Inputs
Family Meal by Bryan Washington: FM hits a lot of the same thematic and tonal notes of his masterpiece Memorial. The world is realized so beautifully, and BW is hardly the only author who goes back to settings or ideas over multiple books. But I look forward to seeing what happens if he shakes things up in future work.
Dita von Teese: A Jubilant Revue: “Y’all want to hit a club after the show? I can make some calls!” my brother-in-law said before he dropped us off. He was being polite. I was wearing a sweater vest. In contrast with the rest of the audience and the diversity of Looks they had chosen for the event, from drag to a wedding gown to Listened-to-a-Lot-of-Cherry-Poppin’-Daddies-in-the-Nineties-and-Never-Got-Rid-of-the-Hat. I was struck by the gulf between these people and myself, in that they were actually capable of acknowledging that they are perceived by others without feeling lowered into an acid bath of self-consciousness.
Anyway, then the show started. I thought it might be a little awkward watching a striptease in public but it actually didn’t feel very sexual- most of it felt like a dream ballet, but with pasties. I kept imagining the boyfriends in the audience the next day saying dude I thought there were going to be boobs but then they brought out a puppet wtf???? It was so gorgeous and joyful. What is the purpose in 2023 of an art form revolving around choosing to reveal or withhold the sight of a body? I’ll never know what it would have been like to watch something like DvTAJR in a world where you don’t have a machine in your pocket that can show you people fucking. But this celebrated having a body and moving it with gusto and precision in a way that felt special.
Outputs
Despite my hangups about my appearance when clothed and general alienation from my body, I’ve retained from the Nordic summers of my youth a high degree of nonchalance about gender-segregated nudity in public bathing facilities. As a result, I am able to enjoy going to places like Imperial Spa.1 Nearly everyone was thinner and sleeker than me and, it being Vegas, there were a few moments of “Why is there light glinting off of her…oh, piercing, right!”, but we were all just there to simmer and I felt like the only thing I could have done that would have drawn judgment would be if I had not rinsed off thoroughly enough before getting in the tub. After the initial soak I had my appointment with the scrubber lady. For thirty minutes I came as close as I ever have to feeling like an inanimate object, while simultaneously feeling painfully aware of every single assaulted nerve in my skin. As she held my arm aloft and went at it with the nylon scrubber, I felt pellets of dead epidermis showering down on me. I thought I was a pretty aggressive exfoliator but no, turns out I am usually clad in a carapace of filth. I usually think of my body as being nothing but trouble, but for a short time it was just a thing to take care of not because it’s failing or deficient but because it’s mine.
Condiment Corner
As described above we spent the holidays visiting my inlaws in Vegas, where I got a shock every time I touched a doorknob and a wrong turn through the new development where T’s sister lives abruptly ended in black desert. Because of work schedules, my family took moderately inconvenient flights while I flew nonstop and childfree a few days later. I had expected that between their departure and mine I would be eating mostly feral snack meals. Instead, I felt a penitential compulsion to dispatch several days’ (weeks, honestly) worth of slumping leftovers. Something sharp and pickly is usually helpful for that purpose, but I found these lackluster. Not much flavor to the brine. The pieces varied in size from a carrot coin to the green tomatoes the size of a Chips Ahoy, the latter being too big for my liking. Bite-sized is best for this type of thing in my view.
It’s fine, but SpaWorld in Centreville, VA is in a superior league.