MINUTE OF MONTH NO. 29 JULY 2022
Channel: Sarah Bay Gachot
Date: 2023-01-13

#minuteofmonth No. 29, July, 2022. July, the birthday month, was a big month, like a spontaneous production where we put on a play about the history of the universe with tempera-painted cardboard sets of nebulae, galaxies, deserts, city skylines, and endless seas, weather systems made of bendy metal, flashing lights, a storm of strings falling from cotton clouds, then a sunrise, a sunset, the big bang in reverse, and then again, the triumphs and the wars, the inventions and the extinctions, the births and deaths. And maybe it was a musical, too, so we were dancing. We put on this play as we were writing it and it was a smashing success. We sweat and heaved and ho’ed, and at the end we were smiling, but not without some mortification for all the stupid screw ups along the way. Luckily, the imaginary audience was kind of stunned, and clapped politely — enough for us to keep going. Then I turned fifty and we raised a glass to this production — and to the next fifty years. Or fifty million. But, really, we covered a lot of ground in July and it felt like a good way to cap of my first half century. We finished our week of learning to sail, guiding a massive sailboat back from the waters of the Saronic Gulf, then immediately one of us got Covid, and we split up into two airbnbs for healing and sweating it out, quarantining in a beautiful old un-air-conditioned house during that first hot week of July, writing, thinking, going for walks, and making soups. Thinking a lot. Then we flew to Barcelona and drove to a friend’s house halfway between Toulouse and Bordeaux in France, where she had gathered family and more friends and it was eating and dancing and getting cool in the pool. . . . I got some work finally, but it was all good timing, writing during the day and being festive at night. We drove back to Barcelona and caught a ferry to Sardinia, and this served as my birthday “cruise,” which I have spent a lifetime thinking about, but it took a slightly different tenor, and it was both a car wreck and spectacularly just what I wanted. We did it up — the full dinner, the Caravaggio suite — while most of the travelers on the boat were going headfirst into some kind of performance piece of endurance, using alcohol, territorial staking out, fuck-all attitudes, and the embracing of misery to survive the night. At the end of it all the feeling was sort of a pit-in-the-stomach, and I accidentally left behind some heirloom bracelets that I may never forgive myself for. But, we landed in Sardinia and that was a whole other story in itself. This was the part of the play where we invented a lot, and we debuted parades and ceremonies and feasts for the singers of Sardinia . . . but I wrote about that in another post. Then from Sardinia we flew to Venice, Italy, so I could spend my actual birthday seeing what the Art Biennale was all about. The last time I was in Venice was 32 years ago on a solo trip around Europe and Egypt for four months, when I woke up, left my pensione, and spent the entire day trying to find my way back. It’s how I learned to travel, so it seemed appropriate to be there again, in Venice, for my birthday, though we have GPS now and we didn’t get too lost. Just a little. Originally posted on:
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