Everybody Feng Shui Tonight!

October 27, 2010

Walking into Village Inn this morning, I broke out in a sanitizing-solution sweat, suddenly creeped out by the feel--and smell--of the place. Yeah, I know. The corporate office has spent millions revamping the look of Village Inn, trying to hip it up a bit with wacky "handwritten" signs and mod colors, but, really, when you get right down to it, all they've done, as Mark so poignantly said, is "papered over the filth."

It's a strange thing when a building sets off a bad vibe. It becomes even more problematic when that same building is the source of your breakfast. Maybe there's a reason that old people make up the majority of Village Inn's customers. After all, old people, who themselves often have a distinctive scent, often lack the sharpened senses of sight and smell that otherwise might warn them "RUN AWAY, SIMBA! RUN AWAY!"

Alas, the Holts stayed, tucked into a booth next to two old women with surprisingly loud voices, both of whom were lamenting their new hairstylists and their need for two take-home boxes.

When we were looking for houses a few years back, we walked through almost 90 homes, and more than a few had that same, bad feng-shui feel of Village Inn. For some, all I had to do was pull up in the drive and I'd get a bad vibe. Walking through the front door only confirmed my suspicions.

Invariably, these homes lacked flow. Some had staircases whose locales seemed to be determined by monkeys. One had a faux-wood supporting pole standing smack in the middle of a room, conjuring images of Night Before trainees, swinging desperately around it, their hopes of steady income slipping like the shoulder strap of a worn negligee. One house smelled as though a herd of cats, each plagued by a nasty urinary-tract infection, had let loose their territorial stench in one Old Glorious outburst.

When I leave a building built upon a foundation of bad vibes, all I want to do is run home, change my clothes and take a really, really hot bath. Preferably with Lava Soap.

I wonder what kind of person designs a building that is so utterly lacking in warmth and charm. What compels that person to put pen to graph paper, sketching rooms that seem to have nothing to do with each other? Was there really an architect who, when that hideous Perkins on 48th and "O", the one that crams a turret in the middle of ten different architectural styles, was completed said: "Now THAT'S what I'm talking 'bout!"

I hope not. I hope he just had a heap of hospital bills on his dining room table and decided those were reason enough to prostitute his professional self, to look the other way as he directed the builders of that awful, awful place.

I can almost feel compassion for someone who does that to a building, if polyps and positive test results were what propelled him to design it in the first place.