The Reader Travels

I’m all aflutter, waiting for 3pm when I go to the airport for my first flight across the ocean. The longest flight I’ve ever taken was from Dallas to Toronto.  Going from the US to Canada, there are only subtle differences that tell you you’re in another country –  signs in French and English, distances measured in kilometers, money with a queen’s head on it, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals you’d need a prescription to buy back home, and Cuban cigars. 

But England is a whole different world, even if they do sorta speak my language, and even if I have been pretending to travel there for the past six months.  I think of my cousins who grew up in Muslim countries, and how their parents protected and sheltered them in many ways. But they have the experience of living in foreign lands and speaking other languages, and I’m the one who really feels sheltered as I leave my home continent for the first time ever, in celebration of my 40th birthday.

This is my reward for all the event planning I did last year when my girlfriends were having babies and getting married.  I said, don’t worry about me this year, just do something special for my birthday next year.  I suggested a party, and then someone else suggested a trip, so I’m thinking, we should go sit on a beach somewhere and have pretty boys bring us fruity drinks with lots of rum  in them.  When D suggested we go see her aunt in England, it was like an epiphany.  Oh my god, I could actually take a trip to Europe? Really? YES.

So, as I prepare to leave, I think of my friends, leaving their young babies at home for a week to spend their time with me.  And I feel loved.  My only regret is that my man can not share this experience with me. Then again, he figures all he needs to know about foreign lands he can learn on TV.

But today, I’m turning off the tube, putting my books down and living. For real.

Out at dinner with my girlfriends last night, we spent an unusually large amount of time talking about death and funeral customs, burials, cremation, mourning, insurance policies.  It started with M, talking about her recent trip to Houston for her grandmother’s funeral. 

The phrase, “There wasn’t an open casket,” led us in.  J, who’s from China, said she’d never been to a funeral with an open casket because they always did cremation back home.  This led us to the book I’m reading now, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which I have just read a scene that takes place at a crematorium.  It seems China and England have similar customs where they go and watch the loved ones enter the flames, while in the USA, we don’t really do that.  We send the body away, and it comes back as ashes in a box or a jar, all mysterious-like, where you wonder if they didn’t just empty a bunch of ash trays into a box and pass it off as your cousin Larry.

M threatened her mother with a bright pink coffin since she’s always hated the color.  Then D admitted that since she liked all things pink, she might like to have a Hello Kitty coffin as her final resting place.  And if the food hadn’t come, I might have talked about the touring exhibit of African coffins I saw many years ago at the Dallas Museum of Art, where they’d make a wooden sculpture that represented the dead man’s life and bury him in it.  An airplane for a pilot, a huge carrot for a farmer, you get the picture.  I’m just not sure why these things weren’t buried, unless they were still awaiting their owners’ demise.

See, this is a conversation I can appreciate.  One day, I’d like to visit the funeral service museum in the north side of Houston, which I read about in some Texas magazine the year after I saw the coffins on tour.  It seems they had the pleasure of hosting the same exhibit.  Call it a morbid fascination, call it research.

Anyway, as I lay down to bed last night, I opened my book and saw this phrase on the page — “the big D.”  Of course, Hornby’s not talking about Dallas, Texas. After all, he’s in London.  What he is talking about, is Death.

That’s not to say that I actually liked Neverwhere as a novel, but I am interested in seeing the BBC miniseries some time.  Although I thought parts of the book were quite trite, the actual concept was cool, and it would be fun to see it played out on the screen, even though I’ve been warned about the cheesiness of the low budget production.

We’re used to having low budgets for fantastical films, and animation in place of live action, and not always because fantasy and comics go hand in hand.  Despite the great stories and magical worlds, it doesn’t always work out, though.  One of my man’s favorite fantasy series of all time was the original Dragonlance, by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.  So, of course, when we heard there was an animated movie coming out on DVD, we put it at the top of our movie list.

I think he fell asleep halfway through just to avoid the torture of watching this film.  From the cheesy seventies style animation to the bad, bad acting, and the annoyance of having to listen to Keifer Sutherland’s voice for an hour and a half, it’s simply not worth it.  Plus, we understand compromise in story line when it comes to translating from book to film, but they flattened the story and sucked it dry.

Either way, I’ve heard Neverwhere was worth the watch and that my seventeen-year-old nephew watched straight through, way past his bedtime, because he just couldn’t turn it off.  Wish me luck.

It’s time to move on.  My tour of dystopic future Londons started back on Halloween. I’ll apologize now. I said it was going to be a “short tour,” but as you can see it lasted over four months. That’s an average of one book per month.  I think I may have gone a little obsesso.

Anyway, I’m not quite ready to leave London, and I’m still lurking around in alternate realities, but this time it’s the alternate reality world of London Below, which merges London’s past and present in the bizarre underground world of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard of Neil Gaiman until I started reading A Great Big Nerd, who talks about Gaiman a lot. Last March the Nerd got me excited about the upcoming movie version of Gaiman’s Stardustwith this plug, even though I had never read the book. He would have been jealous to know that I actually saw the movie at a screening two months before its actual release. They hadn’t even filmed the opening or closing credits yet.

So, speaking of nerds, my two sisters and I all married computer guys, but my youngest sister’s husband will forever hold the title of biggest nerd, even though my man still has a collection like this.  I don’t think he’ll ever live down the time we went to the beach and he wrote his e-mail address in the sand.  Anyway, he’s a nice guy, and he’s good to my sister, so…  They were the ones who loaned me Neverwhere and Good Omens (which I didn’t actually read).

Anyway, London Below is quite the imaginative invention, though I really wouldn’t want to live there.

Travels are cyclical — you start at home, you go away and then you come back home again.  And now I’ve come full circle from the philosophical discussion and back to the gay.  We are talking about Plato, after all.  I was thinking that maybe coming out of the cave for Plato was a little like coming out of the closet.

We’re going to stretch this out a little bit, so bear with me.  Once again, I find myself thinking of the cave as a metaphor for women, and how some men might feel they’re trapped in the hole of womankind. So for Plato to come out of the cave and see the light and find himself in the company of men with superior and enlightened minds, he’s freeing himself of the dull company of women.

As some gay men are, Plato was also a bit of a feminist, though.  In his perfect society, his Republic, the women and men would all exercise naked together, side by side as equals.  Even though women had such revolting bodies, he recommended that men just bite the bullet for the good of the society and do their jumping jacks right next to a cavernous cow with a pair of flopping udders.

How’s that for mixed metaphor?

So another of my favorite tales from philosophaster school was the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic.  Similar to the fat guy story, and as its name suggests, this one also happens in a cave. 

It goes something like this: you’ve spent your life chained to a cave wall.  People pass by outside the cave, and they talk and carry on, but from your vantage point, you can’t actually see them.  You can, however, see the shadows they cast on the cave wall, and all your life, you think the shadows are doing the talking and causing all the commotion. And that’s fine for you.

Except one day, you’re set free, and you see that there are actual three-dimensional people making all that racket.  Maybe you go insane with this new information, or maybe you were ready to see the truth, and you can then become a productive member of the shadow-casting crowd.

It’s an allegory for the lies told to us by our leaders.  They keep us in the dark watching shadows because it’s all we can understand. 

“It’s a free country,” they say.  But baby, freedom’s just a shadow on the wall.

That’s okay, though. It’s a beautiful illusion.

So, the man decided to move on, and I had to come along for the ride.  While the blog application he wrote was fine in the beginning, he wanted to get all fancy with the link backs and the tags and the spam controls, so he figured WordPress was a better way to go.

While it was easy for us to port over all the past articles, it wasn’t so easy to bring our comments along.  Sorry about that. We had our best discussion in months on The Gay Old Days, and I’ll try to add those back if I can since they really added a layer of comedy that I never could have achieved on my own.

Anyway, I’ve been obsessing all day, tweaking the design and other settings, and now you have it.  A whole new me.

I’m loving the search functionality.  You should try it out.  Here are some of my favorite searches so far:

chichimeca
junialeeg
drag queen
blinking