cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Where's Your Pulitzer, You Arrogant Little Prick? I forgot the obligatory 'my weekend' entry yesterday. So here it is and then some I spent most of Saturday doing yard work. I have soooo much work outside to catch up on. Between staying in the office later and the mower deck on my tractor needing parts that I can't seem to find, shit is getting out of hand in that department. Saturday night I watched 'Brokeback Mountain.' It was kinda sad but also kinda funny. Because a lot of their behavior was just implausible. Like the day after their weird, drunken hook-up. Two men who were trying to think of themselves as straight would not have had that conversation the next day. They wouldn't have talked about it at all. And then right after that they go into the tent and have this whole romantic make-out session, the tone of which I also found implausible. That part of the movie was set in a rural, western area in 1963. At that time and place there were no popular templates for romantic homosexual relationships. The vague urges were there, yes. But for these 2 cowboys with strongly masculine, heterosexual identities to tenderly caress each other so soon after their first encounter does not make sense. It would have been much more plausible if they'd written in a few more rough, purely sexual encounters like the first one. Then maybe had Ennis camp alone on top of the mountain for a night. Show him tossing and turning and unable to sleep as he is obviously thinking of Jack Twist. You've got to have a scene or an implied transition where Ennis' way of looking at Jack clearly changes along with his identity. Fucking is one thing. Kissing is a whole other ballpark. Then following that I could maybe buy the idea of him gripping Jack Twist in a firm, sweaty embrace, while his manhood grew against the smaller man's body and their tongues danced together. Or insert whatever slashy prose floats your boat. Sunday I started doing more yard work but was interrupted by the discovery that I had just gone straight over a nest of yellow jackets with a weed eater. Hordes of them began to swarm around the entrance. I have no idea why I was not stung. Probably something like Daniel and the lions. I must be far too worthy for such punishment. Naturally I got right the fuck out of there and ran inside as soon as I realized what was going on. So much for faith. Those yellow jackets were seriously pissed. The nest is underground, right up against the foundation of the house. Meaning that we all had to stay inside until the hornets calmed down, which was the rest of the day. So no more yard work. When hornets or bees are pissed off like that, they will often attack towards the sound of a small engine nearby. So no more lawn mower or weed eater even on the other side of the house for the rest of the day. Now I have the fun of getting rid of the nest. Last year I had a nest to deal with that was about 7 yards away from this one. Far enough from the house that I was comfortable with dousing the nest with gasoline and burning it out. I stood nearby with a hose at the ready to avoid things getting out of hand. This worked very well. I spent the next week picking off the few survivors with a BB gun. The whole thing was great fun. However, I can't do that this time because the nest is too close to the house. Sunday night I came down with a cold. I could have headed it off with a big dose of zinc pills (always works for me) but I thought it was allergies at the time and I missed the chance to prevent it from really taking hold. So now I'm sick. The baby has it, too. I haven't gotten much sleep these last few nights. I went home from work early yesterday because I was starting to run a fever. I'm about half way through 'The Green Fields of Africa.' I'm not prepared to call Hemingway 'over rated' since I haven't read very much of his stuff and am not in a position to judge. Suffice to say that I am unimpressed. All too often he has these sentences that go on fucking forever until you forget what in the hell he was talking about in the first place. The man also has a very singular sense of where not to insert a paragraph break. I will credit Hemingway with the fact that every now and then he comes up with a sentence or a description of something that is just lovely and I want to frame it. But I come up with such sentences myself almost as often. Hell, so do a number of the online diaries that I read almost every day. As a story teller writing in the genre of African adventure (which is what 'Green Fields of Africa' is), he is a definite second to Peter Hathaway Capstick. Too, I am disappointed with Hemingway's ethics as a hunter. He mentions taking a long shot at a bustard across a plain. What in the hell would you shoot a bustard for? Nobody wants to eat a carrion bird. It's no good as a trophy. They aren't pests or destructive to agriculture or dangerous to humans. There is just no excuse for that. If there is one thing that I simply cannot stand it is the sort of man who goes about shooting at everything in sight just for the 'fun' of it. A man like that should not hunt at all. Then you have this situation Hemingway describes where he makes a very bad shot on a cape buffalo with a .470 and the buff ends up gut-shot and they have to track it. Long story short, he sees 2 buffs running together out of a thicket, one of them being the one he'd wounded. Then he shoots at the wrong one, killing it almost instantly. Ok, fine but then he just abandons the search for the wounded animal. This is terribly irresponsible for 2 reasons. First, every hunter has a sacred duty to go to whatever lengths are necessary to find and finish a mortally wounded animal rather than let it die slowly of infection or organ failure. He saw where the buffalo ran but made no effort to track it again. A gut-shot animal *will* die. It might take anywhere from 6 hours to 3 days but it will die and that death will be painful and horrible. Secondly, a wounded cape buffalo poses a serious threat to any other humans or animals in the area. Wounded buffalo will often fly into a rage, attacking and killing anything within sight that moves and is not another buffalo. A great many people in Africa have been killed by wounded buffalo like that. Deliberately leaving a wounded buff in the bush is one of the greatest sins that an African hunter can commit. On a day when one is feeling less than charitable it could be called manslaughter. Of course, if Hemingway were alive to read all of this he probably say something along the lines of 'where's your Pulitzer, you arrogant little prick?' This evening I'm to have dinner at my in-laws' place. I suspect that Bob wants to start planning another scouting expedition for elk. I'm not sure that I can swing it. October is shaping up to be pretty busy already, what with the 3rd weekend already being spoken for (Trish and the kids are visiting family out of state and I have to stay home to take care of the dogs) and one of those other weekends perhaps being devoted to a canoing trip with Erin and Melinda. I've got to have at least one weekend to spend at home with Ida. Plus another for catching up on property maintenance. I don't see the point, anyway. The rut will be over by then and we already know where we want to hunt. Personally, I'm all set for the actual hunt in November. I just have to properly sight in the scope of my elk rifle and I'm ready to go. Oh, I did something else notable on Sunday. I spent about 5 hours cooking a brisket and it turned out beautifully. I smoked it on the grill for an hour and a half and then finished it up in the oven. By the time it was done you could literally spread it on a cracker. I used a spoon to cut it. It was absolutely perfect. I got the basic recipe from Saveur about 4 years ago and have been fiddling with it a few times a year ever since. 10:35 a.m. - 2007-09-11 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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