cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Halloween Parade

The New York trip was a great success, in spite of my nearly fucking the whole thing up.

I did not manage to bag the additional geese that had been hoped for right up until the evening before I left. At least I'd hunted hard enough not to have any regrets. Yet the few Canada geese that I had managed to put away in September proved more than enough to give samples to everyone in the crowd at my workshop.

The tickets sold out completely. I had a few familiar faces to greet me among the crowd. Melissa and Allison, who are both alumni of past weekend classes that I've taught. Caroline, of course. And Leighton, my chef.

The whole thing went absolutely perfectly, which was surprising because less than an hour before standing up in front of all of these people to give a lecture and carve up geese I had literally been on my hands and knees, puking into Caroline's toilet.

Caroline and I had painted the town red the night before. Carousing from one bar to the next, meeting up with friends of her's. Somehow I'd ended up at a Jamaican woman's birthday party in an apartment full of other Jamaicans and Indian women. The food was fucking fantastic.

We ended up back at her apartment drunk as lords at around 4 or 5 am. Then we hung out in her living room for a while, talking about the insanely fucked up things that she has been through in the last 6 months, which were mostly disasters of her own making. A drug overdose, a boyfriend who beat the shit out of her (yet whom she stayed with for months), etc.

Shit happened and I'm pretty sure that we ended up fucking in her bedroom. I woke up at about 10 am, needing to be at the culinary institute by 11 am. Once I got into the shower I discovered that I had a raging headache, could hardly keep my eyes open, and I kind of wanted to puke.

With less than an hour until I had to be at the institute to prepare for the event, I was terrified that I was in no condition to perform and that I was about to completely fuck up something that I had been diligently organizing and preparing for since July.

I puked up water into the toilet and after a good bout of retching felt somewhat purged. We gathered up the geese and Caroline helped me carry them. She shepherded me kindly in the right direction and stopped somewhere to more or less pour coffee down my throat.

We found the address and went inside and found that the space they had for us was far nicer than I would ever have expected. I greeted Leighton and the Sl0w Food people and set up and cleaning up the geese a bit and reviewing the notes for the lecture which, in all honesty, I had only just gotten around to outlining on my laptop on the train the day before.

Somehow, magically, when the crowd gathered and it was time to start, the hangover completely lifted as of the moment I started to speak. While I had only just put together the organized outline of what I was going to say, I know this material. I know it really, really well.

And I'll tell you, I don't mean to come across as an arrogant asshole here, but it turns out that since becoming a full-time professional at this shit I have actually really become a serious professional at it. In response to every single question that anyone asked about anything, I didn't just know the answer. I knew the answer and recalled specific studies and sets of data to refer them to, and I knew the details of anatomy and natural history and evolutionary history, and I had personal anecdotes and fun stories that bore directly on what they were asking.

I was really, really fucking good. And so were the geese. Leighton, as usual, did brilliant things with the meat that I had hunted and dressed and butchered. He spoke well when I prompted him to talk about what were were cooking and how one might do this at home.

Everyone loved the food. Afterwards, a man who looked to be in his mid-60's who had sat front and center and asked all sorts of questions walked up to speak with me. He said that he was on the board of Sl0w Food USA and that he would like discuss booking me for other events.

BINGO! This was, long-time readers will recall, one of the original reasons for why I started doing these types of events for Sl0w Food NYC as opposed to any other chapter around the country. The national umbrella organization is based in NYC and I knew that the staff and board members would probably be on the mailing list for the local chapter and that sooner or later they would show up for one of my events and that I would attract their notice and prompt them to book me for national and international speaking engagements.

Finally, after close to a year of scheming to make this happen, Sl0w Food USA has noticed me and I'm going to move up into a new league. While I am willing to do events for them for free (if they can just cover my travel costs), part of the idea here is to establish myself as a paid speaker. Once I've done my thing at some of these huge conferences in Sweden and Italy and Brazil, I think that I will be able to command some thousands of dollars plus expenses per event. I really do need to secure an additional source of income apart from book advances, which take fucking forever to show up. Speaking engagements can eventually provide that. Maybe TV work can as well but I don't want to count on that in terms of building a long-term career.

So everyone loved the event and I got rave reviews all around. In this case it was even more satisfying than in the past with the venison events, because this time I'd planned it so far in advance and combined the event with an article in the NY Times and setting up the perfect storm to generate interest in my TV show and drive up the value of the advance that I'll be gunning for with my new book shortly. Back in July, I said what I was going to do. I had the idea for this whole thing and I announced it within minutes of the thought crossing my mind. This whole elaborate plan that must have sounded absurd, and yet I acted on it instantly and followed through and busted my ass and I really and truly pulled it off. Wow.

In spite of only having had maybe 4 hours of sleep the night before, I seemed to be on a second or third wind by the time I met back up with Caroline (we had separate things to do after the goose event was finished. I'd walked around Brooklyn with Melissa and Allison and had tried to meet someone else at Prospect Park but I couldn't find her. Caroline and I set out from her apartment just before dusk and had falafels and then found a bar somewhere and had a drink and then took the subway to Manhattan.

As the evening descended, the percentage of people on the street dressed in Hallween costumes increased. It was a wonderful thing. All of New York dressed up in costumes on the streets and in the subways and the bars and clubs leaked out bees and zombies and vampires from every door. The whole mood of the city was festive. I had completely forgotten that it was Halloween weekend. Last night there was truly no other place inthe world where I would rather have been.

We went into a store where Caroline bought things for her costume to wear the next night and then we had time to kill before meeting up with her friend in the East Village, so we wandered down to a street where Caroline had described a bizarre nightly sight of 4 tiny shoe-boxes of Indian restaurant stacked 2 by 2, upstairs and downstairs, where small men in dark suits stood outside and did everything imaginable to coax passersby inside. The 4 of them were apparantly in an intense competition with one another. We went into the on upstairs on the right and were seated by the window amid a jungle-like tangle of jalapeno pepper-shaped Christmas lights that were strung all over the place and in fact provided the only light in the small dining room.

Bollywood songs from the 1960's and 70's played on the speakers as a pagaent unfolded around us. A parade of these small men in dark suits carrying out appetizers and water and offering everything under the sun. I scanned the menu for words that I didn't understand and ordered the first thing that was definitely going to be a complete mystery.

We ate our food and marveled at the sheer oddness of the whole experience. Caroline told stories of how she managed to get kicked out of what sounded like every casino in Atlantic City on a single long night of epic drunkenness.

We made our way through the throngs of costumed revelers to a very posh apartment containing Caroline's best friend and 3 odd gentlemen.

One of them, Eric, was an early 20-something dressed in nothing but a loin cloth and seemed to be dancing around with his long brown hair swaying, whether or not there was any music on at the moment. He was, throughout the evening, rather like a pet. He had little to say, but what came out of his mouth was of an evenly good nature. He was completely stoned the entire time, occasionally jumping on one of our backs without warning for a piggy back ride.

Eric's roommate was a good 10 years older and an attorney of some kind with an absolutely rapier wit. A very sharp guy he was. I don't recall his name but he was dressed as a hippie, circa 1970 or so.

Then there was Alvero, in a splendid golden Pharoah's outfit which he'd had custom made for some obscene sum of money. He does something with building code and law and gets paid oodles of money for it. A light-skinned black man of probably Brazilian extraction, he and I got along like a building on fire.

Alvero happens to be Anders0n Cooper's ex-boyfriend and they are still close. We talked about this and that for an hour or so and did our preliminary drinking before the whole herd of us managed to get out the door to go down the street to a nightclub and bar owned by Anderson that Alvero promised he could get us into. Alvero was correct and his connection with the famous news anchor got us waved in around a line of others who waited on the street.

We bounced around between different clubs and bars and had a grand time. And while Alvero's interest clearly involved the hope of fucking me (not going to happen), I really did genuinely like the guy and we promised to keep in touch.

Getting back from the East Village to Caroline's 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn proved difficult. We tried for 40 minutes to hail a cab with no success. It wasn't just a question of someone else grabbing it ahead of us - we didn't see anyone else manage to hail a cab the whole time. All of them were spoken for or off-duty. The whole of New York seemed to be out in the streets trying to get home from Halloween parties. It didn't help that the subway service was completely fucked up due to construction or something and the R train wasn't running at all and various other lines were on strange schedules and they don't have all that many trains running at 3 am in the first place.

We eventually gave up and took the subway. We got back to Caroline's apartment and started talking about our mutual fascination with what the fuck is going on in the minds of necrophiliacs. I introduced her to the odd character that is K@ren Greenlee and we took turns reading aloud from interviews with her.

Neither of us was as drunk as we'd been the night before so we just talked and hung out and no sex was had. I did not want to fuck her at that point. Caroline, as much fun as she is, is a total fucking mess. She is putting her life back together, is studying at Columbia again, etc. But she's still a bit of a mess. She's put on a bit more weight than was wise and years of smoking have given her a low, throaty sort of a laugh that sounds not unlike Marge Simpson's sisters. I've known her forever, but while she's recovering from the various horrible things that happened in the last year it seems like a bad idea for us to screw. And at the end of the day, I'm no longer physically attracted to her.

We crawled into her bed and muttered things about K@ren Greenlee to one another as we slowly drifted off to sleep.

I'm on the train home now. I am really, sincerely, truly fucking exhausted. Not just from being up until 5 am or whatever last night. Its been a really grueling time these last 10 days or so. Only once in the past 10 days have I slept more than 4 hours at a go, and often much less. Prepping for and teaching the 2 day class, driving to and from GA and hunting pigs and armadillos all night and driving back and then going nuts with trying to get more geese at the last minute, scouting for them around ponds all night, bushwacking through thorns and swamps in the dark.

And oh shit, I just realized that I forgot to turn on the recorder and get audio of the goose event for NPR. I am completely retarded. Oops. I'm going to have to come up with something for them.

Anyway, point is that I've been going too hard for too long. And I've been playing too hard for the last 2 nights (although I worked very diligently during the days). Trish wants me to come to dinner at her parents' house the minute I get off the train but I'm horrified at the prospect of doing anything other than going directly home and crawling into bed to sleep.

I need a few days of rest and relaxation. I desperately do. Unfortunately, Trish is leaving for Minneapolis on Wednesday and will be gone for 6 days and I will be on 24/7 kid duty the whole time. No work will get done during that time, so I don't think I can rest on Monday or Tuesday. I've got to finish this last (?) batch of revisions on the deer book for my editor. I wish I could put that work off until mid-week for the sake of my own health and sanity but it just won't work.

Next week I need to start lining up my next speaking gig. Paid or unpaid. Find out the name of that guy from the SF USA board and send him an email. Finalize the plans, budget and any tickets for the trip to Eleuthera in December. Always I need things on the horizon in order to feel like I'm not a useless failure.

4:10 p.m. - 2010-10-31

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