food.

No clean water.

No way out.

I went to buy sugar the other day. It cost $20 for just a kilo. Food is disappearing, and the little that remains is impossible to afford. Every day, I fight to find just enough to keep my children alive.

I am exhausted. I am scared. I need your help.

I never imagined I would have to beg for my family’s survival. But today, I am.

Please, if you are reading this, help us. Help me save my children. Help us find shelter, food, a way to rebuild even a small piece of the life we lost. If we ever have the chance to leave, we need support. If we are forced to stay, we need a home again.

Every donation matters. Every share helps. Every voice that speaks for us keeps hope alive.

💚 Please donate if you can. Share our story. Help us survive. 💚

gofundme.com

Donate to From Despair to Hope: Help us to rebuild our life., organized by Fatima Rajwani

Hi I am Fatima and live in London UK. I have known Rola now for appr… Fatima Rajwani needs your support for From Despair to Hope: Help us to

🌿 My Name is Rola, and This is My Story 🌿

I never thought I would be writing this. I never thought I would be begging for help just to keep my children warm, just to feed them one more meal. But here I am, reaching out to you, because I have no other choice.

My name is Rola. I am a mother of two beautiful children, and before October 7th, we had a life filled with love and laughter. We had a home. My children had their own room, filled with their toys and drawings. We would sit together on our balcony, drinking coffee in the early morning light. We had dreams, just like any other family.

But in an instant, it was all gone.

A missile struck. The earth shook beneath us. The air filled with dust and fire. My husband and son ran, stumbling over each other in terror. I stood frozen, the ringing in my ears drowning out my own screams. Our home was shattered—windows blown out, doors ripped from their hinges. And when I looked outside, our neighbor’s house, a place that once echoed with children's laughter, was nothing but rubble and ash.

That was just the beginning.

The bombs never stopped. Every night, I held my children close as the sky rained fire. The sound of explosions mixed with the cries of mothers searching for their babies in the darkness. I covered my children, whispering words of comfort, but how do you comfort a child who is terrified of dying in their sleep?

We had to leave. We walked away from everything—our home, our memories, the warmth of our life before. My children left behind their favorite toys, their books, their safe space. Now, we have nothing.

No home.

No food.

No clean water.

No way out.

I went to buy sugar the other day. It cost $20 for just a kilo. Food is disappearing, and the little that remains is impossible to afford. Every day, I fight to find just enough to keep my children alive.

I am exhausted. I am scared. I need your help.

I never imagined I would have to beg for my family’s survival. But today, I am.

Please, if you are reading this, help us. Help me save my children. Help us find shelter, food, a way to rebuild even a small piece of the life we lost. If we ever have the chance to leave, we need support. If we are forced to stay, we need a home again.

Every donation matters. Every share helps. Every voice that speaks for us keeps hope alive.

💚 Please donate if you can. Share our story. Help us survive. 💚

gofundme.com

Donate to From Despair to Hope: Help us to rebuild our life., organized by Fatima Rajwani

Hi I am Fatima and live in London UK. I have known Rola now for appr… Fatima Rajwani needs your support for From Despair to Hope: Help us to