Forcing Fun

I tried, of course, to capture Independence Day with my camera. And, of course, I failed. Wedding, birthday parties. . . I can't do it. I don't have a photo of a flag or a flaring fireworks.

The day was miserably hot. We went to our picturesque small downtown in the morning to revel. People stood dripping sweat and looking for the promised lemonade that had run out. So they stood with limp hot dogs and small bags of chips waiting in long lines for the kids to get a turn at the blow up play thing. We bailed and went home and turned on an old fashioned sprinkler connected to a hose to play in. Went to my mother's for hamburgers and hot dogs and corn and watermelon, then to the BIG downtown to watch the fireworks. The crowds were large enough to scare a boy, so we turned around and headed home. I like that boy. We are much alike.

And so, as my man says, there was that to do and then it was done.

4th

Whenever the 4th of July rolls around, I think of the phrase "Patriotic Gore," and I associate it with Gore Vidal thinking he wrote a book of that title. But he did not. It was the title of a book review in the New York Times of his book "The Last Empire" in which he writes an essay on Edmund Wilson who wrote a book entitled "Patriotic Gore." Vidal Sassoon comes to mind, and then Seigried Sassoon. Etc.

The days of summer wither away, all the dreams and high expectations with it. But today people will gather in large numbers all over the country to eat hot dogs and snow cones, wave miniature flags and watch the wonders of gunpowder and laser lights. Even as I write this, a group of runners passes my house on the annual Fourth of July 10K race to start the eventful day.

Some businesses are closed and others have tremendous sales. And, as usual at such unavoidable times, I am anxious and depressed. It is chronic. I've never done well with national holidays. I do not wish to be part of the hoi polloi, and yet my resistance seems always to cost me something.

Perhaps today I'll watch "The Razor's Edge," the 1984 version with Bill Murray. The opening scene is a great midwestern 4th of July celebration. I've spent time in Lake Forest where it takes place. Oh my. I've tried to be Larry Darrell, but here I am.

And so a photo of repose. No dancing girls. No artful techniques. Nothing to complain about. A simple snapshot of better days.

Still

Holiday weekend. Hard to write. Sushi on the veranda then a movie last night. Loud woman at dinner that everyone could hear never shut up. I don't know how she ate. Then a crowded theater. Just before the movie started, a couple smelling of moth balls sat next to me. Among the throng.

Still, it is good.

I'll try to post later today.

The Ex-Midget and The Maker of Antique Mirrors

("Postcards")

I go to this site every morning. It always makes me feel good. I just like old things, maybe. You can't make them. My friend was telling me about a Japanese movie he was watching in which a fellow makes antique mirrors. "You can't make antique mirrors," I said (this was the same fellow who told me about an ex-midget).

Painters are different sorts of people from the rest of us. They practice an old, slow art, especially if they work in oil. Not so many people do any more. Acrylics. I hate the word. They are convenient like online classes and distance learning. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. I wrote a response to the criticisms of Woody Allen's new movie appearing in the New York Times that hoped his next movie would be about an old man who gets an online degree using only an iPhone. It's possible, right? I don't know if there is anything intrinsically wrong with it. I just don't prefer it.

In retrospect, though, I guess there is an irony about Allen's preference for old buildings and music and his love of young women. Feel free to comment.

The End of Summer

My second fall term would begin soon, and it would be my last at the junior college. Under the influence of Vladi, I had taken big loads and gone through the summer and was going to graduate in December. Most of the people I knew had not bee as diligent and would take a lot longer. Graduating from high school a year early had driven Vladi. He was in a hurry now. He wanted to be a doctor like his father, but he didn't seem to want to wait. He wanted to be a doctor now. And since I was fortunate enough not to have to work, I took an extra class or two each semester.

My buddies had returned from backpacking around Europe. It did not seem that they had been gone so long, but they were there a month. When I saw them, I was surprised by how thin they had become. They told tales of meeting girls and staying in hostels, of eating leftover food off plates in restaurants, of staying up and smoking dope. There had been rifts on the trip and they had paired off and gone their separate ways at times. In truth, none of it inspired me to envy. But they were back and I was glad about that. They were my friends. We were the Blue Devils for god's sake.

But as it goes, things never got back to "normal." Chuck, who hadn't really taken school seriously and whose biggest influence seemed to have become drugs, suddenly, unexpectedly, and out of nowhere, decided to join the Navy. It didn't take long. He was there, and then he was gone. What had happened, I wondered? What in the world would inspire such a change? Nobody I talked to had a clue. Not even his closest friend, Leonard.

It was with Leonard and Chuck that I started running that first semester of college. Leonard's parents had recently gotten divorced and so he was the man of the family which consisted of his mother, who was an elementary school teacher, and three younger sisters, the oldest of which I was completely in heat over. I hung out at his house just to see her much of the time. Leonard, it seemed to me, had it made.

And that was why I was so surprised when he moved out of the house. But he had met a girl. She was a bit older than he and from a big city farther south, and her ideas about life were much more cosmopolitan than ours. To us who grew up in this sleepy southern hamlet, she seemed close to being a movie star. Her hair was naturally platinum and her eyes never seemed to focus anywhere but moved about the world as she looked inward to her own thoughts and feelings. She had a high, aristocratic voice that spoke to us of money, but she lived a hippie lifestyle, though of a richer order than the rest of us. The richness came not so much from money but from taste. While we just looked like poor street kids wearing flip-flops and jeans, she looked like she had shopped in the flea markets of London and Paris with great flowing skirts and ancient bangles. We all envied Leonard, though we thought it would end badly. He just seemed out of his league. Our league, perhaps.

He was the first fellow I knew to move in with a girl. It was still uncommon for us who had grown up with 1950s moral values. Our parents would never have had an unmarried couple to the house, though they may have known such people. Divorces were unsightly enough. So I was appropriately impressed when Leonard made his move out of the house where, as I said, I thought he had it made. More than anything, though, I would miss looking at his sister.

They got an apartment close to downtown, part of a big old wooden house built in the nineteen-twenties. They were living with his girl's younger brother who had recently come to town. The apartment was covered with parachute material and had low couches and cushions and pillows on the floor like some of the apartments I'd seen in movies. It always smelled of incense. I liked going over there, but I was never entirely comfortable with his girlfriend and not at all with her brother. Though they didn't try, they made me feel provincial. They'd had experiences that I hadn't yet imagined. I'd never thought of myself as conventional in any way, but they made me seem to myself a boy unwilling to leave tradition behind. And in truth, that may have been true to a degree I was not aware of yet.

In the last days of summer just before the fall term began, we had some jolting news. A fellow we all knew and liked, one we had gone to high school with, had bought a Harley Sportster and had chopped it up to look like the one in "Easy Rider." He was a big guy, fat really, but he looked good on that bike. And like a lot of kids we had gone to high school with, he had taken to the drugs and rock and roll life. He was on his way to a city on the coast some sixty miles away one night to go to a concert. The details were unclear, but it seems a semi-truck had run him over from behind. He was killed instantly. How in the hell could that happen, we all wondered? But it had and he was gone.

We were a year out of high school. My second year of college was beginning. Things had certainly changed.

Lottery

The night they chose the lottery numbers for the draft, we all gathered in the student center in front of a big T.V. It was a nervous time. We all wanted high numbers, of course. The year before, they had taken men with numbers up into the one hundred and twenties. The energy in the room was weird, something that mediated between horror and ecstasy. Some of us were going to be happy. Others. . . .

But when the lottery began, everyone was silent. We waited as they drew the first number, then we waited to see if anyone one in the room had been chosen. Nobody said anything, and there was a general twitter all around. The second number was drawn, December 24, and Jon went nuts. There was no way around it. He was going to be drafted.

I had known Jon since elementary school. He was a tall kid and an athlete, and he and I used to arm wrestle for the class at recess on Fridays for our sixth grade class (this turned into a round robin eventually, with other boys participating, but all that ended when Virginia got involved and slapped all the boys' wrist to the table without effort). He and I had played football and baseball together in junior high, and he went on to play for the high school basketball team. But like most of us, he'd become enamored of lefty politics, or at least hippie life-styles, and he was determined that he would not go into the military.

After that night, he set about destroying his health. He did massive amounts of drugs and didn't eat, and the day he was to go for his physical, he rubbed Vicks Vapor Rub on his chest and drove a motorcycle sixty miles north with his shirt undone. He was so emaciated that he failed the physical.

That night, though, the lottery went on. Another of my friends got a low number, but he told us he was filing for Conscientious Objector status because of his religious beliefs. He succeeded in that and had to become a night janitor at an elementary school for his public service duty.

At the end of the night, I knew little more than when it started. My number was 136, high enough not to be taken if the war did not escalate, but not a sure thing. I wouldn't have to make up my mind what to do that night. I had some time.

But the draft had left many politicized for the first time in their lives. And, as Ken Kesey had famously declared, you were either on the bus or off the bus.

I was definitely on.

Even on our small campus among intellectuals of the lesser kind, ideology dominated. We now counted the faculty as left or right. We avoided as much as we could the Nixonians preferring professors who had more liberal leanings. We took one professor of humanities, for instance, because he studied The Who's "Tommy: A Rock Opera" in his class. He was a little guy who looked like he might have wrestled in college. He was an unlikely candidate as a liberal, for he dressed neatly and had perfect hair. But like many of our professors, you couldn't tell about him. He seemed more liberal, perhaps, because he was teaching painting and music. He loved Kandinsky who I couldn't stand, but his enthusiasm for his groundbreaking compositions marked him a revolutionary.

He had a strange quirk of rocking his head back and forth quickly to crack his neck, a twitch that I aped, I guess, for one night at dinner, my father asked me what was wrong with my neck.

One day after class, a fellow I'd talked to in groups stayed to ask the professor some questions. I hung around not wanting to miss anything that might be useful on a test. The fellow was older and had a military haircut. He was lean and muscular and looked as if he would be a Marine the rest of his life. He reminded me of a younger version of Catfish, the fellow who had grabbed me by the hair after my accident at the construction site. I should have been more cautious.

He asked the professor a few questions which he answered, but The Marine kept asking more and more questions, and I could see that the professor was a bit flummoxed by it, so I decided to try to help and offered up something of my own. But The Marine was already in a mood. Perhaps he didn't like the prof. I don't know. What I do know is that he turned to me with a look of hate and loathing and said in a threatening voice, "I wasn't talking to you." My face went red immediately out of embarrassment. What was there to say? He was right. I had butted in uninvited. But the viscousness of his response was awful and inappropriate. I said something weak like, "Fine, I wont' try to help you any longer," to which he barked some terrible agreement. The professor stood there nervously gathering up his things and said, "Come by my office if you want to talk about this any further," and then he was gone. Fortunately, The Marine followed him out the door, and I was left in the classroom with an embarrassed impotence wadded in my throat.

I studiously avoided The Marine after that. And I kept a weather eye upon the draft.

Not Ready

The days flew by. I was not a good student because I had not been a good student for years, but school was not difficult, either. Eventually, though, I began to go to study groups because they seemed to be fun, and there was a reciprocal effect. My grades began to improve. The most difficult classes were in my major--biology, zoology, physics, inorganic and organic chemistry, trigonometry, statistics. The other classes were cupcakes by comparison.

I met two girls in my chemistry class who were nursing students. They were from a town on the coast and lived in one of the new apartment complexes that were springing up all over town in the most unlikely places. They lived on a new highway that ran through cow pastures and orange groves on the way to the new airport. One Friday, they asked me if I'd like to come over that night. I don't know why I said yes. Probably because to say no would have been an insult or would have required an excuse.

I won't go into details. I'll just say it did not go well. I got there too early, perhaps, and they were both busy doing something. It was as if I had dropped by unexpectedly. They asked me if I'd like a beer, turned on some music, and went about doing whatever it was they were in the middle of. Awkwardly, I sat on the new couch in a new apartment, everything from the shag carpet to the vertical blinds a shade of beige. Eventually, they noticed me. One of them got out a water pipe and filled it. They smoked it up and began to laugh. One of them showed me their collection of dildos. They made me nervous. I had to leave.

There was another girl in my chemistry class with long, dark hair and big, round eyes who was sweet. I felt good when she sat beside me. But that was all of it. I was too afraid to ask her out.

Tommy and his girlfriend decided to get married. They went to a small town courthouse with a parent permission slip and Tommy's sister as witness. They lived in the trailer with her parents and had the baby the day that Nixon resigned from office over the Watergate scandal. I was there (for the birth, not the resignation). Tommy had been fired from the union job for missing too many days and was back working at the tire shop. They were looking for their own place.

One day, I went over to see them at the trailer after class. My hair was quite long now, and I guess I thought I knew something about politics. I was telling Tommy what a slimeball Nixon was and telling all the dirt I'd learned about that creepy little bastard J. Edgar Hoover. Suddenly, like a sucker punch, Tommy's mother-in-law jumped up and told me to get out of her house. Her face was screwed up in a rage. She didn't want me to come over any more, she said. No one was going to talk like that in her house.

I learned an important political lesson that day.

Some of my friends from school had decided to go to Europe for the summer. They asked me to go. They would take trains and stay in hostels. All spring, they planned and arranged it. I thought about going, but in the end, I wasn't ready. I decided to take summer classes and finish school early. When it was time to leave, I saw them off and felt the difference. They were all smiles, all excitement. I should have gone, I thought. Why didn't I go?

The summer was hot and all I did was go to school and study. Not many people were on campus, hardly anyone I knew. The little cracker box house was an oven once again.

Idyl

(from "Postcards from Nowhere" series)

There are things worth mentioning but not worth telling.

Vladi and I kept diving, but we had another bad experience in an underwater cave. At 180 feet, I experienced nitrogen narcosis and didn't know up from down. We calculated our decompression times wrong and only caught our mistake just before we dove. We decided to try reef diving instead.

We would drive hours south to clear blue sub-tropical waters where you could swim to underwater reefs from the beach. The reefs were in shallow water, never more than thirty feet, so a tank of compressed air would last us forever. One windy day, we swam out to a second reef beyond the first. We stayed down a long time, and when we came up, the surface of the water was covered by Portuguese Man of Wars. We were wearing full wet suits, so we hadn't been stung, but it was spooky swimming back through the dark purple floats and their long, dangerous tentacles.

We took a trip to the Keys and rented a room in an old hotel on the Atlantic Ocean built around a little cove surrounded by palm trees and coral sand. It was like something out of a romantic movie.

One night, my father told me that "Jack Lestow" was on television at nine.

"Jacques Cousteau, dad. I know."

"That's what I said," he laughed. "Jack Lestow."

That night, Cousteau and his crew dove just hours away form my house with the giant manatees. The next weekend, Vladi and I would go.

The river ran into the Gulf of Mexico and was crystal clear as indicated by its name. We rented a little fishing boat at an old, cracker fishing camp close to where where the river entered the salt water, and there were hundreds of thousands of fish. Millions. We rode slowly past the occasional homes and river shacks until we were far from things and found a hole of deeper water and dropped the anchor. Herons and egrets and ibises of every kind wades along the shoreline. It was winter and the air was cooler than the water. Fish gathered at every rocky outcrop. We found a deep hole filled with larger fish and tiny blind caverns a few feet deep. Vladi and I were both biology majors and when we surfaced, we'd talk about the lack of color in the fish, about thermoclines and haloclines pointing to the places where the fish would gather. And then, while we were floating on the surface gabbing, something bit swam slowly by. It was like a VW bug. There it was--a MANATEE!. And though it was why we had come, each of us hesitated, waiting on the other.

"They can't hurt you, right?"

"I guess not."

Slowly, together, we dropped below the surface and followed the giant sea cow along its herbivorous way, keeping our distance and watching it eat. Closer, we saw the deep scars that ran across its back, victim of an outboard motor. Closer still, we saw the barnacles that clung to its skin. We could see the little hairs that stuck out oddly all over its body. Then Vladi reached out and touched it. The manatee did nothing. I touched it, too, felt the warm blooded softness of its skin in the cold water. Then, like pilot fish, we kept it company as it drifted in the current.

That was the last time Vladi and I dove together. He was going away to another school. That idyl had ended.

Mood Indigo

You ain't never been blue,

'Til you've had that mood indigo.

Write, delete, write, delete. Something's wrong. Something's broke. I tried to tell a story, but it is all mangled. There are some things I am not able to write well. There are pictures I'm no longer willing to show. My mouth is filled with dirt.

Lost

Some days, we lose our way, or it gets lost for us.  Either way, we look around and everything is gone.  How did it happen, we wonder?  Everything seemed to be going well.  There was a promise and a hope.  But all that's left is the big, black hollow and there is nothing to do but wait it out if we can.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

We bumped against the narrowing limestone walls looking up, searching for a way out, seeing only the small area lit by the narrow beams of our underwater lights.  We were lost.  I could feel the swelling in my chest, the rapid thumping.  Everywhere we looked, there were new chimneys.  We'd try one, then another, but they were all dead ends.  

Vladi and I were diving on our own now and had decided to try a spring cave that was not too far from our houses.  We had driven down the little dirt road, branches from saplings scratching the sides of the car.  Bumping and dipping and tilting along, we were already feeling dubious about the dive.  When we reached the end, we parked the car and looked down to the spring boil forty feet below.  It was clear and beautiful.  The water was emerald where the spring emerged from the river bottom perfectly clear.  We saw hundreds of fish suspended below us as if embedded in glass.  There was no sound but that which we made as we unpacked our diving gear from the car and the slow hissing of the water below.  

Thirty feet below the water's surface, there was a small opening that led to a tunnel that stretched back at an angle under the river bottom.  At ninety feet, tunnel opened up into a large underwater cave.  With anticipation, we descended into the blackness shining our lights here and there but there was nothing to see but the limestone walls, the greasy stalagmites and stalactites that had formed over the years.  

Then suddenly some invisible hand took hold of me setting me twirling and spinning.  My mask was ripped from my face.  In a few seconds, it was over.  I hung there in the dark for a quick minute before I pulled my mask back on and cleared the water from it.  I still had my light firmly clenched in my hand.  At 150 feet, we had come to the mouth of the spring where the water silently rushed out from it's underground origin, tens of thousands of gallons per minute.  Looking around, I saw Vladi's light.  He was swimming toward me.  With his thumb, he motioned upward.  No doubt.

We had come to a roof, though, with hundreds of chimney openings.  Which one had we come down?  It was the only one that led to the surface.  We tried one opening, then another, then another, each of them narrowing until we could go no further or abruptly stopping at a solid rock roof.  I could see the panic in Vladi's eyes that I knew mirrored my own.  

The days had become so beautiful.  I thought about how they had changed.  I thought about school and my mother and my father, but mostly I thought about how beautiful the days had become, bright and blue and so full.  

I checked my gauge.  I had about half a tank of compressed air left.  We were at ninety feet.  It wouldn't last all that long.  Vladi looked at me and held his hands out at his sides.  I responded by shaking my head.  

We had drifted away from the roof of the cave and landed on a rock and sand bottom.  For no reason, we swam along its contour, following it as it sloped up to where it entered another chimney.  A little way into it, the water seemed to glow.  A bit further, definitely, there was light.  Up and up, brighter and brighter, until we emerged into the river's open water.  

On the river bank, we dumped our equipment and just lay still.  We weren't ready to talk about it yet.  I leaned back and looked at the sky and listened to the water.  

Yes, yes, these were big, beautiful days.  

Tightrope

(from "Postcards" series)

"Lonesome got me bad," he moaned.  

"Why are you lonesome?" I asked. 

"I don't know.  Man, I was doing fine, then summer came and I walked by a Williams and Sonoma window displaying all that summer picnic stuff, wicker baskets and blue umbrellas and ice cream makers, you know?"  

"Yea, I've seen it."  

"Shit, you can't picnic alone."  

"Sure you can." 

"No, its not the same," he said, and he was right of course, but I was trying to cheer him up.

"I just keep listening to Bob Dylan singing 'Blue Moon' over and over.  I broke down crying when Sinatra came on the radio station singing 'Fly Me to the Moon.'"

"What station are you listening to that plays 'Fly Me to the Moon?'"

"It was one of my Pandora stations." 

"Oh.  Listen, though, I've felt like that even when I've been in a relationship."  

But when lonesome gets hold of you, its a hard one to shake.

*     *     *     *     *

She leaned her body up against me pinning me to the side of the car.  I could feel the warmth of her coming through her clothing.  She was from Venezuela and dated the most popular guy in our group.  He had long hair and looked like the singer Leon Russell.  This was his party.  We were at his house.  He was inside.  She had followed me out as I was leaving.  I hadn't been romantic with a girl for a long time, so when she kissed me, my head began to twirl.  I could smell the beer on her breath sweet and sour, but I couldn't taste it.  Her tongue was big, I thought, and soft.  She had a big, soft tongue that she pushed farther into the back of my mouth than seemed right and my head was spinning.  When she slowly withdrew her big tongue, she left her lips against mine and smiled.  Jesus Christ, I thought, she was like a movie star.  She pressed her forehead into my neck and softly giggled.  Suddenly, I was aware that I was breathing deeply, a little too rapidly and maybe audibly as well.  I wondered with embarrassment if she had heard.  Of course she had, I thought.  That is why she giggled.  

Some people form the party walked by, and I remembered Leon inside.  Everybody knew she was his girl.  I tried to get suspiciously small.  

"What's the matter?" she asked.  

"Nothing.  There were just some people walking by."  

She pulled back and stood up straight and looked at me.  

"You're not very tall, are you,"  she said.  It was not a question.

"I'm five-ten," I said matter-of-factly.  She had to be at least six feet tall. 

"OK," she said.  I didn't know if that was an agreement with my statement or a change of direction.  I wanted her to kiss me again.  

She was scrummaging around in her purse and pulled out a piece of paper.  She looked at it for a moment and then scrummaged some more. Cursing, she pulled out a mascara pencil.  

"Do you have something to write with?" she asked.  

I thought that from this point forward in my life, I probably would. 

"No," I said.

She wrote something on the paper in mascara there in the dark and handed it to me.  

"Here's my number," she said.  "Call me."  

And then she kissed me briefly and turned toward the house.  I watched her walk away on those long, long legs.  I didn't want to move.  

Driving home in the night with the windows down, I put on a tape by Leon Russell, driving and singing along with "Tight Rope."  Man oh man, I thought.  And that was about all.  Man oh man.  She was from Venezuela.  She was beautiful and she had the best boy in school.  And she had kissed me.  

Wind, moon, and sky.  

About halfway home, though, something else occurred to me.  I'd never thought about not being tall before.  

*    *   *

"Tight Rope" by Leon Russell

Organizer

Lana was one of those people who bloomed in college.  I'd known her vaguely for years, a girl fit to "swell a crowd" as Elliot puts it.  She was in school clubs, and she may have even been a cheerleader.  She helped decorate the gym for dances and she sold pep ribbons.  But it seemed to me that she was background, a dirty blonde without distinguishing features.  

Of course, that may have been due to my own eyes, vision that was damaged by distance as I sat on the outside of things trying not to look in too deeply.  Perhaps people bloom, but then again, it might be something else.  Circumstances change.  Whatever it was, she had become a lovely, beautiful woman.  

I talked to her one day in the student center and was immediately smitten.  Her hair was blonder and her teeth whiter, her outline more sharply drawn.  But what stunned me was how happy she was.  She was the happiest girl I'd ever met.  It was a quiet happiness, not the obvious sort, but something that radiated from her hair and skin.  So it seemed to me.  But it was contagious and she made me want to be happy, too.  

I was more than sufficiently smitten.  

I'd had a date now, though it had been a misery of sorts.  I'd picked up Terry's girl at the appropriate time, and thank god we had gone to a play at a college renowned for their theater.  We had seen"Dracula," and afterwards, I had taken her out for a hamburger. Then I took her home.  Her interest in me was obvious.  She was just trying to piss Terry off.  There was no thought of a goodbye kiss.

  

Rather than trying to ask Lana out, I had a better idea.  I would organize an outing.  I could invite a bunch of people to meet up at a local State Park, a natural spring that fed a beautiful river.  I'd never done anything like this before, never organized big, beautiful fun.  But I was changed, I thought.  Opportunity lay here.  

It worked.  It was a good idea and everyone came.  There was food and drink and girls in bathing suits.  And there was Lana.  

There were other boys, too, though, and maybe that was a mistake, for Lana spent most of her time surrounded by one bunch or another.  As I watched her laughing and walking and talking and spreading her happiness far and wide, I became more and more morose.  Perhaps it was proximity, or the lack of it, that shielded me from all that joy I felt when I was near her.  But it now seemed like a fire on a cold night, sitting in the distance, seeing the beauty but feeling none of the warmth.  

As the day wore on, I thought, "I have friends now, lots of them, college kids whose lives were this and not the other, the thing I am trying to leave so far behind."  Of course it was not so stilted or organized a thought as this.   It was a feeling, really, and a rationalization, for truly, what did I care about such things just then.  I wanted Lana.  

Finally, at the end of the day, as people were beginning to pack up and leave, Lana came over and smiled.  

"How're you doing?"  

I had not been much of a smiler since I was nine or ten, but I could feel the corners of my mouth curl up as the muscles of my cheeks pulled tight, and I nodded my head up and down, up and down.  

"Fine," I said.  "I'm really fine."  

We walked along a path that led through the woods, a nature trail that looped back to where we started, and as we ambled, we talked about the day.  "This was a great idea," she said.  "I had so much fun."  I could feel the heaviness in me growing in direct proportion to my desire.  Unrequited, I knew, which accounted for the heaviness.  She looked like a wood nymph or sprite as we walked along.  She had put some flowers in her hair and wore a thin gossamer shirt.  OK.  Not gossamer, but I had come to the knowledge of gossamer when reading "The Hobbit", and it had all the hallmarks of gossamer, I thought.  A pixie.  Elfin.  

When we got back to the picnic table where we began, I stood awkwardly looking at her.  Expectantly, perhaps.  But she was distracted.  Someone called her name.  And in a little while, she was gone.  

At least there was nothing to clean up.  I had stayed to the end because I wanted to see Lana and because, it seemed, I was always reluctant to miss something.  Years later, I would realize it was something else.  But now the day was done, and it had been a good day.  I had done it, I thought.  It had been mine.  

When I got into my car and was alone, I felt the familiar longing in my arms and in my legs.  I was OK, I thought.  It was familiar.  

A Thousand Nights and a Night

"Life turns on such small things as the burning of an oil lamp."

I keep the night light burning, but the oil is running low.  I must slow down now.  Enough of seeing.  Enough of voices.  I must remember and make sense of things.  I am awash in sirens, djinns and genies.  

Southern Colonial

(from "Postcards" series)

Not everyone who comes here visits on a regular basis.  I think about that sometimes.  How would you know where to begin?  If you started at the current post and it was part of "The Narrative," it might not make sense.  If you just looked at the photos, you would find no consistency.  I try not to think about it too much, but I am reminded, sometimes.  My friend, Frank Petronio, wrote this the other day:

"I don't check your blog as often as I should, you write too much, but it is always rewarding when I take the 10-15 minutes to really read it. I like your photos more and more too, you somehow have that southern colonial atmosphere down."

To the contrary, Lisa wrote yesterday that she does not "love these latest photos."  But she reads the words.  

I try to reconcile these things, but I can't.  I think I'm just going to keep doing this and try not to let my mother find out.  There is a stupid craziness to it, anyway, an exhibitionist's idiotic belief.  Besides, this is a "workbook" place, a daily posting, not a finished product.  I will begin to have finished product soon, I think, though I feel like a hobbyist without end.  But I am determined to put my stamp on something.

What are the "take-aways" from this?  For me, there is the label with which I am somehow fascinated.  "Southern Colonial".  What a title.  

*     *     *

After I posted, I saw this.  Zackary Canepari has troubles with his photos, too.  

What. . . me worry?  

Summer Solstice

The nice people over at the 591 Photography Gallery have put up a summer exhibit of portraits.  Thanks to Rhonda Prince and Ulf Fagelhammar, I've been included.  I am pleased and humbled to be included with so many good photographers.  If you are interested, click on the link and take a look around.  It is all explained there.  

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Today is the first day of summer.  And it is hot.  The temperature here will be close to 100 degrees and the humidity will get close to 100 as well.  For those of you who only have the temperature and not the humidity, you don't know.  For those of you in the midwest where such things happen, it doesn't last as long.  This is murderous weather.  I'll keep you advised.  

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

I was visited last night; I'm certain of it.  I worked on this image and others like it, so maybe that is it, but I went to bed late, dreamed wild dreams, and woke up early.  There is a nap in my future today.  


I am working on some series of photographs right now. That is why you are getting so many of "these" sorts of images. It is not all I do or can do. It is simply what I am working on now. The more of it I do, though, the more my ideas get sorted and refined. My ideas, I say. We'll see about the images.

I try to think of words, but the images are overpowering them right now.  Lazy, laconic days.  Days of pictures and beaches.  

Spring's Last Light

Observations.

Tomorrow is the Summer Solstice. First Day of Summer. Midsummer's Fest. Puck. Queen Mab. You know. I am all nerves. I have many things to do but run in circles accomplishing nothing. One should not run in summer, I guess, especially in the lazy old south.

I read some interesting reviews online at the New York Times this morning.

First this:

For most of us love is largely a matter of shared mortgage payments, evenings curled up on the couch in front of a video, or maybe a night in a hotel for an anniversary. But Cristina Nehring has a different idea. Her ardent polemic, “A Vindication of Love,” puts forward a darker, more demanding vision of love. This is not, it should be said right away, a book without ambition: the subtitle is “Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century,” though it is not exactly romance Nehring is writing about, but a more difficult, vital image of passion she believes we have lost.

Then this:

It is a sobering fact that, according to Bernstein, until the mid-19th century, “most of the world still subscribed to what I have been calling the harem culture, and in only the few countries of the West, the small peninsular domain of Christendom, did a different attitude prevail.” He describes the harem attitude as “both more realistic about male sexual desire than the Western culture of chastity and monogamy and less sentimental about it.” Bernstein’s harem mirrors the Darwinian male mind, which is sexually programmed for youth, beauty, variety and a great deal of it, “a place of limitless erotic possibility” where lust and pity party.

Already your mind is wandering from this dry — unless you just spilled your coffee — flat page to a smoky room filled with the potent scent of sandalwood and hashish, where exotic young women with veils on their limbs and bells on their ankles dance languidly (sans pole) as you recline on a red brocade divan bulging with pillows, while another beautiful, silky-haired girl. . . . But wait, before you take that final plunge (or puff) that brings perfect wisdom and contentment, come back! We must first consider the political, social, economic (the old “he has the money, she doesn’t” routine) and feminist (ditto but with outrage) implications of the intoxicating collision between Caucasian heterosexual men and, well, any lovely young thing who is not of their own ethnic or cultural heritage. It is here that Bernstein comes to our aid with his accessible, much-researched and far-reaching book — though his subject is so complex that he provides only a bare introduction, a kind of hybrid of history, interview and anecdote.

Then this:

Mr. Allen’s unwavering belief in an empty cosmos made somewhat less bleak by the charms of old movies, older music and much younger women is one of the few things left we can count on. If the man ever gets religion, then we will know we’re really in trouble.

And I read some other things, too, including some of the big photoblogs where people write in the colder, knowing tones. Then I went back and commented on some of the things I read. Then I wondered what was wrong with me, wondered why I wanted to go picking fights. Then I remembered that Midsummer was approaching.

I will leave it to those of you who read this blog on a semi-regular basis to make all the connections. You know what I mean. I'm too rattled to do so right now. In writing, that is. I already know the connections.

Fortune

(Digital Photo of "Postcards from Nowhere" Series)

Sometimes fortune takes over.  I was waiting for a girl at my studio when the skies broke open.  She did not show up.  I was standing in the open front door watching the rain when incredibly a couple came walking down the street holding a small, tattered umbrella that did no good at all.  I watched as they ambled toward me, and when they got close enough, I called out, "You think its a good day for a stroll?"  

They walked under the cover of my porch and we began to chat.  Turns out they live next door to my studio and they were going to the restaurant behind me to get something to eat.  I told them to cut through the studio in order to make the trip shorter.  Walking through, they became enamored of all the paraphernalia I had lying around.  They were an interesting looking couple.  Turns out, she was from the Dominican Republic with a mixed ethnic background.  She was all tatted up and had piercing everywhere.  I asked if I could take her photograph and she said sure.  When they were leaving, I said that if the girl I was waiting for didn't show up, I would like to shoot her.  She was very enthusiastic.  

I waited an hour.  The girl didn't show. 

The rain stopped, so I walked back to the restaurant where the couple was just finishing up their sangria.  I said, "You still want to shoot?"  She had class in a couple of hours, she said.  We'll shoot for one, then, I told her.  

She just started trying things on and laughing, her boyfriend fixing her wardrobe and coming up with good ideas.  

Turns out he is an Arab from Syria.  I told him next time I'd shoot him.  Sure, he said.  

They have friends, they said, who would come and play.  She knows a woman who had a costume shop and has all sorts of things in storage, not copies or knock-offs, but real things from other places.  

Here is a digital photo from yesterday.  The Polaroids will take much longer.  

Saving

We are what we do, and that is the terrifying thing.  What we do is not without consequences.  Of course.  Everyone knows that. But we try not to think too deeply about it, try not to watch the concentric ripples of our actions as they move out from their epicenter.  We are predetermined in many ways, we think.  Our genetics, our upbringing.  Often, we like to think we are a series of reactions.  "This happened, so I. . . . "  We only like to think of ourselves as active agents when the results are spectacular or heroic, or at the very least, pleasant.  "I planted a garden.  You should see the lilies." 

Sometimes, though, we do blame ourselves.  

I read somewhere about a study that demonstrates that the people with the highest levels of self-confidence in America are people in prison.  Rarely do they blame themselves.  

I have a book buyer I deal with on occasion, a man originally from India.  One day I told him that I had been going to yoga classes and that it had taken hold, that I practiced yoga all day long, the principles of yoga, when I walked and when I breathed.  He got very excited and began telling me about his own practices, that each morning when he woke, he practiced meditation before doing his yoga exercises.  Then he mentioned God.  

"Do you believe in God?" I asked him.

"Yea, man.  Sure.  Not one God but all of them.  God is everything and everything is God."  

I'm familiar with the concept, of course.  I've read my Emerson and Thoreau.  I've been intellectually engaged with the idea for a long time.  But his saying it just then made something click.  Timing and circumstance.  Yes, I thought, that is it.  God is a metaphor for everything that happens.  Everything in sum.  It is so big, it seems infinite.  And what we do contributes to the metaphor.  We are all parts of it.  

I got very excited, for now when people asked me if I believed in God, I could answer with an enthusiastic "Yes."  It was far easier than trying to explain the other and it would make most people far happier.  

I've written and read about Memory for a long time now, memory in many of its forms.  Nobody knows how human memory works, really, the physiology of it.  You can't find it anywhere.  It is a complex series of chemical messages of course, and scientist have found that human memory is not contained only in the brain but in all the cells of the body.  

Lately I've been imagining that memory might extend further than that, though, that it may reside in the chemicals that make up the cells themselves.  Chemical Memory.  It serves to extend my metaphor and makes me happy.  Somewhat.  The idea that what we do is stored in the very chemicals that make up the universe, that the chemical memory will somehow help to shape what happens after, that our actions have direct consequences no matter how infinitesimal, well. . . that is enormous.  

Maybe lately I've been weighed down by the idea.  It makes choosing everything more serious.  I'm not sure I am up to the job of shaping the universe today.  The other way of thinking might be more palatable, having something somewhere to which I might appeal, supplicant on bended knees, yes, but something that might change everything in a moment.  At times, we all want saving.  

Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip, Drip

(Digital Photo from a last night's "Postcards" collaboration)

Sushi on the veranda did not help all that much.  The air was warm and moist as storms built all around, the skies bruised and purple, the absolute stillness replaced by small puffs of wind as the storms drew near.  I did not write.  I drank the sake and ate the edamami and sashimi and watched the people hurrying by to get where they were going before the rain came.  

I had just finished taking photographs in my studio with the woman above.  I am making photos as much as I can lately.  It is nerve-wracking.  My nerves are on edge the whole time.  I never know if I making a decent picture.  I shoot the last of the Polaroid film and it comes out bright and crisp and the images look like all images.  I will have to wait until I have made my special ju-ju process with the film and have scanned the photo and all the ephemera that goes into it to see what I have.  I cannot tell much until everything is scanned and I begin to work with it in the computer, so I have to scan everything.  It takes about twenty minutes to get an image to where I can see what it is and can be, and I am shooting between thirty and forty Polaroids each time.  So I scan and wait and wait and scan.  I figure it takes me about forty hours or more to get a few good images.  And that is just the one on the screen.  There is still the printing and the transfers and/or whatever other processes I put the image through.  I have a job and a life, as well, and trying to cram everything in is putting me on edge.  

And perhaps that is why the narrative factory is on strike.  I don't know.  I need to be able to sleep through the night rather than waking up at four in the morning.  

But it is important to me to finish one project so I can begin another.  I am in a hurry, but there is no hurrying anything, neither images nor words.  

Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip.  I sound like a leaky faucet.  

*      *      *      *      *

Terry was a Health professor.  I don't remember how I met him, but I ended up playing basketball with him from time to time.   He was short and blond and had once been well-built.  He'd been an athlete at State and had modeled for the art classes.  Now, in his mid-thirties, the effects of his bachelor's life were obvious.  Still, there was a power in him that you recognized immediately.  

Terry had been married to a wealthy girl from Atlanta, but recently, she had left him.  And so he'd had to go to work.  He had his athlete's degree and had parlayed that into an M.A. and had managed to get a job at the junior college.  And he liked it.  Especially the girls. 

Terry was handsome and outgoing, and he was a player.  One day after basketball, he invited me over to his apartment.  "Come over after you get cleaned up," he said.  "We'll have drinks."  

When I got there, two girls from his class were already there drinking wine spritzers.  They were pretty, of course, and happy, too.  They laughed a lot.  Terry made sure that everyone's glasses were always full, especially his.  

I ended up taking his Health class only because I knew him.  He wasn't much of a teacher, but the class was easy and full of all the people who went to his house to drink.  There were plenty of girls.  

His classes let out early most of the time.  

There is hardly anything more to the tale than that except I ended up going out with his girlfriend after he pissed her off by borrowing her car and leaving it on the far side of town when it got a flat.  I was sitting at a table between classes talking to a guy about dating.  I still hadn't had one.  

"Why don't you ask somebody out?  You've got to ask them out, they're not going to come to you."

"I couldn't stand it if they said 'no,'" I told him.  

"You're crazy!  What does it matter?  Someone will say yes eventually." 

Just then, Terry's girlfriend came over and sat down and began cursing Terry for leaving her car and calling her to tell her where it was.  "The bastard expects me to go pick it up.  Fucker."  

I didn't say anything but nodded.  Then she turned to face me.  

"What are you doing tonight?" she asked me.  

I managed to say, "Nothing."  

"You want to go out?"

My friend's jaw dropped.  

"Sure," I said, not knowing what else to say but not really wanting to.  This was Terry's girl and he was bound not to like it, and she was older than I and much more worldly.  I would be terrified.  

"OK, come pick me up around seven."  

And she got up and left.  I just looked at my friend.  "See," I said.  He just shook his head.  

At the end of the term, Terry was packing up his office.  "I'm done," he said.  "They didn't renew my contract."  

"What are you going to do?" I asked him.  He had his little mousy dog with him.  Even the dog looked sad.  

"I'm moving back to Atlanta.  A friend of mine owns a hotel there and he asked me to manage it."  I could tell by the way he packed his books into boxes that he didn't want to leave, but I think that was only because of the coeds and not his love of teaching.  I don't think he liked teaching at all.  

I stayed and helped him until he had everything in his car, and then we shook hands and said goodbye.  I watched as he drove his old beater away for the last time.  

Terry had been a good role model.  I learned about a lot of things I didn't want to be.  

Nothing to Show

(Postcards from Nowhere)

Another bad day at the narrative office.  I write, but even I would not let it go.  The morning's gone.  I have nothing to show.  I will go for sushi alone tonight, I think, and see what spark that might bring.  An evening on the terrace might be just the thing.  For now, a photograph will have to do.