All weekend I stayed in a hotel room drinking wine and reading.  Sometimes Uncle Jason/Larry Awesome gets a little run down and likes to head to an out of town hotel to recharge his batteries.  Wine and hotel rooms and not really talking to anybody, I have found, are the best ways to do this.  I can only hope that this is the beginning of my slow descent into materialistic asceticism (because I like being alone but I also like marble bathrooms and very high thread count sheets).  But I don’t think I can make that call at this juncture.  Perhaps it is the start of my hermitage, or maybe I’m just really fucking weird and sexually confused.   

It’s been a strange couple of months for me and I have some big things coming up in the next few weeks.  My life has been exciting, empowering, scary, and poopy all at once recently.  I don’t mean to sound mysterious, but I say this to spare you the minutiae and long-story-ness of my life (although isn’t that what a blog is supposed to be about?).  Regardless, this was a good weekend to have one of my trips, to get some alone time before amping it up in the coming weeks.

(I know this sounds completely weird and believe me, it is.  A grown-ass man walking around naked 12 hours a day in a hotel room, drinking moderately priced wine and reading books, most of the time in the shower, is not normal.  However, I enjoy it, so let me be.  You can judge me if you want, but keep in mind that I have never judged you, even when I ran into you in Old Navy smelling the bikini bottoms in the children’s section.)

I usually bring two books per trip.  This time, I brought a book called Collapse by Jared Diamond, the same guy who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel.  Though I didn’t finish that book (way too long and disappointingly boring in parts), I was gifted this book recently and figured I’d give it a shot.  Perhaps, I thought, it would give me something good to say at parties, aside from "Did you guys feel that toilet paper?  I would have been better off using a fork!" and "Fun fact: if you wake up in the morning and before brushing your teeth put ketchup on your tongue, your breath will smell like vagina."  But I never got to it.    

The other book I brought was by wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  Like Diamond, I was familiar with and not particularly a fan of his earlier work.  I read Everything is Illuminated and thought it was ok, but wasn’t able to see what all the fuss was about.  Admittedly, this could have been out of jealousy.  Like many "creative types" (if I dare call myself that; I’m not sure making a joke about wiping my ass with a fork qualifies me as such), I am very jealous of everyone more successful than me, especially if their success allows them to be credit card debt free and/or sleep with attractive women.  But the book had been highly recommended to me by someone whose tastes in literature I consider excellent, so I brought it on my weekend.

I read the book in about twenty-four hours.  When I say "I couldn’t put it down" I mean it in the most literal sense; one hand was constantly on the book, the other more than likely holding a glass of wine or my penis or scrotum.  I read it on the bed, on the toilet, on the floor, in the tub.  There was no stretch of time greater than two minutes that I wasn’t reading this book.        

The effect it had on me was staggering.  I can’t definitively say why.  The story, which I am loathe to summarize for fear of short changing it, was enthralling.  The writing was…I don’t have a word.  I don’t have a joke, either.  At times it was so immaculate that I wanted to break my own fingers, having realized that nothing I could ever write, create, sing, think, draw, or yell would be so exceptional.

But instead of sending me into a whirlwind of self-doubt, it changed me in a more positive way.  Rather then allow myself to get depressed, I fell into some sort of hyper-sensitive trance.  When I finished the book around 1am on Saturday night, I put it down on the bed next to me and drank some wine.  I put my iPod on and let it play.  And I sat there, thinking and drinking, for the next couple of hours, just staring into the room.  Just fucking working shit out.   

Again, I know this is weird.  I don’t usually have deep moments, and less than twelve hours later I was back in my apartment in NYC downloading gang bang porn.  And I readily admit that I was pretty drunk by this point.  I’ve been really into wine lately because it tastes good, gets me where I need to go faster than beer but won’t kill me like hard stuff will, and has a different, warmer, pensive buzz.  So I’m sure that helped with my situation.      

But if I’m not mistaken, I had a genuine bona fide moment there.  It hit me right around the time when Marah’s "Walt Whitman Bridge" came on the iPod.  The song itself deserves an entire post to explore its depth, but I listened to it dozens of times in a row.  The chorus, specifically the lines "Your memory/Blows away", could be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

I wish I could give a better explanation of my moment or what the hell happened in that hotel room, but I suppose that is part of the intrigue of it all.  It’s not like I made any concrete decisions then and there, saying to myself, "I’m going to sleep with five girls before the year is out if it kills me (or them)" or "I’m quitting my job and really going to focus on my swimming career" or "I’m resigning my post of President and CEO of Jason Mulgrew Against the Blacks (and the Gays too) LLC." 

It was a more abstract sense of: Yes.  This is good.  I got it all figured out. 

Because sometimes the world looks perfect, nothing to rearrange.  Sometimes you get a feeling like you need some kind of change.  No matter what the odds are this time, nothing’s going to stand in my way.  This flame in my heart and a long lost friend gives every dark street a light at the end.

Standing tall, on the wings of my dream.
Rise and fall, on the wings of my dream.

The rain and thunder, the wind and haze – I’m bound for better days.  It’s my life and my dream.  Nothing’s going to stop me now.

[spoken over harmonica outro]

No, my friends.  Nothing is going to stop me now.  Excepts bullets.  And sharks.  And any number of things, really.

[End scene]