2018, Havana, Cuba. To prove I was a Hemingway Hero, I challenged all comers to meet me in this fighting ring, bar none.
But the hombres had little interest in fighting a madman. Ha!
Just kidding, of course. Yesterday, wounded and only walking as needed, I sat at my computer culling work for my proposed website all the live-long day. I was working in the Cuba files. Oo-la-la, there are some tasty bits in there, though the photos are no more than travel pictures, illustrations for an article, perhaps. They are good, I think, but not "art." And that brings me to a dilemma in building a website.
But I'll get to that.
As I went through the photos, there were two trips intermingled in the folder. One was with Ili in 2017. One day I got a hair and said to her, "Let's go to Cuba."
"O.K." she said, and without much preparation, we booked a direct flight. Halfway there, I began to question myself. WTF? We would just land and see what happened. Ili had booked an apartment through an Air B&B site online. When we got to the airport, I knew to exchange money there for the best rate. Then we got a cab, gave the driver an address, and we were on our way.
The trip turned out to be very easy. Cuba was now a tourist destination, though most people were coming by cruise ship and staying only a day or two.
As I went through the photos, I was surprised to come across some movie clips. I'd forgotten all about them. There was Ili on our first afternoon sitting at a table in the Floridita drinking a frozen daiquiri. Three takes. I asked her where we were and what we were doing.
"We are at the Floridita drinking. . . I forgot what these are called."
"Daiquiris."
"We are sitting in the Floridita drinking daiquiris," she grinned.
"And what are we going to have to eat?"
With a mischievous look in her eye, she said, "Hemingway's balls."
WTF?
She did this each time, for all three takes.
I have lots of photographs of her, of course, but this was one of the few times I actually shot her with video. There we were on a sudden adventure before the accident, me a bit chubby but healthy, she looking wonderful and still in love. I decided to take the clips into Adobe Premiere and edit them into a little video. I don't do enough video editing and I keep forgetting how to use the program which, it seems to me, has been updated every time I go to use it. It took me a long time to remember how to make titles (I did a shitty job), cut and move clips on the timeline, and add transitions. The audio was pretty bad as I was using the built-in mic on the camera, so I tried to clean it up a bit. Then I tried to white balance and brighten the video. I didn't do a very good job at any of it, still, the clips were quite improved. After spending way too much time on this silly project, I rendered it ready to send. . . where? I wanted to post it to YouTube so I could put it on the blog, but I decided against that.
It was a lot of time spent with Ili's fanciful images. But I was O.K.
When I ran across the photos of me in the fighting gym that I had stumbled onto as I walked some neighborhood back streets, I thought, "Yea. . . that is me, alright, all faux-fury and bluster. . . a sissy-boy playing up his manhood." I was thinking about the trip to the doctor this morning.
I am worried, of course, but more. . . I am scared. I could call it "anxious," but that would be underselling it. As I've confessed, I have come to realize that I am and always have been an anxiety-ridden fellow, but sometimes I am just plain scared. I am afraid of my visit with the surgeon this morning. I am afraid I'll pass out when I see the hole in my leg, or maybe just vomit. I don't want to be the one who has to clean it and care for it at home. I want to close my eyes and let someone else do it.
But there is no one else. I'll have to cowboy up.
I won't go into my paranoia about all the things that might go wrong. I keep imagining that the wound won't heal and all that would entail.
I'm that kind of guy.
I'm also the kind of guy, though, who would always take off on a romantic adventure. At the end of the trip, Ili told me, "My god, that was the most romantic thing I have ever done."
"Stick with me, kid. You ain't seen nothing yet."
And for awhile, it was true. But that is for another time, perhaps. . . or perhaps not.
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