Monday Miscellany (Sinus Headache Edition)

Memory is an elusive prey at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. I've noticed before that when I'm particularly tired (in, for example, the minutes between wakefulness and sleep) the trail goes cold very quickly, and I'll be left wondering what I was thinking just a minute ago. Sometimes I can get back there: I'll take what I was thinking a few moments ago and infer what that thought might have evolved out of. It doesn't always work.

All of this is an introduction to saying that I can't recall Friday night, and it's a little distressing to have a lost evening (I've never had the pleasure of a full lost weekend) because of simple fatigue (up until 2am every night last week) rather than drinking or some other sort of chemical ingestion, but there it is.

Fortunately, there's a fair amount of documentary and other evidence. Running through my email from the day indicates that several guys canceled on me, for reasons of varying levels of worth and credibility. And I know that I was too busy too late last night to watch any DVDs, which means that I must have watched Into the Wild on Saturday night, and I know that it took me two nights to watch the whole thing, so I must have started it late Friday night. And I surely would have worked until at least 7:30, but that still leaves a good chunk of time unaccounted for. My bank records and the new whiteboard on my office wall indicate a trip to Costco. Costco closes at 8:30 on Friday, so I most likely went home, ate something bad for me, watched part of the DVD, and crashed. But I don't really remember much except for the movie itself, so I can't rule out the possibility of a shag either on the way home or after I got there. It's always so easy to hook up on Friday night. I hope I didn't have sex, though: if it was so dull that I don't even remember it, well, that's just depressing.


Speaking of dull sex, I had a fairly boring bj on Saturday night. Fortunately, I had a really great Berber a couple of hours earlier with some guy in a hotel in Rockville. Nothing dull about that one, but the details for both will have to wait for another post.

I do have a sinus headache this morning. For probably the past fifteen years, a low-level sinus headache has been my default condition. I ignore them unless they turn into a full sinus infection, and then I go to the doctor for a Z-pack. A few month's ago, Mimi Smartypants wrote about having bought a Neti pot, so I ordered one online, but the instructions were a little bit frightening. Then, last week or so, Atari wrote about sinus irrigation. I checked out some videos on YouTube. They were disturbing, but they made the whole thing seem benign, so on my way home from the office, I picked up a sinus irrigation kit at the grocery store. I took it home and tried both it and the Neti pot. In theory, I like the Neti pot better, but I just can't get it to work as well in practice as the squeeze bottle. Anyway, the point is that for an entire week, I've been irrigating twice a day (Photogenic? no. Mucogenic? yes!), and I haven't had any sinus headaches. Also, much less congestion. Then this morning, I forgot, and bam! sinus headache. I took some Afrin, which has muted the pain somewhat, but the message here is clear. Sinus irrigation: more addictive than crack!


Into the Wild was very good and not a little heartbreaking. Even on my twenty-five-inch television it was beautiful, so I'm bummed that I never got to see it on the big screen. I didn't always appreciate the structure of the film. I'm sure that from a director's point of view, editing it chronologically is a nightmare because you'd have an hour of a man by himself in the wilderness. But isn't a man by himself in the wilderness the reason the story is compelling? I suspect that part of what others find compelling is the effect McCandless' disappearance and death had on other characters, but, based on the available evidence, that was something McCandless himself would likely not have cared much about.

I entirely understand the romance and allure of wild and wide-open spaces. Have any of us not thought about chucking the lives we have and disappearing? If not into the wilds of Alaska, then perhaps into wilds either rural or urban of a more hospitable climate. Most of us survive by keeping those and similar urges in check.

It is always a difficult task to develop a complete narrative from very limited evidence. Nobody really seems to know very much about the last couple of years of Christopher McCandless' life, but it's likely that if we knew every detail, we still wouldn't understand him.


I was at the office last night, and I saw Jasper online. He wanted to meet me at my place so that I could tie him down and edge him: the standard treatment. But it was almost 7 when I saw him, and he said he had to be home before 9, so I had a convenient excuse. I told him that I really needed him tied to the bed for at least two hours so that I could have him screaming for release. He assured me that I could have him screaming for release in less than an hour if I were more efficient. I explained to him that an artist needs to be allowed to do his work in his own way and on his own schedule. Then I told him that people who act like he does are the reason that Van Gogh had to cut off his ear lobe. To his credit, he found that amusing. He argued his case very persistently, but I held firm. I can already tell, though, that by April or May, I'll no longer be sufficiently annoyed with him to tell him no. I suppose I could regard that as a personal failure, but why bother?


Last night, I spent almost two hours writing an email to the church's music director. She'd pulled me aside Thursday night to ask me about some upcoming solo opportunities, and she'd ended by asking me to email her about my repertoire and what I'd like to sing. Since what I've sung in the past has been mostly either a) things people have handed me to sing and b) things I've heard on the radio and determined to sing myself, my repertoire, such as it is, is highly eclectic. So it wasn't easy to put in an e-mail. It would have been a lot easier, though, if I hadn't accidentally shut the browser window when I was just about finished composing the first version. I really am tired these days.

I did manage, however, to finish Mike Albo's novel Hornito last night. I shouldn't make it sound like it was a major accomplishment: it was extremely well written and a fun read. (Finding the time to read anything is the accomplishment these days.) I've read any number of gay coming of age stories, and, well, it's pretty much a done and tired genre these days. Hornito is a clear exception. The story, though not unlike many others in plot, is more engaging than most, and the writing's very evocative. I'm not usually much of a visual thinker, but Albo writes in a way that make images appear in my head. It's an unusual experience for me, and I liked it a lot.

Sadly, buoyed by the strength of Hornito, when I took YFU to the local used book store so that she'd have things to read for the next couple of weeks, I picked up what looked to be another gay coming of age novel: Rainbow Boys. If the first few chapters are any indication, a year from now, I won't remember anything about it other than that I probably don't want to read it again. Oh well: you win some, you lose some.