grand hotel Archives - Artist & Author Joakim Lloyd Raboff

Back in Lund again to shoot an elevator pitch. Also hosting a podcast about the current state and future of autonomous vehicles with three expert guests, Robert Falk, CEO för Einride, Peter Janevik, CEO för Asta Zero and until recently board member of Terranet and Christian Larsson, expert på advanced driver assistance technology at AFRY and SVP Product Management at Terranet. You can enjoy the podcast here (in Swedish).

I’m fairly sure 154 is my fifth room here at Grand. Once I’ve experienced one I like, I tend to stay put for a while before moving on to the next. While 154 is smaller than the others, I appreciate the front-facing view, blue tapestry, and the full-length bathtub. The bathroom in 154 is tiny, much smaller than in any of the other rooms. The small size reminded of the bathroom in my old bachelor pad in Göteborg at Vidblicksgatan 5. Though small, it too had a full-size tub in which I spent many hours.

We haven’t lived in an apartment equipped with a tub in just shy of 20 years. So I make sure to book a room with one whenever and wherever I can. Tonight, after dinner and before bed, I slid into the warm bathtub, got comfy, and listened to the latest episode of The Daily from the New York Times with excellent host Michael Barbaro. I’m fully aware that the “Times” is a liberal-leaning outlet, but their quality of journalism, especially in the human-interest genre, is nonetheless top-notch.

Tonight I’ll be re-watching Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins in the brilliant adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption. Spread over 25 years, this is probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen it. One of the few advantages of growing older is that I tend to forget bits and pieces of some of my favorite movies. They’re not totally unpredictable – heck, I’m not that old yet. But rewatching them, even after just a few years, is usually long enough for me to have forgotten some of the story’s details and plot twists. It’s kinda comforting when none of the stuff on Netflix, HBO, SVT intrigues me.

Thanks to or because of, depending on your choice of perspective, my current workload distracts me from thinking too much about the pandemic and the tsunami of physical, emotional, and financial implications it carries with it. For hours on end, I am so immersed in my work, I can totally forget about it all.

Like most folks that have yet to know anybody that has been directly hit by the virus, it’s the indirect impact I hear of; from one friend in Malmö whom will likely lose his expansive restaurant business, to another pal, scared and hiding in complete isolation deep in one of Los Angeles sprawling suburbs.

The weirdest part of this unfolding drama is our collective uneasiness. We, including all the self-proclamied experts, still don’t know squat about how this craziness will actually conclude. Antithetical to an earthquake and other natural catastrophes, where there usually are plenty of historical precedents and aggregated statistics to help fill the void, map the scope (and to cope), here there are just too many puzzle pieces missing to provide a full picture of what the Covid-19 pandemic will look like going forward. Is there going to be even more radical plot twists? Like not becoming immune even after recovering from the disease? Or, that even if you only experience mild symptoms the first time you contract the virus, will they worsen the second or third time around – after your immunology has been compromised and exhausted?   To put our current situation in a comically contextual perspective, it’s kinda like having a really bad stomach flu. Even several days after the last time you had diarrhea, you feel uneasy about letting out the tiniest fart. It’s just so friggin’ hard to relax these days.

The above photo of a pineapple themed tapestry is totally unrelated to this post but works as a decorative featured image nonetheless.

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