AUG-B-2
THE RE-ENTRY FROM THE DELAYED
“PASSAGE OUT OF
TO THE DISCOVERY OF WHAT AWAITS IN DC
AND DERWOOD IN THE INTERVAL BETWEEN
AND ALASKAN WILDERNESS MOOSE HUNT
FOLLOWING A MONTH’S ABSENCE OUT OF CONTACT
WITH COMMITMENTS AND ONGOING PROJECTS
ON THE HOME FRONT
I have not yet touched down in IAD and I am somewhere over Newfoundland just now, headed west with the sun, so that I should arrive in daylight to see what is left to me in Derwood, after dropping the pre-packaged rolls of film for prints, etc at GW. I will pick up my bags at the baggage claim in IAD and re-pack the backpack so as to carry it along with the GWU ID by the pre-paid Washington Flyer ticket to the West Falls Church Metro and then in to GW. I will do the film drop, and email items there in the office e before picking up the Bronco and driving north to see what remains in Derwood. There may not be much livable there, if the demolition phase has run its destructive course and there may be no purpose for my stopping to pick up groceries for the brief week interval between this re-entry and departure for the Alaskan big game hunt which begins from the Eastern Shore on Sept . 1, but I can only know when I check, which is what I plan to do later today, as I will be arriving in the light of day—no matter that my own clock is set to 12 ½ time zones eastward. If I can do some collecting at GW, I may b e able to carry all that “home” to wherever that home might be just now, pending the progress or entropic stages at Derwood. At the very least, I had been invited to contribute and editorial to the journal Nutrition, which I have been carrying with me as I travel, but without the facilities that would give some academic underpinning to it, such as the reference material that might be library or other resource based, I cannot complete it, but might try.
I
had also started the year-end letter of 2003 while marooned in Leh, with the
thought that if I had been stranded for weeks in
I
had also thought that I should run, to take full advantage of my high altitude
acclimatization before I lose it through inactivity. After successive days of high exertion and
fitness, I have been sitting on buses or planes for the last several successive
days and need to put on some miles—not run at all since three weeks ago when I
sent my Reebok test shoes back through Lee Dutton who mailed them upon his
return to the US after Ladakh-03 right after our last good run over the Tsemo
Gompa in upper mountainous Leh—at an altitude of some 12,800 feet. This should mean I am ready now for both the
But, I will get to see more of those Americans who are very much in evidence on this aircraft, each of them taking up at least twice the jet fuel that their Asian counterparts—again., with the notable exception of the wealthy urban Indians who are the type to have enough money and influence to be flying internationally for a several month US visit with relatives. Their acquired wealth can overcome the previously sleek, vegetarian diet with abundant exercise they are so eager to escape in the land of: Development.” This is the continuing them of the long Bollywood frothy spectaculars that are shown on the aircraft going to India; each hopes to achieve enough wealth power and consumer goods to live the rest of their lives in some angst about the use of these items and the particular dissatisfaction that material wealth brings, so that one can pose in very designer oriented surroundings while pondering the meaning of it all, and still come up with the romantic ending in the last of a five-hour spectacularly vapid song and dance (one suspects that the hilltop rural bucolic scene is painted on a screen rolled out behind the radio-city-style chorus line Reality is so different among these beautiful people who turn to flab, either here or there, in the India or the US they mimic so closely.