My Year of Meats

This chapter is prefaced by an excerpt from Shōnagon in which she compares men who leave hastily to men to who leave slowly; she expresses her preference for the latter. 

While working on the show, Jane develops a relationship, which for months consists only of phone sex, with a traveling musician named Sloan. She finally meets him at her motel bar in Nebraska where he is dressed up disguised as a commissioner. He comes over to her and her film crew and makes small talk with the men that work with her until Jane dismisses them. He continues to pretend to be a commissioner as he leads her upstairs and has sex with her. She finds the experience “strange” but enjoyable, and the day afterwards she cannot stop thinking about him (54). He starts to make a habit of preemptively showing up in the cities she is about to film in, and she likes it. Other than one man, none of Jane’s crew notices the commissioner is the same person from state to state. She wonders if this is because they believe “all Americans look the same” (56). To herself, she admits that there is a sameness. She blames this on Wal-Mart, a corporation she believes has stamped all personality out of America by crushing local commerce.