cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This, My Life I have important email to deal with and, yet again, I'm avoiding even reading it. We spent last night at Mary's parents' house in the mountains. I thought that there would be tons of other people there for F's birthday but it was just us as it turned out. It was an interesting evening. Mary's psychologist mother could not stop talking about how Mary had spent years being head over heels in love with me. Poor Mary. Hell, poor F., sitting there listening to this shit about his wife being in love with one of his best friends. He was a great sport, was F. F and I went fishing for about 45 minutes while dinner was being made. We didn't catch anything. We were forced to leave early when, standing on a short pier over the water, we heard the loud snort of a very large black bear behind us from only about 15 yards away. I grabbed my backpack immediately and fumbled for my .38 special revolver and loaded it. With the annoyed bear (why? What the fuck was this bear's problem with us?) only a few yards parallel to us in the brush, we high-tailed it out of there. F. held both of the fishing rods so that I would have my hands free to keep the pistol at the ready in case the bear came any closer. I did not want to kill the bear but I would have killed it if I'd had to. We made it back to the truck and drove back up the mountain to the house and informed everyone that we had not caught any fish. Mary's parents left just before dinner. We stayed up late, drinking beer and wine. This morning I woke up just before dawn and lay in bed with the burden of things to think about. One should not have anything to think about before dawn. An hour or so later I drifted back to sleep. I woke up again later and went upstairs and drank a cup of coffee. Then F. and I had ourselves an hour's worth of target practice with rifles and pistol before it was time to have breakfast. We ate on the railing-less balcony in the back, with a spectacular view of the mountain dropping off steeply behind the llama pasture behind the house with the narrow valley behind and another 3 or 4 ridges of mountains beyond. We dined on poached eggs on English muffins drizzled with hollandaise sauce and slices of tomatoes and sliced peaches taken from a tree in the valley below, covered in cream. With the incongruous slices of tomato and the alps around us it all felt very German, so I poured a glass of beer from the mini keg in the fridge. A breakfast lager in this setting with this meal made it all feel more Bavarian than most of the meals I have eaten in Bavaria. F. and I spoke of Indians and buffalo hides and the probable travels of Squanto while the women spoke of people they knew and Mother Theresa and something of celebrities I had never heard of. Hours later, we picked up the kids from my parents house and went to my brother's place to have dinner with him and wife. We finally came home at dusk. I walking inside last, carrying our baggage with a scoped .22 rifle slung over my shoulder (which F. and I had been using for target practice) and then Trish started screaming bloody murder about a snake in the bathroom. She waddled down the hall with her trousers halfway down her legs and was saying something, only I didn't really pay attention because it didn't matter much what she was saying since my job was the same in any event. Dropping a suitcase, I plucked a few special .22 shotshell cartridges from the box in the bedroom and loaded them into the rifle that was already over my shoulder and I walked into the bathroom and in the dim dusk light I lined up the crosshairs over the head of the 3 foot long snake and waited for that portion of the snake to be somewhere other than right in front of the toilet. I fired once and blew the snake's head apart. The body moved stiffly, without real direction. Bright red blood spurted onto the white linoleum. This, my life. This, I have been made aware by others, is not a usual way of living. It was an entirely usual sort of weekend for me. My brother was interviewed for the Today Show the other day. I think the story will be airing on Monday morning. It has to do with a very prestigious job that he has just quit on account of some drama involving an attempted workplace coup and the suicide of a co-worker. His last day will be Wednesday, just 6 days before my last day at my own day job. I wish that I could say that this sort of thing is unusual for him, but this type of high-profile media drama has accompanied him for the last 15 years just as surely as snake blood spattered across my bathroom floor is the sort of thing that has accompanied me. He is changing jobs into something that will put him less into the limelight while I am shifting into, well, my own TV show and a career as an author. 10:38 p.m. - 2010-08-22 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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