cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And Still Cold? This last trip was a huge success and a total time-hack. I lived what seemed like a month in the space of one week. After my last entry I drove to NYC. This was the first time I have ever driven a car in New York City. I was coming from the north so I came down 9 onto Broadway through the Bronx. My purpose was to attend the Book Exp0 of Americ@ downtown but I'm competent enough in NYC to know that parking would be really expensive near the conference center so I decided to take advantage of easy, free, (and safe) all-day street parking on the Upper West Side and take the subway to the Javit Center. The strategy worked well. Parking would have been around $60 for the day near the site but as it happened I spent the whole day and evening in NYC and only spent $15; accounted for by one pretzel and a Coke in Washington Square Park, and by one $10 Metro card for subway rides. I collected my credentials and found my publisher's booth at the expo. Holy shit, this thing was huge. Fucking huge. The entire American publishing industry really was there. I got to the booth and was introduced all around. They invited me to dinner later, which I accepted. Then I wandered around the convention. People kept handing me books. Literally I could have walked out of there with over 100 books, but I started saying 'no thanks' when my backpack filled up and I realized that anything else would need to be hauled around through the streets and subways later by hand. Publishers recognized my name and talked about my upcoming books from their own memory. I was amazed. They all seem to expect great things of me. I think that I met Neil Gaim@n. I was plied with champagne. It was quite a to-do. After I'd left the convention center I made my way farther downtown to the dinner rendezvous via subway. I am very pleased with my mastery of the subway, I should add. I arrived at this upscale Italian place at #1 5th Avenue around NYU and it turned out that I was the only author there among a delegation of 9 from my publisher. This made sense when I recalled what my editor had told me the day before. See, my publisher specializes in a particular type of non-fiction. Most of their authors aren't really writers to start with. They recruit them to write books about something very specialized they know about and the editor does way more work than she should have to. These people don't tend to be very charismatic, either. As it turns out, I am the only one of their current roster of authors whom they feel that they can trot out in front of buyers as a serious writer and speaker and personality. I find this kind of funny. Bearing in mind that this approach has always served me very well, I identified the most important person there and sat next to her at dinner. Always do this. I have made a whole career out of that habit. Nobody is out of your league. You can sit next to anyone and get along with them. People of consequence are just as easy to get along with as those of no consequence. This must always be in your mind. Follow this doctrine in any social setting and you will go places, provided that you are not socially retarded. I was given some very strange, very serious advice by this woman in her late 60's who runs this publishing company. She said that I ought to do one of two things. Either become an acquisitions editor or a literary agent. This was very strange to me. But she really meant it and she explained why (which I won't delve into at the moment). If I were to become a literary agent, she would like to hear my pitches at any time. I don't think that I want to be a literary agent right now, but it was all very flattering nonetheless. There were these two publicity chicks whom I wanted to wrap up with a bow and kiss them forever. The short one especially, but the other one had very pretty eyes and the one with pretty eyes insisted that they was concerned that I might get on the wrong subway line and so after dinner she accompanies me not only to the station but on one train after the other to my final station. I wanted to kiss that one with the pretty eyes very much. But understand that I don't have the usual range of human experience at this age to draw on. I have been looking after the same woman since I was 17 years old for 15 years until she announced to me that she is a lesbian six months ago. I don't know anything about dating or what one is supposed to do when. None of it makes any sense to me and I don't understand why people are supposed to be so false to each other instead of getting straight to the comfortable part. So I rode the subway with the one with the pretty eyes and we talked and then said goodbye and there I was walking to my car. I had hell's own fun finding the Lincoln Tunnel to get out of the damn city already. But eventually I did and I drove to Philadelphia and got a motel room and went to bed at around 3 am. The next day I finished the drive home and arrived in the later afternoon. Now I am preparing for the next trip, which will go even longer. Maybe two weeks. Maybe more. The day after tomorrow Grant arrives by train and we're driving to Louisiana together. I finally got everything lined up on that end and we have a place to stay (cottage on a lake) and people to interview. There is a big-deal photographer meeting us there and unfortunately we're stuck with him for 7 days. Men's J0urnal must be paying a fortune to make this article about me happen. The funny part is that while Grant has been this huge fan of my work for the last year, I have been a huge fan of his work for the last ten years. I haven't told him yet that I had already read every word he'd written before we'd chanced to meet last summer while filming my pilot. Speaking of which, that is suddenly back on. My TV show us being pitched to the Food Netw0rk next week and they are apparently very interested. I'm not getting too worked up about it. I've been around in circles with various fuckwits in the TV business enough times not to get stars in my eyes. I've been offered a TV show before and I turned it down. I'd be more likely to say 'yes' to the F00d Network than I was to '7ru-TV' but that is still no guarantee that I'll be satisfied enough with any contract offered to actually sign it. I got my hair cut today and I am smitten with the chick who did it. She recognized me and went through a whole 'you look really familiar but I can't place you' thing before she figured out who I was. Which I was surprised by because I'm not all that famous. Anyway, she did a really great job with my hair, which is good because I'm being photographed a lot over the next week for Men's J0urnal. I liked her and I wanted to kiss her a lot. At the end of the day, I suppose that there is a certain subset of women who like the idea that I am slightly famous and the I am likely to become more famous. But there must be plenty enough wrong with me because it all seems to stop cold past a certain point. It seems unlikely that in such superficial situations they could sense what I've been through and the fact that I am not even remotely a civilized human being at heart. But maybe that's it? Its the only thing wrong with me that I know of. As I've written here before, I have suffered in ways that very few Americans since the great depression have. Putting hungry children to bed has broken something inside of me that will never be fixed. Maybe I'm just cold now, or too serious, or perhaps I just lost too many years looking after one woman and I'm just not acting the way I'm expected to with women whom (I think?) are clearly interested. 12:49 a.m. - 2011-05-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||