cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Avocado I have made a cardinal, though non-fatal, error. If you're going to do something bat-shit crazy like quit your job of 11 years and drive around the country hunting and eating strange creatures then you should be quick about it. I gave more than 7 weeks notice. Bad idea. I feel like an avocado sitting on the counter becoming over-ripe. You can see that the avocado is the right color and has just the right amount of resistance when you squeeze it. The time has come to eat the avocado. Or make it into guacamole or whatever. Waiting a few more days will not make the avocado any better. In fact, it might turn to rotten mush. My avocado is ripe. Lately I am in envy of Mary. Mary is a great thrower-away of things. Only 2 weeks before I found her this past spring, she threw away my t-shirt from summer camp that she stole from my trunk in my cabin when I was 12. She'd kept it all those years through one purge after another and only on the cusp of the opportunity to steal another did she finally part with it. Sometimes one of us will mention a movie and Mary will say "we had that DVD but I threw it away a while ago." I find this nigh incomprehensible. Throwing away an object with such inherent value as a movie. Mary does this regularly with books, movies, clothes and people. Today I went fishing and I didn't catch a damned thing. I butchered a hindquarter of venison and spent a few hours cooking the get a recipe recorded for the deer book. The parmesian cheese got too melty and ran out from inside of the meat where I'd stuffed it with fresh thyme and I was disappointed with the result. The hindquarter came from the deer that F. and I went to buy yesterday. We sat there beside a tall, wire fence with my scoped bolt action .22 and waited for a moment when there was a clear view of a deer's head without either another deer or the sky behind it. This took a surprisingly long time. Finally the rifle cracked off and a deer fell as the others scattered. We opened the gate and walked over to it. Its brains had been blown out instantly, which was what we'd wanted. A geyser of dark red blood poured from a severed artery like a water fountain that splashed in a wide arc to land a solid 14 inches away from where it had started. The lady with the deer farm had customers showing up at any moment to pick their own tomatoes and heirloom beans. People who wanted to play farm without all of the death. We loaded the dead doe into the back of F's pickup truck and I gave the lady $180 and thanked her and we left. It was barely 10 am and already 95 degrees so we couldn't drive the 90 minutes home without the meat spoiling. The deer needed to be butchered in a hurry. F. knew about an old Confederate forge where they made cannon balls and artillery pieces all through the war between the states and neither Grant nor Sherman ever found the place to wreck it on account of it being so well hidden. We drove the 5 minutes to that Confederate forge and pulled off the road to get the deer done. The great stone building was crumbling but more or less intact. Its massive stone walls were sloped ever so slightly like the forts I walked through in San Juan. We carried the deer off behind an old spring house and hung it by the neck from a rope looped around a rafter tail of the spring house. F. skinned the deer using nothing more than a flake of obsidian which he had apparently been carrying around for just such a purpose. Obsidian chips are sharper than surgical steel and I have never owned a knife that skins better than a piece of obsidian just as it comes when you crack it off of a rock. I had a little Flip video camera and I recorded F. as he skinned the fallow deer. The flies and yellow jackets were beginning to gather and we had to hurry. I imagined that ever car I heard passing by was a cop car that would slow and pull over and result in our being locked up in the county jail on poaching and trespassing charges. I imagined myself trying to explain what was going on, pointing out pale white spots on the hide to an uncomprehending police officer who would note our considerable personal arsenal and radio for backup. It occurred to me that I forgotten to get a receipt. We gave up on filming once the quartering started because we needed to hurry before the meat spoiled. I needed to cut corners to save time that were too embarrassing to let anyone else see. I did not gut the deer but rather I stripped all of the meat off of the outside. No time to waste on gutting and the only meat you really need to gut to get at are the tenderloins, which only amount to about a half a pound of meat on a fallow doe like that. At least the hide was still saved. Something kept splashing around just under the surface of the water in the spring house a few feet away from where we were working. Like the tentacled beast in the garbage room in 'Star Wars.' About 45 minutes after we started, the meat was stacked into a cooler and we were cleaning up in the creek that ran along side the forge. I changed my clothes and we drove to a gas station to buy a bag of ice and some Gatorade. I think it was as we walked into the gas station that I noticed that fact that my life is really fucking strange. The game commission employee who was checking creel limits in the parking lot by the fishing lake had heard of me and recognized me after chatting for a few minutes. Tom Waits is big in Japan. I'm big in the parking lot down by the boat landing. Mary keeps confiding in Trish that she's worried I hate her or something because I don't respond promptly to her FB comments and take a while to get back to her email. Sometimes I don't respond to her email at all. I do this on purpose, because Mary throws away things that have become predictable and boring. The DVD that shows the exact same movie every time you put it in the player. I am aloof. Something that she has to work at. I quietly force her to perform. I am the puzzle she cannot quite put together, which is exactly what I have been to her since I was 8 years old and she was 9. We sat beside each other on her couch and watched 'Slumdog Millionare' together on Saturday night. Trish was on the other side of her. Our legs kept migrating and drifting until our thighs were pressed warm and tight against one another. I would let this happen for a while and then move the leg away until hers crept in towards mine. I'm not necessarily trying to fuck her. We're all in this for the long-haul. Trish is secretly in love with her. She thinks that I don't know. She thinks that nobody knows. 11:36 p.m. - 2010-07-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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