cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Home Again

I have a whole long thing that I wrote on my laptop while in Eleuthera, from which I have just returned. I had no internet access most of the time that I was there, which is why I haven't posted here in a while. I just got back home yesterday afternoon.

The trip was a huge success, even though I only got 1 and a half species that I set out for. I'll post my running thing that I wrote during the trip later on. Meanwhile, I've got other shit to write down.

This whole expedition was exactly the sort of thing that I was trying to make happen. I mean in the sense that this was not a vacation. Very quickly I entangled myself among the expats and the locals and established myself as a traveler but not a tourist. In between the hunting and cooking for the book, I washed dishes, helped fix trucks, did light carpentry and ran up and down the island by land and sea with people who will probably now be friends of mine for life.

I spent a day violently ill with some type of sickness from drinking bad water. I lay alone on the floor, dizzy and hallucinating in the dark during a prolonged power outage. I was scraped and stung by coral while diving and my right foot is still sore. I threw out my right knee (old injury from Boy Scouts when I was a kid) due to staying out on the water while spearfishing for too long on several trips out. The force on the swim fins against the knee is really something else after a while. Every now and then something seems to pop out of place and the leg goes weak and I sort of collapse. I walk with a bit of a limp on that side owing to both the bad knee and the poison from the coral that is still festering in my foot.

But it was all worthwhile. In fact, in this case it was better to suffer than not to have suffered. Because, glory be, I have a lot of shit to write about in the new book.

While I was gone, I was written up and quoted by the Washington Post. Today I did yet another interview with the NY Times for a short article about me that is supposed to run in a Sunday edition soon. Audubon magazine sent its fact-checker to talk to me and based on the huge laundry list of questions this looks to be a fairly big article that they are doing on me.

And get this: Someone from Esqu1re Magazine wants to do a feature on me. The guy happens to be a friend that I made while hunting lizards in Fl0rida a few months ago. He was doing a story on the guy I was hunting with and we have kept up ever since.

If I wasn't so God-awful broke, I'd be ecstatic right now.

I have something in mind. If the article in Esqu1re happens then almost by definition the editor will have read my stuff. My stuff is good. What I will propose after the dust has settled is that I write an article for Esquire that compliments the new book. Specifically, I'll suggest that they send me down to Australia to hunt Asiat1c water buffalo, which are an invasive species on the western coast.

Hunting those fuckers is remarkably dangerous. First of all, its an enormous angry thing with big horns and vast, sharp hooves that wants to kill you on sight. And before you even get to said enormous angry thing with horns, there are swamps full of huge crocodiles to get through.

Now I don't mean to sound like an ass, but if I can pull this off and make such an arrangement with Esqu1re then I think that my career will be pretty well cemented. This would well ensure that I have an even bigger target market of people who go out to buy the new book. And in popular culture it will, I think, establish me as a sort of modern Hemingway. Which is exactly where I'm trying to fit in the American imagination.

What I have going for me is that fact that I will risk almost anything to my physical person for the sake of getting a good story to write about.

10:49 p.m. - 2010-12-22

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