Two months down now and I’m getting quite anxious to sally forth into the mountains. This month was quite an exciting one though.
October could easily be summed up as my time was spent milling about with Mel, working happily at Diedrich’s (the coffee shop), and of course having spectacular romantic getaways to Boulder with lovely lady Laura. But summing a month up like that seems feeble and lame and details are always the spice of life so I shall give them.
It was a month sprinkled with the seasonings of winter and summer together in their transition. I finally got myself a jacket for $16 for the incoming cold and a new pair of shoes for $6 at my new found clothing hero, The Arc. My work schedule through out the month generally consisted of mornings spotted through out the week. When they coincided with Laura’s hectic school and work schedule’s days off or lazy mornings I’d bus my way up to Boulder and we’d indulge in snuggling ourselves away with a movie for the evening. Sometimes after a dinner out, other times with a picnic at home, but always the snuggling in front of a movie was there.
This came about usually once or twice a week and was what I would look forward to while at work. In the meantime I’d be working with the good folks of Diedrich’s where Mel would usually turn up toward the end of my shift and we’d have an adventure around Denver.
The first half of the month was quite stressful for me. My good friend Allyson from high school got married in the middle of the month back in Boston which I returned home for, but events surrounding that trip got me back to chewing up my fingertips again. Over the summer on the walk I had broken this habit of at least ten or fifteen years without even thinking about it. Returning home got me back on the knuckles like nothing else with such things as uneasy relations between Ingrid and I and just home itself tends to depress me at times. Surprisingly when the time came to go and make all my visits everything went along smoothly. I got to visit my very dear friend Gus and his wife and kid, I got a good visit in with my dad, and at the wedding got to see friends I hadn’t seen in about ten years almost.
Returning home proved to be a mighty chore, though. I didn’t bother looking up when my flight left so I just left with the earliest guest that was leaving the hotel at 8am. It turned out my flight left at 3pm. As the day wore on milling about Logan Airport the flight got delayed an hour and a half so rearrangements had to be made for my connecting flight in Chicago. A mess was made, but in the end I wound up meeting a wonderful lady heading into Denver talking about life, travels, and family which was nice. By the time I got home I’d been traveling for 14 hours.
Back in Denver, after work the next morning, I went up to Boulder and stayed with Laura for another cuddly evening. Checking my email the next day I discovered a girl, Julie, had found my website and wanted to talk with me. She was planning her own walk across the country starting in Oregon and was interested to hear what I had to say or suggest. Of course I suggested she walk with me if she liked. So now I had a buddy to plot out my next years travels with and excitement was abound in me.
Meanwhile, any other time that I wasn’t at Laura’s, or working, Mel and I had become inseparable. After work we’d go look for a job for her, or take photos around the park, or just wander the 16th St. Mall under the excuse that we were looking for something, be it work, research for my next leg, or some other errand, but usually we got nothing done and we would take in a movie. The new found organization of September disappeared with the stability of my new job and with its disappearance came the old listless yearnings to wander the town and explore.
By the end of the month my anxiousness to leave on the walk again was working its way down my knuckles. The planning with Julie helped some, but just egged me on worse to want to go then and there. In fact at one point I became so frustrated I started looking into southern routes to see if I could leave in January, with or without the money I needed. Halloween rolled around then and everything suddenly changed.
Diedrich’s is in the heart of Denver’s gay community. Because of this Laura and I got inspired to go to a Halloween party dressed as lesbian lovers. She wore a school girl outfit and I decked myself out in the best earthy crunchy girl costume I could devise on under $10, and it looked good. We figured out the best way to make realistic boobs were with water filled condoms in a bra. Then I put my short hair into little ponytails all over my head and threw on a long sun skirt. I was turning heads of some of my more adamantly lesbian friends.
We got to my friend Bill’s party and started gabbing away with the folks around us, partaking in the liquor in the kitchen. By midnight it seems I partook too much and my memory faded away. It wasn’t until the next day that I found out my jokes with Laura had become a bit too snide for her taste. But that, my friends, is next month.