Got back tonight from a weeklong trip to the Rockies in Colorado. M. and his friend A. flew in from Pittsburgh. I was looking forward to J. being on this trip, but he ended up dropping out. It would have been fun if he’d made it. The Rockies are seriously beautiful mountains. Someone who hasn’t seen the Himalayas would be apt to think the Rockies the roof of the world. The tundra puts my Cascades to shame. I hiked a total of 40 miles over the last seven days and would have hiked more if I hadn’t been debilitated by a mysterious bout of food poisoning brought about either by an insufficiently baked frozen pizza with topped with uncured meats or a sardine sandwich.
The morning after the ill-fated meal, whichever it was, a dizzy spell came over me, and I passed out and literally face-planted on the kitchen floor. I don’t remember passing out at all. One moment I was at one end of the kitchen, acknowledging the onset of a sudden bout of dizziness; the next, I was waking up to M. standing over me, frantically trying to shake me awake me by the shoulder. At first I thought I was in my bed; then the tiled floor of the kitchen came into view, and I realized I must have passed out. M. said something about me breaking a tooth, and I realized my lower lip was swollen and bleeding. My head had narrowly missed the corner of a granite countertop, which meant I was lucky to get away with the few scratches I’d sustained. A gratuitous visit to an urgent care clinic the next town over, combined with a persistent feeling of weakness, decided me to sit the day out, which I was secretly glad for, because my out-of-shape ass really needed a rest day after struggling through consecutive days of multiple hikes amounting to a total of 11-14 miles per day at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. I realized during the course of the day that my split lip was actually a sizable chunk of lip that I had nearly bit clean off, and I’d chipped the tooth responsible for the injury. I’ve instructed M. and A. to tell anyone who asks that I was involved in a fight and got some respectable blows in on my part.
I decided to buy a new book at the airport in Denver on my way back. For the first time in many months (even years), I felt the thirst for a new book. The bookstore was called Tattered Cover. It seems to be a chain that's local to Denver. The name alone makes it impossible not to walk in and buy a book. I bought Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian, of which I’ve read a hundred pages already. I wanted to get in touch with my cultural roots — namely, Indian American roots. The fact that it was based in Atlanta made me giddy with familiarity from my Georgia Tech and AMI days whenever I came across a place name or reference I recognized — e.g., Buckhead, the Spaghetti Junction, the Perimeter. I’m going to wait until after I’ve finished the book to review it — partly because it’s 1:30 AM right now, and critical analysis, which I have trouble with on a good day, is an especially tall order for my brain.
I also watched the first half of Elton John’s biopic Rocketman on the flight back to Seattle. I plan on finishing the other half tomorrow, before my rental expires. I started listening to the song “Rocketman” a few weeks ago, and when I told J. about my new obsession with it, he told me he had gone through a little Elton John phase himself after watching Rocketman. I am going through my Elton John phase right now, which means that every scene of the movie filled me with frisson. Elton John is no less a genius than Mozart. He has the gift of melody. Taron Egerton has come a long way from his Kingsman days and has developed into rather a convincing Elton John — which is to say, not my type. I found myself attracted rather more to Charlie Rowe as Ray Williams and Jamie Bell as Bernie Taupin. The scene where Elton leans in for a kiss and Bernie says, “I love you, but not in that way,” made me cringe with first-hand memories of similar attractions. There is a lot of stuff to unpack there. My therapist has tasked me with analyzing the banal phenomenon of gay guys falling in love with straight guys who are not in a position to reciprocate their feelings, which I shall attempt to do in a future entry. I’ve gathered some material for this purpose from Cleanness by Garth Greenwell, which I finished two weeks ago. My first book of gay lit, as it were. The first story, "Mentor", is utterly beautiful; by the end the anthology devolves into very graphic pornography. Well written, to be sure, but so, so graphic.
0 comments :
Post a Comment