Wedding 3?
Not much to report on August, actually. Kept my head down, wrote more novel, worked on that project I told you about, etc. etc. But that’s not to say there weren’t highlights. I capped off this insane summer of weddings (4!) at a place in what seemed to be the German old west. Surrounded by farm land, the location was no less beautiful, and it was cool to see a new take on a German wedding.
Should I have gotten a haircut for this dress-up event? Probably, but like I said in the previous post, I was spent, man! My last 20 bucks went to the dry cleaning of the suit. I still owed a debtor in Miami for the 4000 dollars I spent on taxis there. Jokes aside, it was obviously a fun time. Congrats to Tim and Vivian, and please god no more weddings until next year! Also, a dude who looked a lot like my boy Bragi kept widening his eyes at me when the bride was throwing her bouquet. He saw Victoria in the line of catchers and said, “front row… and center… uh oh” and I wondered how I ended up in a 90s romcom where dudes still made those jokes. All I had to do was purse my lips and the dude burst out laughing.
The rest of my month looked something like this:
Some of these pictures I will explain, some I will not. The tennis photo you see was from a tournament in which I got double-bageled (0-6 0-6) in the first round, so not really successful there. But I as I hulked and heaved my slowly responding body across the clay, I was able to grab a few exciting points that proved I could still fight with the big boys, if I ever decided to give up sedentariness as a virtue. Tennis is great because when you play it, your only frame of reference for what you may look like is from watching the pros, so when you see a video of yourself looking like you may collapse at any moment, and your strokes look like they’re being swung by an overweight chipmunk playing against Andy Roddick, it’s always a shock. Still, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
And towards the end of the month, Vici and I went on a lil spa hotel trip. Treated ourselves after all the treating ourselves. In reality, while we did a lot this summer in total, we didn’t really do too much together (just the two of us), and we wanted to live like royalty for a bit. You know, the robes, the slippers, the Nordic barrel of ice water you plunge into after leaving the 200 degree herbal infused dry sauna, and pray your heart doesn’t fail you now. Naked men and women sloshing about with reckless abandon because this is Germany and oh my god I will never get used to this please god why is she staring at my scrotum right now like I get it, it’s super hot and now it looks weird but please just turn the other way again. Like I said, royalty.
We kid, we kid. The trip was awesome. I finished Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes there, which was almost laughably bad and I can’t even believe this man wrote it, and I started into Jorge Luis Borges’ collection of short stories called “Fictions”, which has been awesome so far. What killed me after like the fourth story is that almost his entire work is comprised of short stories about other fictitious works. For example, he writes a miniature biography of a fictitious author (never existed) who spent the latter half of his career trying to live his life in such a way that he himself would come up with Don Quixote, verbatim, but without looking at the original or trying to memorize anything. Borges writes about this man’s contemporaries and letters of correspondence, his impact on literary culture, and why his other works were still important. He even adds footnotes leading to fictional references. This book is hilarious. Anyway, much recommended.1
If I have bored you, have no fear, for this is the end. After the spa trip we simply went back to the old grind. Summer proper has drawn to a close, after much clinging and praying and even weeping; Fall has arrived. And soon, my boy Joshy will have arrived as well, so stay tuned for that later in September / early October. In the next two posts, I’ll bring the dates up to current, share some pics, and share a solid excerpt of the novel and talk about that too.
See you tomorrow.
Nick
1Last point on the Don Quixote story. Borges argues that if such a thing were to happen, if this man really wrote the whole thing on his own, that we’d have to view it as a separate work, and that it would be even BETTER than the original due to the more experimental and stylish technique by the author (rather than the lame, of-its-time verbiage that Cervantes used). The argument in the end is that there’s an entire world of infinite analysis of art available to us, if only we imagine fictitious crossovers of artists and works i.e David Lynch’s “Dumb and Dumber”, Mindy Kaling’s “Moby Dick”, etc. Borges is the most serious troll I ever read.
Nick Denardi 