Diary of an AirBnb Host
Phil Collins, hazelnut coffee, and the delightful variousness of strangers
If you’ve always wanted to stay in a third-floor loft in that part of Pittsburgh which is half warehouses and half forest and half old townhouses with prayer flags and Halloween skeletons hanging from the porch, I’ve got good news for you: You can stay in the AirBnb my partner and I are running above our house.
Every time we turn the apartment over between guests, I find J going through his records and grabbing an armful of whatever he thinks the next guest might like. Tinariwen, Phil Collins, Solange, Pharaoh Sanders, Madonna — we’ve got it all. I don’t know how he determines the selection, but it is very serious business, which makes it all the more disappointing that none of our guests have played a record yet. (Are people just anxious around turntables?)
But I do the same thing with books — maybe I’ll add a little Brandon Shimoda and Morgan Parker if they seem really cool.
One of the reasons I typically enjoy staying in AirBnbs is that I find it extremely entertaining to conjecture about the hosts based on the furnishings and condiments. If you’ve ever taken my POV workshop, you know that my whole theory of fiction centers on the idea that every bit of granularity in a character has to say something…
