cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stuffs and things I'm so focused on Helenah that I'm not paying enough attention to other communication. I have interview requests that I haven't even responded to yet. NPR asked me to record a radio essay last week and only a few hours ago I got around to talking to them about it. Helenah sent me a wonderfully long email this evening. Her presentation went really well and her advisors are psyched about the film. Looks like she has a green light. She is going to come to Texas with me. We're doing it. Two weeks together. This is a dream come true. We're going to drive most of the way across the US together, probably along the Gulf coast. We'll stop in New Orleans for a day and a night. We'll visit friends I've hunted with around the country from when I was writing my second book. I keep waiting to wake up from this dream. This is what I wanted for so long. Every time I'm on the road alone I have craved the company of a woman with me and now its really happening. Not just 'a' woman, but a beautiful, intelligent, creative, accomplished woman. And look, this is going to sound kind of rotten but don't take it the wrong way. I love my country but I fucking hate mainstream American consumer culture. I don't hate the people who are part of it but I do find them quickly tiresome. The people who can only talk and think about TV shows, internet memes, tabloid figures and petty things. I made several trips to Europe when I had the money simply because I wanted to get the fuck away from all of that. The worst part was always flying back into ATL and being confronted with televisions blasting TV infotainment news at every gate. Welcome back to your country; please surrender your brain cells. Helenah is Swedish. She's only been in the US for 15 months. And she doesn't watch TV. Her English is perfect (though magnificently accented) but she has nothing to do with that whole culture that I want to stay away from. I love talking with her because her perspective on everything is so fresh. She doesn't yak about retarded tripe. We talk about things that we know and have done and places where we have been. She spent several months traveling around rural east Africa making a film, for example. With most people they talk about gossip or movies or things from popular culture. We talk about sights and smells and things we have eaten and people we didn't understand or who we liked and about days with sunlight that was especially beautiful. I think that she is probably more intelligent than I am. She is very intuitive, very gentle, very adventurous. Things are more out in the open now at home. Trish talked to Mary on the phone and I overheard her laughing that I am 'swanning around like a teenager.' I have fan mail pouring in today. Long, breathless emails from kindly middle-aged men. I've decided that I'm going to write the goose book while I'm in Texas with Helenah. If I finish it fast enough then I'll work on something more literary as well. Either I'll work some more on 'Speak of the Dead' or maybe write something slightly fictionalized about the story of meeting and falling in love with Helenah. I can hunt aoudad and boar early in the morning and then write through the heat of the middle of the day, perhaps hunting again late in the afternoon. The evenings are for Helenah. The easy comparison is to Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfieffer. Right when his first book came out he met Pauline and fell passionately in love, left his wife Hadley, and started a romantic new globe-trotting life with Pauline. It remains to see how far things will go between Helenah and I. Maybe she'll tell me to get lost next week and break my heart. But I have no desire for this to be a short-term fling. I see Helenah as someone who needs to become and remain a major romantic and creative force in my life. It is horrific to imagine what the fuck I'm going to do if she ends up rejecting me. That would be, I think, the single worst experience of my life. She acts like she is in love with me. I definitely act like I'm in love with her -- everyone can tell. I would think that if she didn't want me then she would have backed off by now. If she was thinking 'oh shit I do not want this guy pawing at me for the next few months' then there is no way that she would be suggesting that we spend 2 weeks together in close quarters, 24/7, on an isolated ranch in Texas. I mean, right? She only just had to commit to her thesis project today. She would have switched out and walked away from me if she was uncomfortable. I believe in living a romantic life, in taking risks. I believe in attempting to do great things even if one has no idea what the hell one is doing. I believe in stepping off of cliffs. I believe in getting in the car and driving south until the Spanish moss is hanging from the palm trees and wading knee deep into the ocean with my jeans still on. I believe in becoming that man that so many people needed someone to be. I believe in inhabiting greatness even if one knows ones self to be unequal to it. I believe in owning the room. I believe in going for the throat. 1:22 a.m. - 2011-09-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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