september 25, 2009

From an email I wrote last fall:

I've been lonesome in the past day because C's been gone. Ordinarily traveling alone is okay for me, but the contrast between yesterday's traveling circus and today's lonely wandering was hard to handle. I did a tour of the Sydney Opera House, took a ferry to the zoo, where I mostly darted from shady spot to shady spot trying to avoid sun exposure and occasionally lifting a camera to capture kangaroos scratching their balls, and then took myself out to a sushi bar where dishes passed by on a conveyor belt and your stacked up plates next to your messy sauce dish remind you of your own gluttony and profligacy. I had this moment when I realized why some people turn to substance abuse, because for about five minutes I was feeding wasabi into my mouth one pea at a time, and waiting for the tears to well up, because it was a good way to distract myself from feeling self-conscious about eating alone next to all these couples. I felt especially pathetic listening to this conversation next to me, which I wrote down on my memo pad:

Girl 1: To-dye was the worst dye eever.
Girl 2: Would you loike a beeskit? Oh a glass a wine?
Girl 1: Noi, you knoi I can't drink that. I'm on a diet. Vodka shots, though. Noi calories een that.
Girl 2: Really?
Girl 1: Oi yah, I knew a gull who'd drink three glasses of champagne and a boddle of wadda for lunch.
Girl 2: What is with these people I knoi?

I stuffed myself and then left, and walked past an arcade where only Asian people were throwing away money on giant claw games where you try to pick up giant stuffed dolls. I watched for half an hour and then spent $5 trying to win a digital camera to replace C's lost camera. There were colored lights and Asian bodies everywhere, all the elements of a Wong Kar-Wai movie, except that the lonely dreamy protagonist is not nearly as good-looking as Tony Leung, and nobody would pay $12 to see this movie. I think I've just about reached my limit for traveling like this, and for wandering around generally. I used to want to live in another country for at least a year or two, but I think the window for that has passed. My daydreams now take me to an office where I can sit and educate myself with either my work or my Google procrastination jags. I guess it's sort of stupid that when I'm stuck in a job I don't feel great about, all I want to do is travel, but when I'm traveling all I want is stable domesticity. I think I should just find a job I like.

. . .

I just sat down to read and reread your email and write you a response, but I thought I should first listen to the Queen song you referenced just to get my head in the right mood for the email composition. But I searched and searched, and could not find the mp3 that must have been lost in my transition between computers, and instead got my hopes built up by an Earth, Wind & Fire track by the same name (“You and I”) – imagine my disappointment upon hearing the bleating brass of mid-70s funk instead of Freddie’s beautiful voice! – and then settled for playing my go-to John Fahey album of jangling guitar instrumentals to drown out the noise coming from the pack of American, Australian and (judging by the accent) Singaporean or Hong Kong kids who have taken up all the acoustic space in this giant hostel. “What’s fellatio?????” an American girl just screamed. “Drink!!!” the chorus responded. I don’t resent these kids having fun like I used to when I was about the appropriate age to be shouting “What’s fellatio??????” (though let’s just be honest, we all wonder the same from time to time; and also it’s not like I’ve really matured past the point of being an idiot in public), but I just wish they’d enclose their heads in scuba submersible helmets and talk to each other with helmet-to-helmet intercoms instead of trilling in the open air like magpies. Did you know, one of the Australian Rules Football teams is call the Magpies, nicknamed the Pies, and I had to ask Aimee what a 148-point font newspaper headline that read “LARGE PIES POSTER FREE” meant? (It was a centerfold promo photo for the team.) Who cares? I’m very happy that you like that song. I don’t think it’s on any of their best-of compilations, but I wanted to include it because I think it’s one of the finest Queen recordings. It shows off the texture of Freddie’s voice so nicely; listening to this song is the closest I get in waking life to realizing my dreams of flying. I also like how in “Another One Bites the Dust,” his voice is straining so much at the top of his range that after many of the lines he makes a whimpering or deflating sound. It first appears at 1:09; the highest note he has been recorded signing (highest not sung with head voice) is the (I think) D he hits at “ripple” on 1:20. Montserrat Caballe, the Spanish soprano who recorded “Barcelona,” the official song of the 1992 Olympic Games, with Freddie just months before his death, said that what distinguished Queen from other rock bands was that Queen was about selling the voice, not a gimmick or a performance or anything else. I will stop talking about Queen now.