“No, that’s definitely not Dave,” I tell her.



“It looks like him. Oh look, it’s Alexi!” she asks pointing to another photo.



For a moment, I’m confused, because everyone does sort of look like people we know, but they are definitely not people we know. “No, look,” I say, “I don’t think these are Boston people, these are like…these are models or something”



She holds up her smart-phone showing me the hotel’s Twitter account, reading its description out loud, “Promoter of local music, champion of counter-culture.” She looks back at my computer, “These must be people from around here. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.”



“Yeeeeeeah.” We both stare at the photos for a little while in silence.



Sunday 2:16 PM – I am packing my bag for an overnight stay. There were many slogans I ran into during my prep on The Verb’s website, but as I roll some clothes and toiletries into a backpack, I keep repeating one in particular: “Check In, Tune Out.” Of course, this is a playful remix of Timothy Leary’s famous “Turn on, tune in, drop out” phrase, popularized in 1966 during his mission to deliver LSD to the masses.



Fragments of popular culture repurposed to promote a commercial endeavor has often haunted me, given me the hopeless feeling that no matter how pure the original source, the end game is waiting around the corner in a car commercial. This fear of the intersection between art and commercials has, in the popular opinion, almost entirely evaporated over the last decade: the notion of “selling out” has become synonymous with a caricature of what it meant to care too much in the ’90s. Leary described the “Tune in” part of his famous slogan as meaning that you “interact harmoniously with the world around you.” So, if the hotel encourages guests to “Tune Out”, what does that mean? What would it mean for a hotel to encourage you to behave inharmoniously with the world around you? What would it look like to overthink a hotel review? Will I always overthink things like this? What if, I involuntarily wonder, I get stuck inside this hotel article I’m writing? Is that a possibility? Is it OK that I’m asking?



Maybe it just sounded good and no one was thinking of Timothy Leary at all.



Sunday 3:33 PM – My girlfriend just returned from a European tour, so the last thing she wants to do is spend a night in a hotel. I, on the other hand, am excited to begin my stay. She’s agreed to check in with me for a few hours to offer her expertise opinion on the accommodations. Having stayed in hundreds of hotels in over twenty countries, I consider her my secret weapon for the more hotel-y observations about a hotel.



Valet parking is nearly $40 a night. So we do a U Turn and find parking down the street. Honest first impression: The building looks sort of magical and unquestionably impressive as you approach.



There’s a perfectly restored vintage tour bus permanently installed in front, and a window where you can see “LISTEN TO MORE MUSIC” emblazoned on the wall. On my first airplane ride, when I was 8, I remember a stewardess coming around asking if I wanted a magazine. My eyes lit up at the possibility, and I asked her for the latest issue of Mad Magazine. They did not have Mad Magazine. But, when you walk into the lobby of The Verb, it reminded me of an airline that carries Mad Magazine. Marshall amplifier stacks (fake) function as a shelving unit, a real Fender amp in another corner with a guitar connected to it (though I never saw anyone play it), stacks of vinyl records to browse, furniture with shaggy white fur adorning it, a multi-colored circular pinwheel ceiling window, and walls covered with rock n roll history memorabilia all carefully framed and expertly placed in the room. It’s like walking into an adult, real life Pee Wee’s Playhouse.



Two extremely welcoming, friendly men both in grey cardigans greet us at the desk. The check-in desk turntable has “Van Morrison His Band And The Street Choir” cued up on it, but it’s not playing right now. Some other music is playing from another source I never identify. One of the men says, “We hear you’re a reporter?” I feel embarrassed and sheepishly tell them yes. As they hand me my door keys one of them says, “Perfection.”



Sunday 3:33 PM – Room 205. There are 94 rooms in this hotel. This particular room features a queen sized bed, a couch, a dresser, a movable side table, a functioning, vintage Royal Typewriter, and a flat screen tv. Everything is clean. On the dresser there’s an 11×17 manila envelope left for me. I imagine they felt this presentation would make something totally ordinary feel like I was beginning some sort of secret mission, and god dammit, they’re 100% correct.



Inside is a guide to the hotel and the surrounding neighborhood. The fourth wall of the room is all windows, some of which are color treated, some are clear. My view looks down on the hotel’s swimming pool, and across to the other set of rooms and decks of the hotel. You can see people milling about their rooms if they haven’t closed their curtain, and it conjures elements of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” in my imagination. “Yep,” I think to myself, “I’ll probably solve a murder tonight.”



My girlfriend opens a window and we hear the roaring crowd of nearby Fenway Park. If there was a concert at the field, you’d be able to hear it in your room. Neat. Above the bed, on the wall, there are two reproduced covers of the now defunct Boston Phoenix alt-weekly newspaper (each room has two different Phoenix covers). One of the covers in my room is the issue from May 21, 2001 with a tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic cover image with the headline, “IS THIS THE END?” It takes me a moment to remember what the hell that was all about. I double check the date. No, it’s not Y2K, what scared everyone in 2011? Then I remember: Harold Camper, a Christian Radio Evangelist, predicted the date as the end of the world, and it stirred attention because he spent 5 billion in billboard advertisements declaring the end. It strikes me that Camper’s method is like the payola of apocalypse predictions— they were only popular because someone threw massive amounts of cash at the issue. After the date passed without the world ending, he then chose October 21, 2001, which also passed without incident, but later that month he did die, so some credit is due.