cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Around and Around Last night I went to a party. Out of the 50 or 60 people there, I only knew 4 of them. Yet everyone knew who I was. It was fucking weird. Everyone who I talked to recognized my name and knew who I was. Some of them had read about me in the NY Times, others had seen something on TV, and still more had read interviews and articles in various magazines about me. EVERYONE. Every. Single. Person. And it was all from different sources. Am I famous? This is fucking weird. What a weird thing to be famous for. I have this kudzu thing to put together this week. The people that I need to work with on this one are lined up and now I need to find some kudzu. Hopefully Facebook will deliver. I have a good kitchen to use as well. Next weekend we're doing the dry-run for the r1fle building class with a volunteer who we will be teaching. Paul did a pre-dry run dry run yesterday so that we will have an example of the finished product to show to people. The rifle looks really good. We'll see how it shoots. Yesterday F. and I scouted out a place on his wife's family property to build a 150 yard shooting range. It is going to take a lot of work but I'm hoping to have it ready to use for the first rifle bu1lding class when we test the rifles and zero their scopes. There is a trail out to the site, but we need to spend a day or so chainsawing a bunch of trees that blew over it in the blizzards last winter in order to get a Jeep through. Then we're looking at another day of clearing out a few trees and a bunch of brush between the targets and the spot where the shooting benches will go. Building the benches will be the last step and probably the most fun. I'm also considering knocking up a quick pole frame using the trees that are cut down. Something that would provide some shelter from rain and wind. No permanent roof; just a basic frame to put a tarp or canvas on as needed. The cash left over from my last class is rapidly dwindling. I need to get something else on the calender ASAP. Hopefully people will start to understand why these classes cost as much as they do. Cutting the trail and building the range is going to take 3 people about 4 days of labor to make it ready for use. We've spent a lot of money and time on the dry runs for the rifle class. This shit all takes a lot of work to make the class go smoothly when the curtain goes up. Suddenly there is some retarded drama between Mary and F that I do not want any part in. They had some kind of huge argument the other night where they were threatening to separate. I do not want anything to do with this shit but somehow I seem to be getting dragged into it. F. is confiding in me about it; Mary is confiding in Trish, and now Trish is practically ordering me to take Mary out alone for dinner on Thursday so that she can talk to me about it. Fucking hell. No thank you. I do not want to play marriage counselor. Especially in a situation where for all I know my existence might have something to do with the problem in the first place. It is especially annoying having this happen right when I am trying to integrate both of these people into my overall program. Mary is supposed to help out with the kudzu event and I may hire her to cater future classes, F is a co-instructor for my deer classes, and here F and Paul and I are about to start building a rifle range on land owned by Mary's family. If they suddenly have some kind of messy break-up then that would tend to leave me shit out of luck with all kinds of work put into a shooting range that I would probably not be able to use for classes. Meanwhile, the D1scovery channel producers want to bump up the date for filming my pilot or taster or whatever the fuck it is. I'm worried: I need money for this and don't know where I'm going to get it this fast. At a minimum, I have to come up with $300 to buy the deer and pay F. to drive up and get it for us. Possibly I might need to drop another $100 on renting a kitchen to film in. This shit is happening before my advance will get here. I might have to try to offer another class right the fuck away just to get the money to make the D1scovery filming go smoothly. Maybe I can get them to foot part or all of the bill? These people from the NSSA still haven't gotten back to me about hooking me up with an instructor or speaker for this NYC hunting rifle ownership thing that people are asking me to organize. I have email sitting here from people I've never met asking me to teach them how to butcher dead things. Someone is trying to get me to go up to DC to do a Sl0w Food event there. After work I have to go driving around looking for kudzu for people to cook and eat while NPR records it. I don't even know how I keep all of these balls in the air at once. I don't even know what the fuck to call this. What is my job title? When do I get paid? Will there be days off? Being in charge of all of this is weird. I have all of these really smart, competent people whom I work with and organize for all of this weird shit that I do and all of them are waiting for me to decide things and make plans. I am completely fucking disorganized. I am making it all up as I go along. That total picture is what has been missing from all of the interviews and articles and documentaries and blog entries about me that have been published over the last year. The sheer scale of 'what the fuck' has not made it into any of the coverage. I don't even really understand the whole of whats going on any more. Between books and travel and writing articles and fielding constant questions about mountain lions (WHY? I wrote one fucking article about cougars and the world thinks this makes me the expert) and carving up meat and organizing events and producing this TV project and building a rifle range and developing new courses and reviewing business plans and everything else... I have lost all perspective on what the fuck is even happening with my life and career. Everything whizzes by so fast. 4:36 p.m. - 2010-05-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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