cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GPS & Book Stuff Out of nowhere, I just bought a hand-held GPS on eBay about 2 minutes ago. For $70. I had a little extra money after putting the down payment of the car last night so that is where this is coming from. Basically from the sale of the BMW. This looks self-indulgent but it really isn't. I was looking through the new Cabela's deer hunting catalog last night and saw the page with all of the GPS systems on it and I started thinking about what happened on that scouting trip along the Kentucky border a few months ago. To recap, I got lost in the mountains and could easily have ended up in a life or death situation. Had it been closer to dark or had I twisted my ankle or something, things could have gone very badly indeed. While I feel pretty good about my ability in general to survive in the wilderness for quite a while if I am provided with a knife and warm clothing, it is best to avoid testing that theory while actually lost. In about 30 days I'm going on the actual elk hunt for about 6 days and this will naturally involve a lot of hiking around in those same mountains. This GPS could easily save my life and I don't think that it is overly indulgent or wasteful for me to purchase it. $70 is a bit of money for me at the moment, but when one imagines the sun going down and the temperature dropping below freezing while one is far from any trace of civilization, that $70 starts to look pretty damn cheap. I know how to use a topographical map and have had plenty of landnav training in Boy Scouts, Outward Bound and ROTC. However, I'm a little rusty. There is often a lot of fog on those mountains. I could easily be on a ridge somewhere with visibility under 100 feet and no way of seeing landmarks to match up with contour lines on the map. So I'll have a paper map and compass as back up but the GPS will be my primary means of navigation. The only thing I think that I need for this hunting trip is a collapsible ground blind. That would really come in handy. Maybe I could go for an inflatable mattress as well. I *can* sleep on the ground as per usual but that sorta sucks after a few nights. An air mattress would be cheap and easy enough to throw into the canoe. I should just get one. If I remember, I'll stop some place on the way home and see what's out there that looks easy to take camping. Aside from that I think I'm pretty well set for this thing. Trish and her mother must be so fucking sick of hearing about this thing. Every weekend when we go over to their place this is all Bob and I talk about for the last 3 months. Blah blah blah, elk rifles, weight limits of various canoes, remaining velocity and energy of a certain bullet at 150 yards versus some other bullet, where to make camp, how many tents to bring, will it be cold, whether or not to hunt ducks while we're there, etc. etc. Then you just know that they are going to continue to hear about it for another 3 months afterwards even if we don't get anything. If we do in fact manage to get an elk then neither of us will shut the fuck up about it for at least 6 months. Then there will be a very brief summer lull until we start planning the next trip. I intend to do some writing this weekend. I have a few ideas for books that I intend to take a stab at and see if there's any real inspiration. Write a chapter or 2 and perhaps an outline. When I'm really 'on' and suddenly into an idea, I can crank out a story or an article almost as fast as I can type. For hours. Then maybe I go back later and edit the fuck out of it until it's half gone. But it's easier to edit crap than a blank page. Recently I've discovered the website of this guy named Tucker Max, who claims to be a professional asshole but is really just a good story-teller who also happens to be an asshole. I like his whole approach to writing. I fucking hate writers who just wank on and on about being writers. The fact of Tucker Max being a writer is invisible in his writing. Dude just tells a story well and it happens to be written down nicely. He has thousands and thousands of readers and had a book on the NY Times best-seller list because nothing about him or his book is writer-y. The people who buy and read his books are probably not very interested in books per se. They are interested in hearing these fucked-up stories about some dude getting shit-faced drunk and insulting people and kicked out of bars and having sex with strange women. I think that they read the book and the website as if they were sitting in a booth in some dive listening to him tell the story over a beer or 20. Yeah, that's the way to go. His stuff about drinking reminds me a lot of the acid memoir stuff that I wrote in my old diary under the other name. Shit that's so weird that I couldn't make it up if I tried. Getting into a car filled with snow to drive to a strange college campus to wander around a strange dorm and look for acid. Buying half a sheet and driving back through a blizzard to dose half of our own dorm. Picking the locks on a laboratory like cat burglars in black BDUs to steal lab equipment that we used to invent a new drug called 'sneed.' Getting caught red-handed in the process of making said drug in the middle of the quad (had to be outside on account of fumes), being taken into custody by a police officer and then talking our way out of the situation such that we were allowed to leave the public safety office with the stolen lab equipment and half-purified sneed. Anyway, reading Tucker Max's stuff has reignited my interest in writing a book about that whole phase of my life. Apparently there is in fact an audience for this kind of thing and it's ok to present it in the form of a bunch of short stories. Yeah, the more I think about it, that is the book that I probably have in me before all others. Those are the stories I come back to again and again in my diaries. I don't know how the fuck to write a novel. I don't know how to squeeze more than 50 pages or so out of a political manifesto. It's this stuff that I know how to write. 2:15 p.m. - 2007-10-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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