Instead, it deals about the struggles and aloneness of modern-day life with a story of three brothers — one brother commits suicide when his business fails and his wife has an affair, one brother watches the suicidal brother’s life destruct while he has the affair with suicidal brother’s wife, and one brother who is dealing with anger and addiction along with the loss of his brother.

Here is a clip showing the angry brother grieving over his dead brother and meeting up with his dead brother’s ghost:

Here’s a clip of the suicidal brother’s wife and her brother-in-law starting their romance:

And here’s a clip with the minister dealing with his feelings of frustration due to one brother committing suicide and not being able to intervene:

The “beigeland” spaces that we inhabit daily are used as the scenery for this drama.

I have my own little trick. When I’m ‘forced’ to spend more time than I’d like in the Beigeland of airports — or airplanes or hotels or malls — I sometimes like to use the time to imagine how an ordinary person who lived 100 years ago would feel to suddenly wake up and observe. An average man or woman who lived, say, 200 years ago, or 500 years ago — or a thousand — opening up their eyes and just sitting and looking. Clean, bright, comfortable, soft, busy and filled with an astonishing sleekness of form, a simplicity of function — and food. Flush toilets. Egads. They would think it a paradise. An unachievable and inconceivable dream. Utopia.

And if I’m in an airplane — look down and marvel at going further in 5 minutes than what once took days, if not weeks, on foot or by cart. It is far easier for us to imagine their astonishment than it would be for them to imagine what they would be astonished by. How grateful they would be … for all of it. How privileged they’d feel to even glimpse it and find out.

We tend to romanticize the past and forget how dirty and hard and dangerous it was. We also like to romanticize the future.

But there is no rule that says we can’t romanticize the present for a little while.

I had a travel job for a few months, and if I hear a song off one of the cd’s I brought with me, I’m transported right back to that extremely specific mix of feelings. Independence and solitude, quiet and the open road, everything financially covered for a couple days. Fear and uncertainty about my future beyond those couple days, apprehension for the unpleasant work I’d being doing at my destination, loneliness.

I was mostly traveling alone in beigeland. I felt oddly separated from the people who actually lived all those places, like talking through water. I was not doing rewarding and important work. (Also I find hotel rooms by myself creepy.) It was incredibly isolating. I never consider travel jobs anymore.

All the chairs seemed designed to scrub all of the skin off your ass and double the size of your hemorrhoids. And the desks are all at precisely the height designed to aggravate your carpal tunnel syndrome.

Also, being in a Beigeland hotel room actively encourages you to get out and look around. I would have missed the last solar eclipse had I not gotten bored in Beigeland and walked outside to get some air. And there were a bunch of people looking up.

Do I miss that working environment? Sometimes I do. We were solving the really tough problems, the intractable ones that get put off because “nobody can fix them”. I miss the high of the good problem fixes. I miss Pensacola Beach.

But I really like home, family, decent meals, exercise, and living where I do in California.

The notion that I’ll probably never walk Pensacola Beach again, though, is a sad one.