cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In Honor and Danger I just tried my first stab at writing the chapter of the new book about the nutria trip. I'm not happy with the results. I can do better than this. What I need to do is skip past the set-up and jump right into the action and then flash back to how I got into that shit in the first place. Seriously, its cliched but I think that is the way to go. Much better than the 5 pages of shit that I just wrote. The physical danger is what sells people on that book anyway. I need to keep this in mind for the last few trips over the next six weeks or so. Whatever I can do to make any of the remaining hunts dangerous, I should do. Perhaps I can somehow fish for tilapia in Fl0rida by tackling alligators. I'll tell you something true now. I have been through more shit in the last twelve months in order to produce this book than most people experience in their whole lives. I've seen parts of America and the Caribbean up close in personal that I never would have otherwise learned about. I've risked my life during the last year more times than most people do before they die. I have gained what will surely be life-long friendships with amazing people. This whole project has been so worthwhile in that sense, even aside from the book that will result. In this past year I have had the kind of adventures that most people never experience even after a whole lifetime of hoping and waiting. My life has been astoundingly rich, though at the same time it has been brutal, painful and at times almost heartbreaking to endure. The end is in sight, though I'm not there yet. I'm glad of the travel and the people I've met and the things that I have faced on the road. But the things I've been through at home for the last year weren't anything that I would ever want to do all over again. The hunger and the cold in the winter. The cold. My children crying and the furnace broken and my face and arms sooty and black while I spent all night trying to make heat appear somehow. Not having milk. Not having hot water, and needing to heat the bath water up in great pots on the stove and my 3 year old burning himself horribly and going to the hospital. Losing my house and my land. This last year has been easily the most emotionally painful and draining of my entire life. And I include my year with cancer in that. The worst moments were those when people close to me were suffering or in danger; The best moments were those when I was suffering or in danger. And all the while the international media did story after story about me and my work without ever noticing any of what was really happening to me. I have been through terrible, nightmarish things this past year. And I don't think that anyone will ever really understand what it all amounts to for me. No civilized, western person this side of Baghdad. I feel that perhaps I have seen too much in too short a period of time. Nobody should ever have to watch their own children go hungry or scream in agony. I think that it is this experience as much as anything else that keeps me as isolated and alone as I am. Because there is nobody I am likely to meet over drinks at a cafe who is likely to understand what I've been through or who I am after going through it. Without the travel for the new book it would all just be meaningless. It is my hope that I will write the remainder of this book well enough that something good can come out of it all. Because I mean it when I say that I have suffered to make this book happen. I feel essentially broken and lost and I don't know if that feeling will ever go away. I keep hoping that someone will come along who will make the brokenness and the isolation all better but I don't think that is going to happen. Nobody is coming. It doesn't matter how many alligators and cottonmouths and sharks and swamps and dark lost nights in the wild that I face. I will be just as damaged and fearful afterward as I was going into it. Because its not any of those things that I'm really afraid of. The worst that they can do is to kill or mutilate me. I'm afraid of much worse things. Like hunger and cold and crying children. 12:44 a.m. - 2011-07-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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