I’ve been slowly writing a series of stories in hotel rooms around the world.

I call them the Kippenberger stories and they’re named after the painter Martin Kippenberger who liked to draw on hotel stationary. The story is I began writing the stories on hotel stationary.

There are many of them now. They’re very short and they go something like this one I wrote tonight on 8th Street.

“Sometimes when I encounter really annoying people in New York my remedy is to just start fantasizing about being more annoyinger,” you tell Kippenberger on a Monday.

“How do you mean?”

“There was this woman sitting next to me getting a foot massage and she was typing really loudly while I was trying to relax. I mean who does work while getting a foot massage? I hated her. After the obligatory dirty looks didn’t work, I put my headphones in and closed my eyes and thought about how I could annoy her more than she could possibly annoy me.”

“How could you?”

“I thought about snoring really loudly.”

Kippenberger laughed.

“How loudly?”

“Like my grandfather who can’t breathe loudly. I thought about being totally oblivious and snoring like the loudest person in the world that she would be so distracted she would stop typing and be forced to listen to me. This made me so amused I started to smile. And then just like that she stopped typing.”

“You won.”

“Sometimes,” you tell him, “I win. But only sometimes.”