“Listen, Marcel!” Shlomi took a deep breath, the kind a man takes before delivering news so devastating it might as well come with a condolence letter. I braced for impact, already wondering if it was too late to fake a medical emergency or hurl myself out of a conveniently placed window. “You see, don’t let this rub you the wrong way, but… you are useless.”
Silence. Not just any silence. The kind of silence that precedes a catastrophic explosion. The sort of stillness where you briefly hear your own pulse thudding in your ears as your brain scrambles to process the audacity that just landed in your lap.
I blinked. Useless? Useless? Had he really just said that? Out loud? With his whole chest? To me? My brain struggled to process this nuclear insult disguised as friendly advice. I was about to respond with a measured, sophisticated counterpoint—something along the lines of “Go shove a cactus where the sun don’t shine”— but before I could, he plowed ahead, apparently eager to ensure that if my ego was going down, it would go down in flames.
“Let me explain.” Oh, please do.
At this point, I was actively looking for a blunt object to brain him with—a chair, a bottle, a potted plant—whatever was closest. But my friend was already in full TED Talk mode.
“All you do is sit in your travel agency making money, and in your spacetime, all you do is finding ridiculous ways to spend it.”
He paused, possibly for dramatic effect, or maybe just to watch my ego crumple like a cheap lawn chair. I had a sinking feeling that what followed would make me want to launch myself into the sun.
“You have three cars, two other business operations, seven employees, fancy suits, and expensive watches. Your camera equipment alone costs more than the war in Afghanistan, even though you don’t even want to make money out of your photography. You do race trips to the Nurburgring and drive flash sports cars in circles, and that’s it. You’ve essentially perfected the art of going nowhere—at high speed.”
He wasn’t finished yet.
“Oh, and I hear you play a decent round of golf. Fantastic. A sport invented by Scottish drunks who thought walking wasn’t pointless enough on its own, so they added frustration and tiny flags. Congratulations, you’ve mastered the fine art of hitting a ball into a hole and calling it an achievement. Basically, you have no skills worth a damn. You’d starve to death in a fully stocked supermarket, wandering the aisles like a malfunctioning robotic vacuum cleaner, baffled by the concept of sustenance. You’d get lost on a football field, despite the fact that it is literally a rectangle. You are, in essence, a decorative houseplant with a wallet that signs checks.”
Again, he paused.
“And now, suddenly, you think you’re going to save elephants? You? The man whose greatest contribution to nature is visiting a luxury safari lodge and drinking Amarula? Tell me, Marcel—do you plan to take a really nice photo of the extinction process and call it a day?”
I stared at him. Not just stared—glared. The kind of glare that, in a just universe, would have made his head spontaneously combust. Now, normally, this is where I’d fire back with a savage, world-ending comeback. But I didn’t. Because somewhere, buried beneath the sheer audacity of his words, was a horrifying truth. I was, in fact, a luxury-loving dunce—a man whose greatest survival skill was estimating exactly how many more miles I could push a car with the fuel light on before I’d have to start making up an elaborate excuse for why I was stranded. Drop me into the wild, and I’d last about as long as a vegan at a hunting trip.
I couldn't ride horses—unless you counted the mechanical kind outside a supermarket, and even then, I’d probably find a way to fall off. I couldn’t shoot very well either, meaning if I ever had to defend myself, I’d have better luck throwing the gun at my attacker and hoping for blunt force trauma. Fixing my car? Forget it. If roadside assistance didn’t swoop in to save me, I’d just start drafting my will in the breakdown lane.
And piloting? Planes? Helicopters? Oh sure, I remember vividly when I was toying with the idea of becoming one of those smug, weekend hobby pilots—a leather-jacketed, aviator-wearing sky-god among mere mortals. That was before I had the distinct displeasure of enduring a ride in what could only be described as an airborne apocalypse—a small Cessna of some sort—while being shuttled from one safari lodge to another in Botswana. Why? Because thanks to the ungodly heat rising over the Savuti National Park, flying in that banged up burger wrapping felt like being inside a blender set to 'obliterate.'
I was so violently airsick that I began contemplating my options. Hurling myself through the tiny window? Too small. Hijacking the plane and landing it myself? Instant death. Strangling the pilot in hopes that unconsciousness would at least make my suffering end? Legally questionable.
By the time we landed, I had gone through all five stages of grief—twice—and made peace with my fate: I was never, ever going to fly a plane. Or if I did, it would be strictly in a scenario where death was already guaranteed, and I had nothing left to lose.
Fixing fences, perhaps? Absolutely not. The only thing I knew about fences was that they kept people out of places they weren’t supposed to be—like my property, for instance—and if I ever tried to fix one, the result would look less like sturdy craftsmanship and more like a crime scene taped off by confused authorities.
No, I was about as useful in a real-world crisis as a ski jump in a coffin. My entire existence was built on convenience, luxury, and the vague, unwavering assumption that someone else would always be around to do the hard stuff. And yet—somehow—I had convinced myself that I was about to enter the world of wildlife conservation.
What my friend Shlomi forced me to realize—though it hit with all the emotional finesse of a freshly severed toe—wasn’t just that I was useless. No, I was aggressively useless. Offensively unskilled. I wasn’t just ill-equipped for real life—I was a walking liability in cargo pants. If left alone in the wild, I wouldn’t even get the chance to be eaten by a lion—I’d probably perish from trying to open a coconut with a credit card.
Shlomi had just stripped away the carefully constructed illusion of my competency, leaving behind a stark, terrible realisation: I was one Wi-Fi outage away from complete societal collapse.
My entire existence revolved around burning money on expensive toys like a trust fund kid going through his “artistic phase”. In a real survival situation, and I'd be dead before the first sundown.
Shlomi wasn’t telling me anything new. He was just forcing me to confront it. Like an executioner making you dig your own grave, then handing you a mirror so you could watch yourself sweat.
Flashback. How did we get into this conversation in the first place? It was sometime in 2010, about a year after my exotic excursion into the abyss of real poverty—which, for the record, was not the charming, soul-enriching, Facebook-filtered “poverty” that some trust fund backpackers like to dabble in before they scurry back to their lattes and MacBooks. No, this was the full experience. The kind of poverty that doesn’t give you a memoir deal—just a front-row seat to humanity’s worst instincts.
I had ended up in Kibera, then Africa’s biggest, baddest, and most notorious ghetto. For those unfamiliar, Kibera wasn’t just a ghetto—it was the ghetto. The heavyweight champion of slums. A place so bleak it made Harlem look like a gated retirement community in Florida and the Sudan seem like a peaceful yoga retreat for suburban moms named Karen. If Dante had written The Divine Comedy today, Kibera would have had its own bonus circle of hell, complete with an express lane.
Here, the skyline wasn’t dotted with high-rises or hopeful ambitions—it was a sea of rusted corrugated metal, tangled electrical wires defying the laws of physics, and a suffocating sense that even the concept of a “future” had packed its bags and left long ago.
Predictably, my little venture into this urban nightmare had a considerable impact on my perspective—mostly by confirming my long-held suspicions that charity, like everything else, was just another elaborate pyramid scheme where suffering was the product and good-hearted suckers like me were the investors. I had witnessed firsthand the gold-medal-level gymnastics required to skim vast amounts of money from tender-hearted donations, all in the name of “helping” the very people they were robbing blind. It was less about aid and more about a Ponzi scheme where the only guaranteed investment was suffering. Oh sure, the brochures showed wide-eyed orphans and heartwarming success stories, but behind the scenes? It was less Save the Children and more How to Get a Free Land Cruiser by Crying on TV.
And yet—despite being trapped in a bureaucratic circus run by greedy clowns with humanitarian buzzwords—not much had changed for me personally.
Yes, I felt uneasy. Uneasy in the way a man feels when he realises he's been cheering for the wrong side of history. Uneasy in the way one does when staring into the abyss and realising the abyss is running a fully-staffed, government-approved, tax-exempt nonprofit organisation.
But empathy?
That was harder. Because, quite frankly, I lacked the emotional wiring to truly relate to them. Empathy for human beings, as a concept, had always been somewhat… foreign to me.
My entire life, I had always preferred the company of animals—and not just because they were easier to understand, but because they lacked the talent for deceit that humans had turned into an art form.
I could sit for hours watching wildlife, entranced by their social interactions—the way lions nuzzled their cubs, the delicate bonds of elephant herds, the endless, hypnotic migration of wildebeests and zebras across the plains. There was a raw, unfiltered honesty in them. Animals didn’t lie. They didn’t scheme. They didn’t take donor money meant for polio vaccines and use it to install a Jacuzzi in their office. There was something pure about them. Something untouched by the rot of human corruption.
I would never—could never—intentionally harm them. The idea of hunting them for sport was about as appealing as performing open-heart surgery on myself with a rusty spoon. The idea was absurd. The very thought of shooting one—unless I was on the verge of actual starvation—was unthinkable. And, frankly, even if I had tried to shoot something, the safest place for any living creature—animal or human—would have been directly in front of my barrel. Given my abysmal shooting capabilities, I would have had better luck throwing the bullets at my target and hoping blunt force trauma did the job.
This realisation didn’t just emerge—it kicked down the door, lit a cigarette, and stared me dead in the soul. Even though I was burning to make a difference—desperate to throw myself into something raw, something real, something bigger than my spoiled, vacuum-sealed life—I came face to face with a sickening truth: I had nothing. No skills. No training. No clue. No real-world grit. I was armed with nothing but good intentions and the emotional depth of a wet tissue.
In that cinematic instant, the brutal daylight of reality—camera slowly circling, tragic orchestral swell building—I realised I wasn’t a man on the verge of greatness. I was a background extra in my own life. A glorified spectator throwing guilt-laced donations like glitter into a hurricane, hoping it counted for something. A pampered mess mistaking his soft hands and expensive camera gear for purpose. It wasn’t heroic. It wasn’t noble. It was… pitiful.
And yet, something inside me was growing—something more dangerous than naïve charity or fleeting guilt. The will to change. The need to become something more. The obsession with learning skills that mattered—real, practical skills, not the kind that looked good on a LinkedIn profile but would leave me helpless the moment civilisation so much as sneezed in the wrong direction.
It was a wildfire. An all-consuming, ever-growing inferno that devoured everything in its path. A insatiable hunger to change, to evolve, to burn away every excuse I had ever hidden behind. It was spreading—fast, reckless, and completely out of my control.
And soon, it would consume everything.
As usual in life, all it takes to change is making the decision that you want to change. That’s it. That’s the magic. No incense, no enlightenment, no divine lightning bolt. Just a single, brutal act of will. And once you do—once you truly mean it—providence starts moving like some ancient machine groaning to life. Doors creak open. Roads appear where there was nothing but rubble. Help shows up uninvited. You start to believe in fate—or madness. Sometimes both.
Which, of course, begs the question—why doesn’t anyone actually change? Why do most people stay shackled to their own miserable reruns, even when life throws Molotov cocktails through their windows and burns the couch down around them? Why do they sink deeper, dig trenches in their habits, and pitch tents in their own damn rot?
Here’s the ugly truth: it’s not because they can’t change. It’s because they won’t. Because change means death—the death of who you were, of your excuses, your polished delusions, your comfortable failures. And humans, oh, we’ll cling to the burning wreckage of our own mediocrity just to avoid the terrifying possibility of becoming someone new.
As kids, we were afraid of the dark. But as adults? We’re petrified of the light. Of being exposed. Of being seen trying. Of stepping forward and realising we were never gods—we were wet clay with delusions of grandeur. So we stay small. We hide behind schedules, routines, clever quotes on Instagram, and the ever-handy phrase: “Maybe later.”
Because stepping into the light isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s a war. A public, personal, soul-flaying war—and most people would rather rot than fight.
Entering the abyss of aviation
In my case, things didn’t explode all at once—no, they started tilting off-axis in that charming, deceptively harmless way life often chooses when it’s about to shatter your illusion of control like a head-butt to a Fabergé egg. It all began with a vicious tag-team of unrelated events that joined forces like a cosmic prank squad and handed me an epiphany so blinding, it should’ve come with a surgeon general’s warning and complimentary sunglasses.
First offender? My then-girlfriend—now wife—blissfully unaware of the existential chaos she was about to unleash, handed me a gift voucher. A scenic flight. A scenic flight. At our charming, sleepy, one-horse-town airport in Germany, which was about as thrilling as a soggy bratwurst in a snowstorm. This place had all the excitement of a funeral home run by beige accountants. To say I had no interest would be like saying the Pope isn’t wild about pole dancing—it doesn’t begin to cover the levels of visceral disinterest at play.
County airports, to me, belonged in the same category as tax audits and medieval dentistry. And flying? Please. The very idea of being trapped in a tediously flying thumbscrew with some underpaid, overenthusiastic local hero who referred to himself as “Captain” despite the fact that his flight hours barely qualified him to operate a drone… well, that was just the cherry on this unappetising sundae.
I could already picture the scenario in glorious, excruciating detail: thirty minutes of skull-numbing, mansplained aviation “facts” delivered by a man whose emotional range hovered somewhere between weather balloon and parking meter. He’d drone on about the ‘art’ of flying, lovingly stroking his analog dials, pretending they meant something beyond “your crash will be orderly and well-documented.” If I was really lucky, he’d toss in some wildly fabricated tales from his “days in the Luftwaffe,” despite being born in 1972 and still living in his mother’s basement.
The only silver lining? No turbulence. Germany, you see, treats the sun like an ancient pagan god—revered, feared, and almost never seen. Most of the population hadn’t felt natural warmth in years, unless you counted tanning beds or sauna visits. So at least the skies were stable, grey, and emotionally dead. Much like my enthusiasm.
Part two of the tag-team of terror that would suplex my comfortable existence straight through the folding table of reality came disguised as an innocent newspaper article, lying there like a landmine in the middle of my morning routine.
The headline screamed like a dying prophet:
HELP SAVE THE AFRICAN ELEPHANTS!! ONLY A FEW LEFT!!
I blinked. Read it again. “Only a few left?” What the hell did that mean? I’d just been in the Maasai Mara—two weeks ago—but the place had felt like an elephant convention with bad parking. Had I hallucinated them all? Were they ghosts? Did I photograph a phantom pachyderm parade?
Granted, now that I thought about it, a few of the more legendary bull elephants had seemed suspiciously absent. But I’d chalked that up to seasonal migration or maybe a midlife crisis in the savannah. I made the mistake of voicing this thought to my friend Shlomi—whose expression instantly shifted from mild amusement to a look normally reserved for contagious diseases and malfunctioning nuclear reactors.
It was the kind of expression that said: “This man should not be left unsupervised. Ever.”
Still, he responded—mercifully—with words rather than a slap:
“What are you, an idiot? They’re being poached into oblivion. The Chinese are building half the roads and infrastructure here, and as a thank-you gift, they get to smuggle ivory out like it’s duty-free gum at the airport.”
I was stunned. Not just at the casual horror of it all, but at my own ignorance.
“Someone’s gotta do something,” I muttered, fists clenched in the kind of righteous indignation only the utterly powerless can afford.
And that, my friends, is how we circled back to the beginning of this chapter—the moment when Shlomi, with the precision of a man performing emotional surgery with a rusted cheese grater, began dissecting my complete inability to change anything.
Except maybe my socks.
And even that was negotiable.
But wait—there was more. Because of course there was. The article, in its noble crusade for doom and despair, had apparently gone the extra mile and interviewed someone on-site—a man presumably knee-deep in elephant carcasses and righteous indignation. His name, if memory serves, was something melodramatic like Krueger—which already sounded like either a discount safari villain or someone who moonlighted in your nightmares with a machete.
Turns out, he was a volunteer with some spin-off version called the Mara North Project, something painfully earnest like the “Save the Elephants Project,” tucked away in some forgotten bush camp in Kenya. At the time, I had no idea that a few years down the line, I’d have the deeply questionable pleasure of running into this human embodiment of granola and grit.
Had I known? I would’ve repurposed that newspaper in a heartbeat—used it to start a fire, line a birdcage, pick up dog turds, anything more productive than absorbing the Gospel According to Krueger. But alas—ignorance, as always, made a willing accomplice. Still, there I was, devouring every sanctimonious word. The journalist—clearly believing they were uncovering Watergate 2.0—had asked Krueger what real solutions might stop the poaching pandemic once and for all.
And oh, did Kid Krueger have ideas.
With all the somber drama of a man unveiling the Dead Sea Scrolls, he laid out his humanitarian wish list: satellite radios, surveillance drones, trained dogs, guilt-driven Western volunteers with daddy issues—and most critically, bush planes.
Yes. Planes.
Apparently, what his plucky little jungle outpost really needed were brave, khaki-clad sky warriors to patrol the air like airborne vigilantes. Pilots to spot poachers from above and, presumably, radio in the cavalry or drop pamphlets pleading for mercy.
And that—right there—was the moment my soul began a slow, confused ignition.
Pilots? Bush planes? Missions of mercy and righteous rage?
My fate was being baited with the subtlety of a coked-up screenwriter pitching an action movie: Top Gun: The Ivory Wars.
I should have looked away. I should have laughed.
Instead, I started to lean in.
Back at the desolate wasteland that dared call itself an airport—where the coffee machine had PTSD and the walls reeked of broken dreams—we were greeted by a man who looked like he’d overdosed on cheerfulness and cheap aftershave. He radiated that specific flavour of forced enthusiasm reserved for mall Santas and cult recruiters. And worst of all, he had the smug, simmering arrogance of a man who knew how to use a compass and would never, ever let you forget it.
You know the type. That slow, knowing smile every time you dared to open your mouth. The polite-but-deadly corrections to anything you mispronounced. The slow-motion explanations of rules, regulations, and unholy aviation trivia, delivered with the gravitas of someone disarming a nuclear bomb, even though you were just trying to figure out how the door handle worked.
And then came the emergency procedures—a required performance so dull it could’ve euthanised a horse.
Each sentence dragged like a corpse through molasses. His tone, a flatline so deadly it made a weekend seminar on international tax law seem like Raiders of the Lost Ark on caffeine. I began fantasising about pulling the emergency lever just to inject some actual danger into the moment.
The only upside—if you can call it that—was discovering that our pilot for the next 30 soul-scorching minutes wasn’t a former Luftwaffe relic here to relive his glory days over Brandenburg.
Oh no. It was worse. So much worse.
He used to fly commercial for Air Berlin.
Yes. Air Berlin.
The German airline so uninspired, so catastrophically bland, that it managed to vanish from existence with the emotional impact of a filing cabinet being wheeled out of an office no one remembered.
So here I was, strapped into a glorified aluminium mosquito with a washed-up commuter pilot who thought he was the last guardian of the skies. The only thing scenic about this flight was the impending crash of my patience.
I climbed into the passenger seat, still half-wondering if this was the dumbest thing I’d agreed to since letting a street barber in Mexico “fix” my hairline. My wife—clearly already mourning her decision to gift me the scenic flight voucher—squeezed herself into the back seat, a space clearly designed by a sociopath who thought “comfort” was a myth and human anatomy was a suggestion. That space wasn’t meant for passengers. It was meant for luggage… or a dog.
The pilot was still droning, explaining knobs and dials like they were the sacred texts of aviation, but I’d already mentally left the building. My brain took the emergency exit and dove into the memory of that Kenyan newspaper article—the one about the elephant slaughterhouse dressed up as conservation. That twisted cocktail of idealism and helplessness still echoed in my mind. Somehow, during that spiral of thought and internal nihilism, we’d actually made it to the runway. I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t care.
The flight itself? About as exciting as a televised chess match between two narcoleptics.
Unless I lie—and trust me, I’m tempted. I’d love to claim a tornado ambushed us or that we barely dodged a flock of resurrected Pterosaurs on meth. But no. Reality was far crueler: nothing happened. Not even a bump. Not even a hiccup.
What did happen, and what I remember with disturbing clarity, was this:
I spent that entire flight watching the pilot’s hands. Watching him move the controls like a bored pianist rehearsing the same damn song for the thousandth time. His voice had become background static—a movie played on mute.
And then it hit me.
“I can do this,” I thought, in the kind of arrogant whisper that usually precedes bankruptcy, explosions, or federal investigations. “Easy. Don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
That was the moment. The moment. The birth of the monster. It was a delusion, perhaps. But it was mine.
That flicker of dangerous confidence, paired with an absolute disdain for anything resembling caution or protocol, would become the very foundation of my flying style. A style forged in idiocy, baptised in ignorance, and wrapped lovingly in a total refusal to read manuals.
Radio procedures? What radio? In my future airspace, radios would serve two purposes: ordering pizza and sending shoutouts to grandma as you buzzed her tin-roof shack at 50 feet.
Maintenance? Please. Maintenance was a rigged lottery. A comedy act. In the places I was destined to fly, you didn’t get your aircraft serviced—you survived it.
And slowly, dangerously… a vision began to take shape.
Africa. The Wild Skies. No rules. No checklists. No smug instructors with clipboards and dead eyes. Just me, a plane, and the roaring chaos of a continent that didn’t care whether I lived or died—as long as I made it entertaining.
Eventually, we swooped in for a smooth landing—serene, uneventful, and completely unaware that midair, somewhere over the potato fields of rural Germany, the trigger had been pulled on the demolition of my entire existence. We taxied back to the pitiful little shack that dared call itself an airport terminal, more reminiscent of a meth lab with a vending machine than any kind of transportation hub. I clawed my way out of the cockpit like a corpse from a crash site and stepped back onto the cracked tarmac, half-expecting my legs to give out under the weight of the revelation that had just hit me midair.
My wife looked at me.
And then she really looked at me.
Her eyes scanned my face, caught the dangerous glint behind my pupils—the kind that precedes midlife crises, cult memberships, or poorly thought-out business ventures involving cryptocurrency and alpacas. She shook her head and muttered something under her breath. I didn’t hear it, but I imagine it was along the lines of
“What have I done?”
And then she left—like someone quietly walking away from a building just before it explodes. There was nothing more to say. The look on my face said it all.
With the unwavering conviction of a man who believes the second coming of Jesus is scheduled for next Thursday, and the blind optimism of someone utterly unaware of the trials that await, I declared—out loud, to no one in particular:
“I’m becoming a pilot.”
The words hung there, stupid and heroic in equal measure.
“If this dunce in jeans can do it, so can I. I’m on a mission. I’m getting my own plane, and I’ll become a bush pilot. I will chase the elephant poachers across Africa like a plague with wings. I’ll hunt them like a fever dream—part apocalypse, part wildlife documentary, narrated by Satan after three espressos and a midlife crisis, piloted by the ghost of colonial guilt, hell-bent on redemption and violently allergic to common sense.”
Cue the slow zoom.
Cue the thunder in the distance.
Cue the narrator whispering: He had no idea what he was doing.
Marcel Romdane—off the rim and into the abyss of aviation, fuelled by delusion, haunted by purpose, and held together with zip ties, unresolved childhood issues, and just enough lift to clear the wreckage behind.
Life was just excess and ego—race tracks, overpriced toys, and blissful ignorance—until I snapped and thought saving elephants was my job. Would I do it again? Only if a lobotomy came first. I should’ve stuck to donations and designer guilt. But I jumped into the abyss—and it didn’t blink. No regrets, but never again
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