Lo-li-ta

I'm exhausted tonight, but I know tomorrow will be worse, so I am writing for the morning before I go to bed.  Classic jazz playing, whiskey ready, I think of a thousand things at once.

Tonight I shot with the child model again.  And her fourteen year old sister.  Oh my, wait until you see!  Wake up the neighbors about this one.  I am walking the tightrope here since I've not processed any of those images yet, but I feel safe enough.  More than that.

But it all wears me out.  I have another shoot tomorrow night, and it is emotionally bigger than this evening's.  C'est la vie.  There are worse problems in the world.

I'm posting one of the straight digital photos today.  Straight for me.  There are people who like this sort of image.  Lots.  It is the sort of thing her mother has in mind.  Some of you will like it more than my naked girls on a couch images.  And you may be right.  Who knows.  It sure is a lot easier.

Lo-li-ta.  You know the rest.

Swimming Underwater

I am underwater, swimming against the current.  The sky lightens the surface above me.  It is pleasant.  Why are we so often underwater in our dreams?  I want to stay there and look at the undersides of water hyacinths, watch the minnows dart under their shadows.  I want to live like this awhile.

Waking dreams.  I made pictures with a woman last night because I was seduced by her writings.  She liked my photographs she said, "As an intellectual, feminist, and lover of things that are both beautiful and destroyed, I really appreciate your work."  I asked her ethnicity.  Indian, she said.  Hindu or Muslim, I asked. Muslim by birth, she reported, but she was no believer.  She majored in philosophy, she said, and was an existentialist.  I of course was intrigued.  Still, she was ruled by her father.  She would need to be careful.  "My family and the Indian community at large are pretty despotically conservative and maintain a vigilance on their community members that is reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia," she exclaimed.

My dreams were of the east, hers were of the west.  She was shrouded, I thought.  I wanted to strip away the veils.  Of course, I know how that story goes, thousands of veils, layer after layer.  An old fashioned Orientalist, corrupt and corrupting.

We exchanged more emails.  I did not want to shoot with her.  I did not wish to meet.  I only wanted her to tell me stories.

"The social dynamics of all this [family] are extraordinarily complex," she wrote, "and compromise is often the only reasonable half-solution. . . I have to play along with some of the games in order to be faithful to my love for my family."

Faithful to her love for her family.  I could smell the curry and spices.  She was Africa, England.

No, I did not want to meet.  I could only disappoint her.  Why did I think that?  I had become fanciful, I guess, swimming underwater, looking at the undersides of water hyacinths.

Just Living

Johann Georg Meyer Von Bremen

The neighborhood is made up of houses built in many styles on small lots that line up block after block.  The lots were divided by a developer who sold them off one by one.  He put in basic water and sewage but runoff was handled by open ditches that lined the street in front of the houses.  People came because the lots were cheap, but they were near the a waterway that ran to the Gulf.  "Bunny huts" is what a fellow I worked with when I was a kid selling magazine subscriptions.

People park in the street and in the yards.  There are lots of pickup trucks, but there are big motor homes and trailers and even the occasional semi parked next to the houses which look small by comparison.

"There are fourteen convicted sex offenders in this neighborhood," Player told me.

"Those are the convicted ones," I said.  "What about the rest?"

"No way to track those," he said.  "There are drug dealers all over here.  Guys walk up and down the street all night long.  This guy over here deals in speed, this guy in pot. . . ."  The list was long.  "You see all these guys not wearing shirts?"  Nobody seemed to own a shirt in this neighborhood.  "You see a guy not wearing a shirt, you know he's doing Roxies.  It make you hot."  Everyone was doing Roxie.

How's a kid going to grow up living here?  Nobody cares about school.  My cousin's husband tells me, "There's lots of people who didn't finish high school who are smarter than college graduates."  I can't argue with that.  I know it is true.  Take a smart kid and put him in this environment, and he's going to figure out how to beat you.  Player's plenty smart and likable.  What are you going to do?  I ask him things about the future, tell him about opportunities.  He just kind of goes blank.  He's doing O.K.  He doesn't work much, has a big new truck, gambles all night and sleeps all day with his very pretty girlfriend.  Things happen.  There is much excitement.  He knows people who will kill you if he asks them to.  Some go to prison, some don't.  It's all too familiar.

I've watched the families generation after generation, all the smart, beautiful kids.  They do well for awhile, but there is no money, and they have to get a job when they turn sixteen.  Morals are loose and the girls are put on birth control early on.  Eventually, they begin to know where they are in the social hierarchy at school and turn away.  If they are lucky, mom or dad puts them in some polytechnic high school to learn a trade, kids who are far too bright for that.  An early pregnancy, food stamps, some government checks, help from the family.  Another generation.

Player's happy for now, happier than I am, perhaps.  He doesn't worry about the things I do.  His world is immediate.  You'll never hear him say anything like "global awareness."  I'm not sure he can find most countries on a map.  But he put an LCD screen on his dash so he can watch movies while he makes the long drive to gamble at the Indian reservation.  He has a cool phone and plenty of cash.  He lives at home and pays no rent and feels no need to get his own place.

Driving home with my mother, I'm sleepy.  I'm always sleepy now.  My body aches with fatigue.  Why can't I sleep?  Dozing off in the car, I think of what I need to do when I we get back.  So much to be taken care of.  I don't want to do it.  I want a big new truck with a t.v. screen and a cool phone.  I want to be clever and young, filled with social wit.  But there are new books to read.  That will be good.  And I'm going to change my diet around a bit.  Maybe I'll go back to yoga.  Perhaps I'll sleep better.  But first I must get all this other stuff taken care of.  There's so much to do.

I wake with a sudden jerk and look out the passenger window.  We are driving over a big river that barely flows through palms and grasses.  The sky is cloudy.

"Why don't you put your seat back," my mother says.

"No, I'm O.K., " I tell her.  I keep looking.  There is no one on that river.  Maybe I'm coming down with something, I think.  In a minute, the river is gone.

Better Stories than Mine

The New York Times thrilled me this morning.  Not because of any news it reported, although I liked reading about the President's busted lip.  That is reassuring, somehow.  I want a President who takes a physical beating once in awhile.  It is a healthy thing, and more people need to.  But the thrill came from the Book Review section.  Steve Martin's new novel, "An Object of Beauty," is out for the holidays.  You will think me shallow to look forward to this, perhaps, but I liked "Shopgirl," both the novel and the horribly underrated movie.  This novel, I hope, is hermetic, sealed against anything that does not resemble art.  With understated wit.  We'll see.

But sitting in bed with my laptop, listening to the roosters crow in the coming dawn, glancing about at the seashell tables and framed Tommy Bahama posters and nautical knickknacks, and a lamp that is a faux-Tommy Bahama shirt. . . nope, I can't wait.

So that you will not think me a complete Philistine, though, I am also excited to read the new short story collection from William Trevor.  It should be a nice counterbalance.  The review of that book reminded me that I have not read Alice Munro's latest, either.  I may put everything else on a back burner and spend my days in a coffee house somewhere reading while the holiday shoppers pass by.

"Cockledoodledoo."

It sounds so appealing.

I have to quit being such a prick about my relatives, though.  They are ultra-nice people, and like most have gained quite a bit of sophistication due to the last decades of national affluence.  Television and the internet have changed the way they live and think.  They have nice pickups that I envy, boats and kayaks and giant flat screen televisions.  They even eat better than they used to.  They don't leave food out unrefrigerated for hours any more.  But none of that makes a good story.

What does are the stories themselves.  Player told me quite a few last night.  He is a funny boy who took over part of his father's lawn business when pop decided he had had enough of working in the sun and took a job at an outdoor store.  Player stays out all night and comes home in the morning to sleep the day away.  Two nights ago he went to an Indian reservation to play poker all night.  He knows poker.  He and his buddy go and play for days at a time.  He has to come home eventually so that he can get up at four p.m. and take care of the four accounts he still maintains.  And before he goes gambling, he has people he has to take care of, too.

"Veronica is going to be eighteen soon," he tells me with a suggestive raising of the eyebrows.  She is the high school senior, my second cousin in the little dress at the Thanksgiving table.  I'm not sure if he is suggesting I should make a run at her or if he is when he says, "But she is such a bitch."  He tells me that he got with her half-sister, her mother's daughter by another marriage, when she lived with his uncle.  "She wasn't blood to me," he says.  He is pretty candid.  The whole story is a mess.  My cousin's wife was a very pretty woman who liked to drink.  "She hit on me at my parent's silver anniversary," he said last night at the dinner table with his parents and my mother.  My mother was treating everyone to the Outback where about half the employees are cousins.  His mother stared hard at him.  "I'm telling you, it would have been an easy pull."  His mother shakes her head.

But everyone knows it could be true.  She and my cousin got divorced because she didn't like to come home at night.  She liked to go to bars and flirt with the younger boys.  But after a year or so, she moved back in and they lived together like roommates.  Still, he did not like her running around, and one night when she didn't come home, he went looking for her.  He found her sitting at a park by the water absolutely drunk and naked and with one of the neighborhood men.

"We're not doing nothing," she reportedly told him.

And that was the end.  She moved out a few days later.  Player says he sees her at the bar dancing with boys younger than him.  "I pulled her out a couple of times," he says.

Meanwhile, my cousin, who is very shy, hasn't had a date for several years.  He's tried everything.  He pierced his ears and shaved his head and then the rest of his body, but even such fancy measures didn't win him a single date.

"I was telling him about an online service for call girls," Player told me.  "He called me about ten minutes later and asked me for the website.  The next morning, the ambulance took him to the hospital.  That's when he had the stint put in.  I never asked him if he had someone over.  But I'm just saying."

A few weeks ago, my cousin went to the Outback where both his high school kids work.  He went with a purpose.  He was going to ask one of the waitresses out, a woman about forty.  The kids were telling the story at Thanksgiving dinner.  They said he had put on a Tommy Bahama shirt and had parted his hair on the side and sat at the table with his hands pressed together like he was praying, noticeably trembly and nervous.

"I had to go to the bathroom," he said.

When she brought him the check, he asked her if she wanted to go out on Saturday.  No, she said, I'm going to a party with my girlfriends.

But the party was on Friday night, his daughter spits derisively.  Her father says he isn't going to ask anybody out any more.  He'll just spend the rest of his life alone.

The stories go on and on.  I will write them more artfully one day if I remember.  But I know I shouldn't be telling any of this.  Family, for god's sake.  I should be more protective.  But god, they are archetypes and I am trying to fictionalize enough to prevent them knowing.  They will never read this.  No one will.

The roosters are really at it now.  The sun is up, the day gray.  I will drive with my mother back home in a bit, and I will think of all the things I didn't write down, didn't photograph, and I will think I should go back and stay a week or two in the name of fiction.

Back home, I will buy those new books and seal myself into that protected life again, away from what I ran from so long ago, haunted by how familiar it all becomes so quickly, knowing my life does not provide me with the rich material that a few days with my mother's family can.

Everyone is moving now.  Toilets are flushing and kitchen drawers are banging shut.  I will get another cup of coffee and finish reading the New York Times.

Rat Bastards and Little Girls

Thirsty.  My tongue is swollen.  It fills my mouth.  Oh, oh.  What is that?!  The goddamned rooster!  It's dark.  Motherfucker shit piss damn.  What the hell happened?  I feel like I was in a train wreck.  My tongue's so big, I wonder if I'll be able to talk.

"Cockledoodledoo!"

I'd kill the sonofabitch if I could get up.  Man oh man am I thirsty.  I don't have to pee.  That's dangerous.  I think back.  My cousin.

"Cockledoodledoo!"

Why do they call it "medicinal"?  He's a rat bastard, that cousin.  Hillbilly humor.  Tells my mother,

"Why is your boy eating so much?  Why's he all chink-eyed?"

The sonofabitch.

I'd been drinking whiskey, too.  I'd be sleeping if it weren't for the goddamned rooster.

"Cockledoodledoo!"

I stay in bed dozing off and on.  The rooster goes silent for a while.  I know I will feel like shit when I get up.  When I wake again, the sky is turning.  Fortunately, my cousin's husband's brother has been up and made coffee.  I grab a cup and quickly disappear back into the bedroom I am using.  I turn on my laptop and read CNN and the New York Times.  I have been thinking I'd go to the beach and run, then swim.  Not now.  A long walk, maybe.  Perhaps I'll swim a bit.  Just to clear my head.

On my way out, my cousin's husband says, "You'll be lucky to get parking."

But he is wrong.  At ten o'clock on Thanksgiving day, I find a spot easily.  I pick up my small pack and head for the beach.  The sun is already bright.  I have no sunglasses and can barely open my eyes enough to see.  I should drink water, I think, but strangely I can't bring myself to do it.  I have become hydrophobic.  I've had nothing but coffee--lots of coffee.  The fine sugar sand of the beach is cool.  I make my way across the long strand to the hard packed sand by the water.

The crowd is much different than the afternoon before.  Older.  There are the middle-aged joggers in their matching outfits and baseball caps.  And there are the brown, wrinkled people who have lived in this sun.  And me.

I walk the curved beach for an hour, until I get to the end where you must go into the water to get past a monstrous house that has been built on the point over everyone's objections, and turn around.  Midnight Pass.  It is a lovely, evocative name.  Walking back is better, the sun at my back.  I do not have to squint.  The water is true blue.  Suddenly, I see an old woman walking toward me.  It seems she is not wearing a top.  Nope, definitely, this woman is not wearing the top to her bathing suit.  I am horribly curious.  As she gets closer, I'm sure I don't want to see and know I won't be able to help myself.  Closer.  Wait a goddamned minute!  That's a man!  He's got titties hanging halfway to his belly button.  I think about the future.

I make it back to the car.  Little time before dinner.

Back at the house, there is concern.  My mother's sister says she is not coming over.  She has been ill, but it is not that.  Maybe she is mad at someone.  Nobody knows.  She's always been like this.  Hillbilly madness.  And there are others who are not coming, too.  Still, there is a full house.  I shower and prepare to eat.  I open the first bottle of wine.  Not so many people are drinking.  Me.

I've got to straighten things out for you here.  My hillbilly player cousin is actually my second cousin, the son of my girl cousin.  Her brother, my boy cousin, has cooked the turkey.  He has children, but only his daughter, a high school senior, is coming. She is bringing her boyfriend.  She is seventeen and trouble.  She is a petite girl who weighs ninety-eight pounds, and she is a little knockout.  She wears a small dress that shows nothing really but suggests everything.  I shouldn't be looking at my cousin's daughter.  That is what I keep telling myself.  Nothing but disaster there.

I eat like crazy.  But the wine is gone.  Who drank the wine?  Still, I cannot bring myself to drink a glass of water.  Player's brother, another second cousin, comes in with his wife.  New wife.  They freak me out a bit.  She has just finished an online degree from a state university in computer programming.  He did not finish high school.  He rarely works.  His wife is a manager of a Walmart.  He likes to sit around and play video games.  And no shit, he tells me that they just featured his 80's game room on CNN.

??????????


"Cockledoodledoo."

I don't care.  I'm sleepy now.  Everyone goes into the living room and sits on the leather forever furniture.  I am falling asleep.  I hear everyone laughing.  Apparently, I keep twitching.  I wonder what is wrong with me.  This is surely what is happening to me in the night.

Then Player's girlfriend comes in.  I open my eyes and see her soon-to-be five-year-old daughter, a toe head who is beautiful.

"Look at you," I say, and she looks at me gruffly.  Nobody talks, so I talk to her.  She is a pip.  She is dramatic.  She is trouble.

"Who are you?" she asks me.

She is contentious.  I am good with kids.  Wonderful, really.  I usually win them over right away.  But this kid is really something.  She picks on me.  Why this, why that.  I give up.  Then she comes over to do my hair.  Her mother does not care for me, I can tell.  She doesn't smile, is sullen.  She yells at her kid a lot.  Don't do that.  Quit it.  What did I tell you?  Bad juju, I think.

They all decide to go to see a second cousin.  No, I say, I will stay here.  I want to read.  The little girl comes up and wants to know where I am staying, where I sleep.  I walk her downstairs.  I ask her if she is coming back.  "No," she says, "we are going home."  "Well, it was awfully good to meet you," I tell her and she grabs my legs and gives me a big hug.  This makes me very sad for some reason, and I am uncertain.  It is dark.  They are all gone.

I realize I still have not had a drink of water.  I pour a scotch.  I will pay for this, I think.  How much and for what is not that unclear.  I keep thinking about the little girl.

"Who are you?"

It is pitch black outside, though it is early.  There is a lot of night ahead.  I don't know.  I don't know.

Travel Day

(photo by Robert Frank)

Riding in my mother's car, the sun shining in the blue blue sky, little traffic in the middle of the day, going drowsy, then putting back the seat and falling asleep.  Suddenly, my hand jerks, does something in a dream and I am awake.  This is what must happen at night, I think, when I come to in the dark.  Here in the car with the sun shining through the windshield, my mother driving her steady fifty-five, I have time to think.  What violent thing brought me back?  It was something I can almost remember.  Saying a few words to my mother, asking if she is doing O.K., dead tired, I fall back to sleep.  The miles hum beneath the car.

I wake when we pull off the interstate.  I want to do bad things.  

"Chick Fillet or Burger King?"  

We see a Wendy's.  No Whopper, but that is O.K.  

A cute, very small Hispanic with schoolgirl English and a heavy accent takes our order.  I get french fries.  She beams into my eyes:

"We just got those in today!"  

What the hell does that mean?  Her eyes are burrowing into mine.  

"What?!" she says with a smile.  

I wrinkle my eyes and shrug.  

The bill comes to $8.00.  O.K.  I am officially a pig.  I had no idea.  I look at my mother.  

"Eight dollars?  Are you kidding?  For two meals?  Shit, I pay that much for bottled water!"  

I feel myself an asshole saying it.  I think about the shoppers at Whole Foods.  I try to eat only organic foods, but I'll admit the people shopping there look no healthier than the people eating at Wendys.  Hormones, pesticides, and antibiotics may not be the big deal we think.  I'm just saying.  Eight dollars.  

Then I see a sign.  The french fries are new that day.  Something different.  They are using sea salt.  I think about the Hispanic girl.  I think she liked me. 

We arrive at my cousin's house.  

"Cockle doodle doo!"  

"What the hell is that!"  

The cousins have chickens in the back yard.  And two roosters.  

"Don't the neighbors say anything?"

"Not yet."  

I ask if they have a hatchet.  

My cousin has a new girlfriend.  He shows me a photograph of her in a sexy pose showing her underwear.  She is as hot as his last one.  What the hell?  How does he do it?  They all look like supermodels and run around with a these violent lowlifes.  What the fuck do I know.  My cousin is working it.  

I take my mother to her sister's house.  Drop her off.  I'm going to the beach.  

I am still tired, my body buzzing with fatigue.  The air is crystal clear and blue and dry.  Everything looks like diamonds.  The whiteness of the sand.  I cannot open my eyes against it.  I take off my shirt, my shoes.  I am fat.  I see some pretty girls.  They do not see me.  I walk and walk.  These are different times.  Every nine year old girl has breasts, hips.  All those Wendy's burgers.  Hormones.  I can't quit looking.  I will be beaten and arrested, I think.  It is odd.  When did this happen?  It is only I who is odd. It is normal to them.   

Mile after mile I walk, the sun low in the afternoon sky.  Everyone is happy, miles of happy people.  My stress is falling away from me, all those problems.  I am not living right, I think.  This is what I used to do and what I used to feel like.  This is that melancholy happiness in which I used to live.  Teenagers on paddle boards, kids building sandcastles, joggers running without shoes.  Yes, oh yes.  

I get back to where I began.  I am sleepy.  I will go to the gym.  

Later, at dinner with the family.  Hamburgers from the grill, macaroni and cheese made from scratch, baked beans.  

My cousin has some medical marijuana from California.  

"Smell this," he exhorts.  It is in big prescription bottles.  I put my nose in and draw it back almost violently. 

"Whew," I say.  It is strong which is why he had me smell it.  

"Hey, man, I've not been sleeping much lately.  Can you hook your cousin up?"  

We talk about life.  He knows the same kind of people I did at his age.  It is bad.  Felons, steroid boys.  Pretty girls destined for things they can't imagine.  My mother and cousins are in playing cards.  It is the night before Thanksgiving.  My cousin is going out to the Turkey Trot, a bar hopping event on the beach.  He does not ask if I want to come.  No, of course not.  He will not be home before four, five.  How will he sleep through the roosters?  I wonder.  I guess he has his ways.

I am writing.  The others are playing cards.  Life won't ever quit being weird.  It just won't.  

Happy Thanksgiving

Crazy, hectic days where you work unconsciously knowing you have more to do than you can do trying to get caught up before the holidays which you are looking forward too so that you can relax, just relax and sleep, and you tell yourself you will eat junk like Whoppers and french fries if you want to and you will do nothing, but it all comes too fast before you have caught up at work and so you know you will have to do some over the holidays which will be spent with your hillbilly relatives anyway though you don't care since they live by the beach and you can always say, "Mom, give me the keys," and she'll do it so you can drive away alone and start to think which is not always the best thing and there on that holiday beach which now seems hollow and empty, you thinking about things you don't wish to think about any more and you become very melancholy remembering how many times before you spent your holidays alone without someone and the wind coming off the water seems to blow right through you, so you head to a good restaurant you know and think you will eat something small and have a drink wishing you had a big bag of Xanax and sleeping pills and maybe some weed, too.

But you don't.

You Must

I've been working on formatting this entry for an hour and can't get it right.  I'm leaving it alone as it is.  I've tried everything I can think of.  A mess. 

I love this sort of thing:

"The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code." 

(Donna J. Haraway, "Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature"}

It sounds fascinating.  It reveals the power of language.  It reveals power.  It cuts both ways.  I always love "must" statements.  It is a tremendous word, "must."  I like it best, though, when it is used to impute rather than command, as in "You must be an idiot."  Orders just make me break out.  But perhaps Haraway is using the word as a synonym for "ought" or "should."  I might not have noticed the statement, though, if she said "should" rather than "must."  We need the next sentence, of course, to understand.  Must in order to what?  Oh, that in order to what is where the fistfight breaks out.  But who cares to fight with a cyborg?  Not me.  No thank you.  You must be an idiot to do that.  

Don't get me wrong about this.  I like Haraway's work with the metaphoricity of science.  I believe in it wholeheartedly.  I believe in the metaphoricity of just about everything.  And it weighs on my consciousness all the time.  It is why I am not so very fun to argue with.  I don't argue the point so much as the language used to express it.  Slippery stuff.  Best not to put too much stock in it.  Gets you into too much trouble.  E. E. Cummings knew.

Cats and Rocking Chairs

"My mind is full of nothing but cats and rocking chairs" (Ryan Adams).  

The full moon kept me awake.  That is what I will tell myself.  But it is probably too much or the lack of stimulation.  Whatever.

Last night I made a fish stew.  Interesting.  It was good, I think.  Healthy.  Onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, and stewed tomatoes, 3/4s bottle of left over white wine, then a pound of scallops and two pounds of fish.  My mother and I ate it and then had seconds.  I still have about two pounds of stew left.

I had a nice surprise when I came around to my front door Sunday.  I hadn't been there for some time, I guess.  A package lay on the doorstep.  It was from Amazon.  I didn't remember ordering a book, but I order things that are out of stock all the time, so maybe. . . .  Inside, I opened it and saw "Life" by Keith Richards.  I hadn't ordered that though I've looked for it in the bookstores.  It was from Q.  Why am I not as thoughtful as that?

The holidays are here.  I will buy myself something this year.  Maybe two.  Oh, yes. . . I should probably buy something for you.

Sometimes the brain will not work when you sit down to write.  But I have music playing in the background.  I can't write to music.  That must be it.

Here is another portrait of a young girl.  Best things.

An Old Note in a Book Somewhere

It is odd.  I was in the library at the Country Club College and found a faded note on a scrap of paper in the index of an old book of literary criticism that probably had not been opened for years.  The book smelled of disuse, the pages yellowed and dry, the spine worn, the threads beginning to loosen.

"Tomorow [sic] night the full moon. . . and you will be with me.  We will sit by the lake and watch the moon rise and drink that bottle of wine Mary gave to you.  And this will be the night.  You promised.  Don't think of changing your mind.  Not on a full moon." 

What was supposed to happen, I wonder?  And why was the note left in the book and not delivered?  Was this a girl writing to a boy or vice versa?  I think about it tonight, for tomorrow night is a full moon.  The Beaver Moon, of all things.  I will write a note tonight and leave it in a book for someone to find.  I will begin writing a series of them and place them in books all over imagining the curiosity of the people who will read them.  Perhaps we all should do it.  What fun we might provide.

The photo is of the young model in her mother's wedding dress.  Reminds me of a Whistler.

Sad Songs

Someone sent me the email that follows.  Why?  Do I inspire this?  Perhaps I shouldn't recommend sad songs so often.  It is just that I love those sweet desultory things.


"Nights when you hurt so bad, you just want to be held. . . .  It's been so long.  You haven't kept count.  On purpose.  A Friday night.  Another dinner alone.  You know where you can go to eat and not feel so bad or be embarrassed.  Sushi, of course.  You choose the little fish restaurant that started so well and has fallen to hell.  Even there, the couples come holding hands, kissing at the car.  You can see it all.  You sit outside.  You are a freak, you think, an oddly shaped dog on the horizon, something outside the pack.  The moon is almost full.  The sun down, there is just the smell of moisture on the quickly cooling air.  Everyone gets served.  But you.  Finally, aching with humility, you tell the waitress you think they've lost your order.  Minutes later a lukewarm dinner comes out.  If you felt better, you'd ask for your money back, but you do not feel better.  You do not feel good at all.  For a minute, you are consumed by something outside yourself, another couple's conversation, an old Beach Boys song.  When you become aware of yourself again, it is terrible.  You are a moron, you know, feeling the emotions of others.  Empathy, you tell yourself, but you know it is fantasy. You shovel in the desultory meal trying not to chew too much so as not to feel the awful texture of the lukewarm fish.  This is what you get, you think.  This is what everything you've ever done has brought you to.  It's not all my fault, you tell yourself.  I was born wrong.  If I'd been born better, things would have been different.  Remember all the times you were struck by lightening, you say almost aloud, the way you sing along with a familiar song in a crowd.  What was that?  You try to think of something else.  You think about the article you read that morning, the one about the discovery of the first planet beyond our galaxy, beyond the Milky Way. The sun was interesting, they reported, full of metals.  It had already exploded, had already expanded and burned up the planets, but not this one.  It was like Jupiter, and somehow it survived.  How do they know this, you wonder?  Then you are by yourself again, the kind of person who eats alone and thinks about scientific articles in the New York Times.  There are worse things, you tell yourself.  Lots.  You look around at all the couples, some leaning together over dinners that are probably warm, others together so long they hardly speak.  You begin to feel your deficiencies.  There are bars, but they are not for you.  You think about churches.  You've never been able to stand them, but now you think of them and their socials, and you begin to understand.  Safety.  They were safe harbor.  People could go to a church dance on a Friday night and not need to be afraid.  No fights would break out.  Nobody would get killed.  It was a gentle, sweet time.  Finally, after so many, many years, you begin to understand.  Hello brother Leroy, they would say, how are you on this fine Friday evening.  Fine, you would say, and nobody would mock you.  Perhaps there would be a fish fry, the fish hot and just out of the oil.  Some corn.  A piece of cornbread.  At another table they might be carving pig.

The lukewarm meal is finished, you realize, sitting, looking, thinking.  I've done a lot.  I've done more than most, you think, sitting without purpose, without direction, without. . . . Perhaps tomorrow I will get a facial, you think, and after that an hour and a half massage.  Yes, I will.  I deserve that, you think.  But I'd better get home and drink some whiskey now.  That fish wasn't cooked well.  Whiskey.  That will fix you up."

Phenomenon

I'm still trembling.  Tonight I shot with a phenomenon.  I almost didn't.

My work is getting around enough now that models contact me to shoot.  For some reason that I can't figure out, though, I get a lot of girls who are minors.  Not eighteen.  Classic trouble.  You know the show on television where the perverted reporter pretends to be a good deed doer and busts pedophiles on video.  You know the show.  Everyone does.  Minors.

I put them off.  It is not me, I promise.  It is the thought of everything that can go wrong and the inevitable consequences of that.  O.K.  O.K.  It is me (I know it is supposed to be "It is I," but it sounds awful in both places).  I am the problem.

So this girl contacts me.  She is sixteen.  But man. . . the pictures in her portfolio kill me.  I write her.  Are you sure you've looked at the stuff I am doing?  Your parents?  Oh, yes, she says, I love them, and my mother loves them, too.

?????????

I put her off some more.  I ask her what she wants to shoot with me.  Again, I say, you've seen my work.  She writes back about some improbable country scene with a milk can, her hair in pigtails, etc.  Definitely sixteen.  Maybe twelve.  I don't do that sort of thing, I tell her.  There are lots of photographers who would jump at the chance to do that, but I'm not one.  I need themes, moods, atmospheres.  I need narrative lines and conflict.  You know, all the stuff of art.

But man. . . that portfolio.  I think she is capable of being a big-time model.  What do I know about such things, but that is what I think.  And I begin to figure. . . it sure would be good to have made photos with her later, etc.  Do you have a prom dress, I ask.  It is a simple shoot.  It will take only half an hour or so, I say.

She agrees.  Her mother will come and sign the release.

I'm nervous all day.  Like sick.  Like I need to go to the bathroom.  What the fuck have I agreed to?  You know.  I'll do something.  I'll be in trouble.  I'll go to prison.

We are to shoot at six-thirty.  I go to dinner beforehand.  Sushi.  Something light, I think.  And sake.  Settle the nerves.  But I always have a whiskey after sushi to kill the worms.  So I cross the street to a bar I've never been to, a new, expensive seafood place.  The bar is nice.  I order a McCallum twelve year.  Oooo.  It makes me feel warm.  After the sake, it is good.  But I jump up.  I've got to shoot!

I get back to my studio, only a few blocks.  I turn on music.  I wait.  Six-thirty.  Six-thirty-five.  I knew they wouldn't come.  Nope.  She probably was driving herself and got lost.  Her mother doesn't even know, I think.  I hope she doesn't come.

The phone rings.  It is the mother.  They are a bit lost.  Easy to do since I am in a crack neighborhood.  Most decent people just get scared and loose their bearings.  I wave them in.

Holy shit!  This girl is unbelievable.  And there is her mother rushing ahead between us.  I am a little drunk, I think.  I have to be careful.

"Hi, I'm ________, and this is my daughter, _______________."  My head is swirling.

"Here, let me help you cary that."

Inside I ask them to sit down.  I don't ask if they want a drink.  I won't be having one myself.   It is the only way.  Talk, talk.  Here, I say, let me show you some of what we will do.  I pull out prints and explain things.  The daughter is blank as I talk.  I am talking to mom.  They have brought a wedding dress.  It is mom's.  How old were you when you got married, I ask.  She avoids the question.  Eventually I find out she was married when she was thirty-nine.  Her daughter is the oldest of three.  What?  Started late, she says.

It is quaint, the daughter in the mother's wedding dress.  But I have to admit--she looks like something.

Mom signs the consent form.  The daughter, she confesses, is only fifteen.  She lied to get her into an agency.  FIFTEEN!  The girl is only fifteen!  I get one of the painters from the studios behind me to witness.  All is good.

"O.K." I say, "let's just get you out of those clothes."

No, I don't say that.  I'm just afraid I did.

I explain to her what I want.  No, I don't.  It is not that profound.  I explain how I want her to bend her body.  She does.  Oh, shit.  I can't believe her.  There can't be anything going on in her other than the instinct to pose.  Her mother tells me she is home schooled.  I ask how long it takes to do the work each day.  Oh, about an hour.

We shoot very, very slowly.  In two hours, I take only forty pictures.  Forty Polaroids.  I have never seen anything like them before but with Sarah Moon or Paolo Roversi.  I can't believe my luck.

"I almost didn't shoot with you," I say.

"Why?" her mother asks.

"I didn't want to go to jail."

Her mother laughs.

"Now, though. . . I don't even care."

This is the first time I've ever seen anything like this.  We are tired.  It is over.  After she changes, I pick up my digital camera and shoot some snapshots.

It is done.  I hope not.

A Simple Idea

It was a simple idea.  I would photograph people where they lived.  I don't want to make an "artist's statement" here, but I would show people in their places.  Documentary style  It would be fun.  I would break out of what I've been doing for so long and begin to do what I used to do again.  With strangers.

Monday morning, early, I packed my cameras into the car with a ton of film.  35mm, 120mm.  I had about an hour's drive, I guessed.  I said I would be there at eight. The sun was just coming up.  The world looked strange from the interstate to me.  I'm not usually driving about this time of day.  There was dew.  The air was hollow.  Crossing the bridge over the big river, looking out into the giant lake it formed, the palms and scrub shining.  I don't want to do this, I thought.  I was getting nervous.  I wanted to be at home, drinking coffee, reading the news.  I was going to photograph someone in her place.  It was taking me out of mine.  Where was I going? I wondered.  No place.

Off the interstate, traffic slowed.  People going to work.  Lots of them.  I was driving through an old, beat up part of town.  1950's, sort of.  I crossed some railroad tracks and found her apartment complex.  It looked O.K.

The door opened.  Hello.  Hello.  She was skinny.  Really skinny.  And she had tattoos all over.  Short hair, sleepy.  "Is this too early."  She went back to bed.  I followed.

The first minutes were awful.  I shot with medium format rangefinder.  After a few minutes, I realized the lens cap was on.  I switched to a Leica.  I thought that it was loaded with film.  I was wrong.  I picked up another medium format camera, an old Bronica.  The film advance broke.  I said nothing to her about any of it.  This was a disaster.

Finally, I got film into working cameras.  Now what?  She sat up in bed, opened the blinds.  Not much light.

"I thought you were from east Europe," I said.

"Lots of people think that.  It is my cheekbones."

"No, no, I read it somewhere."

"Nope.  I was born and grew up here."

I looked around. The place was a mess.  It looked like a boys dorm room.  There was a littered desk with a picture of Anais Nin, a typewriter, an open journal, some photographs.

"Who's this?" I asked pointing to a photo.

"That's my girlfriend.  She just left for work.  This is her place.  I just moved in two weeks ago."

"Girlfriend girlfriend?'

"Yea. There's another girl living here in the other bedroom."  I could hear a little dog barking behind the door.

She sat at the desk.  She sat on the floor.  We went down to the kitchen to make coffee.

"I can't smoke in the house.  I'm going out for a second."

The day had turned warm.  The apartment was getting stuffy.  I asked her to tell me her story while she smoked.

"I used to weigh over two hundred pounds. When I was in high school.  The first time I had sex, I was fourteen.  With a boy.  It wasn't much fun.  When I was fifteen, an older girl seduced me at a party one night.  She was eighteen.  I liked that.  One night, I was staying with my best friend and I kissed her.  I was the aggressor.  We made love, but we never talked about it after that.  We never did it again.

"I kept dating boys through high school.  I quit eating and got a tattoo.  My parents were mad, hated it.  Boys were easy.  I could get them any time.  I was going with girls, but I didn't tell anyone for a long time.  When I came out to my parents, they were appalled.  But they got used to it and my tattoos.  My mother is going to get one now.

"I still go out with guys once in a while, but I prefer girls.  I don't like big things, hairy things.  I like delicate things.  I like the way girls smell, the way they kiss.  They don't stick their tongues down your throat and drool all over.  Boys are predictable.  They kiss you, then they stick their tongue in your ear, then they mall your breast and pinch and bite your nipples.  They're on top of you and they are big and heavy.

"My favorite thing is turning girls.  I like to go out to clubs and pick up straight girls and turn them.  I like to take them out and pay for dinners and drinks.  I like being in control."

The apartment was small.  There were not many places to go.  I realized I was listening more than shooting.  I'd been there two hours.  There is a natural rhythm to things, a beginning, a middle, and an end.  We had run our course.  We were finished.  It was time for me to go.

Hope and Fear

I step outside to see the Leonid sky.  Falling stars, up to twenty each minute.  I want to make a wish.  Many. It is the season for wishes, but the sky is cloudy.  I need some luck, I whisper, turning to see if there is anyone to hear.  Nothing stirs.  The damp coolness gives me a shiver.  What possible hope can there be, I wonder, on such a starless, damp night.

I will wait.  Tomorrow night, there will be more shooting stars than this.  And the next.  How long can the clouds keep out hope?  But the fear comes on me.  Hope and Fear.  What was that carved onto Caravaggio's knife?

Left Undone

Each day, I think to do things.  Each day, I don't.  I make lists, encyclopedias of them.  I may do one.  And then I get used to the things unattended.  And that they remain.  I live like a shut in lately, a catatonic who can only go where he must, wound up and pointed in a direction.  I manage things, but not many.  I ache and am weepy.  These blue skies wash over me and through me.  I am enervated.  Then the shades turn pale, the shadows grow darker, the music more melancholy than before.  A gut-string guitar.  I am molecules and this is music.

Listen

Sun Kil Moon.  Listen.  Kill me on a soft autumn night, blackness only half-lit by partial moon.  I kick around Slocum's solitude .  A party somewhere close by to which I am invited but cannot attend, a lost great love somewhere near, too, to whom I've not spoken for a year, more.  Another, an email.  Two.  Two loves.  Three.  Only me, though, and this, this and the whiskey in the glass at my wrist that whisks me away far and near, there and back, magic on a velvet night.  I am old again, I am young.  How much melancholy required in an average life?  Like passion, more for some than for others.  We imagine.  Things felt, things lost.  Tonight, though, events as tiny as the tides of small lakes loom large.  A romantic heart. Whose?  Sun Kil Moon.  Listen.

I Make This Up

I look at the photograph of this woman--a photograph of anyone--and wonder what goes on in her head, in her life.  We all do, of course.  It is a stupid statement.  Who is she, though?  What is her home like?  Is she happy?  Last night, did she go out or stay home?  Children?  Etc.

I do it with people I meet, too.  So do you, I guess.  The man or woman at the bank who helps you start a new account.  The way he wears his tie, his shoes, the faint lines just beginning to form around her eyes.  They all tell stories.  It is that and the way a person doesn't respond to something you say.  Too personal?  Not friendly?  I do say surprising things in order to better size them up.

I imagine their personal lives, so far from the truth.  And yet, I think, we (I) shape our actions and our lives based on these imagined truths.  We do it even if we never watch a movie or read a story about a movie star.  We need these imaginative offerings of our imaginations.

The time change has goofed me up.  I have been overly-tired all week.  In the mornings, I wake too early and lie in bed trying to enjoy it.  I drift in and out, sometimes thinking, sometimes dreaming.  The dreaming part surprises me.  The dreams are always things I wouldn't think, yet there they are.  It makes me wonder about the show that goes on that I do not remember.  In these waking dreams, I have conversations with people, making them up, creating their responses.  It sounds like them.  It looks like them.  It is disorienting.  This morning looking at this woman's photograph, I wonder how much I (we) make up even the people I do know?  And how does that affect what we expect?  Do we dream even our lovers into unexpected roles?

And so I scare myself with this morning's missive, wondering now just what it is I don't invent, wondering about what I think is real.  Maybe the more imaginative ones of us are doomed to having more difficult times with the people we know than do others.

I blame it on the time change.  I'll be better next week, I am certain.  Otherwise, it is probably better not to think about it.

Certified Artist

(For all appearances, this is neither Paltrow nor a Certified Artist)

I just watched a clip of Gwyneth Paltrow singing at the Country Music Awards.  It doesn't look like her, though.  What happened?  It confuses me as much as it did when everyone said that Paul McCartney had died and the Beatles were substituting a look-alike.  I'm not sure if anyone has ever determined if this is the same Paul McCartney that started with the Beatles or not.  Perhaps Paul simply took a break for awhile and they did use a stand-in.  But what about Paltrow?  That is not the same woman.  Something is going on.  Let the rumors begin.

I read this morning, too:

"As SoHo’s iron-boned, sprawling lofts became gold mines over the past two decades, co-op boards, banks, brokers and the city itself winked at a rule requiring that they be reserved for working artists.

But over the last year or so, something odd began to occur: people started paying attention to the rule.

At 158 Mercer Street, for example, one buyer who offered $8.2 million, the asking price, for a loft several months ago backed out after his lawyer warned him about the artist requirement.

The story continues:  

The sellers’ broker, Jan Hashey, cut the price to $6.9 million but found no takers, and three other apartments in the 22-unit building have been for sale for more than three months, even though the building has the requisite star power: among the residents is Jon Bon Jovi (a certified artist, to boot).

“At these prices, buyers’ attorneys are very loath to advise people to put that kind of investment into something that’s limited,” said Ms. Hashey, who is also a certified artist. “It’s like a lien on the property.”

How do you get to be a certified artist?  I want the license.  Any of you, please tell me how to apply.

Two of my images from "Lonesomeville" are hanging in a group show that opened last night.  It is the first time any of them have been displayed.  They look magnificent.  To me, at least. As I remember, they are the only depraved pieces in the show.  They are big.  The images are 32" x 26".  With the matting and frames, they look huge.  I priced them at $900 each.  That is what the gallery insured them for, so I am hoping for a fire or a theft, as good as a sale.  They will be reified.  Perhaps, then, I can be considered a certified artist!

I Imagine a Blog. . .

I have imagined the blog of one of the models I wrote about yesterday, an entry in which she talks about the photographers she has worked with.  Some of them are professional and make their living at it.  Some want to be, but are only making extra money charging young models too much to shoot some head shots for their portfolios and doing the occasional wedding.  Some work in camera shops and some are just guys with cameras who want to take photographs of girls.  Some. . . she just doesn't know.  Some of the photographers are very nice, some nervous, some confident, and some just creeps.  The worst are the ones who think they are something.  They fall in love with you and want to take you on a date.  No, there are worse.  She once went on a shoot where the photographer asked if he get get naked, too, while they worked.  Some photographers have interesting ideas, some ridiculous ones.  There are young guys and old guys, but mostly old guys.  She shoots with some for money and with some for more money.  Some guys don't have studios and take you to locations.  Some have "home" studios.  Some give her beautiful prints and some can barely managed to send a CD with un-retouched images.  It is all just very, very weird.

And so I understand all the photographs of dilapidated, empty urban streets or empty suburban lawns.  I may take up macro-photography in order to avoid everything.  I'll make pictures of flowers that are incredibly sharp and have tremendous color.  I'll buy a macro ring flash and all all the gadgets.  Anything other than what I am doing now.  It is all troublesome.

In truth, though, I have had a swell time.  I've met some very wonderful and interesting people.  We tend to get along.  I wrote to one of them yesterday to see if she would work on the next project with me.  She wrote back a terrible tale of woe.  I responded with a long missive consoling and encouraging her.  But being what I am, I also asked if I could use her email.  She said sure, of course.  And she agreed that I should come over and shoot with her anyway.  There are many great people in the world.  You just have to look.

"Hi,

You are not going to believe this, but one of my implants ruptured. Don't have the money right now to have it fixed! Trying to break the other one, they are both warrantied, all I have to pay for is the anesthesiologist. I'll hold out a little longer.  I'm sure I'll get it fixed eventually, the ruptured one has done this 4 times prior and the left one 3 times. I swear to God what else?

Been seeing the cardiologist, found out I have cardiomyopathy.  Glad I found out now, think my heart is getting ready to burst, literally.  Had to leave the gym early today, get so dizzy. Been telling the dr. for 1 1/2 years I've been feeling like I'm going to have a heart attack, I thought it was the medicine. Tomorrow I go for a six hour test, think there is something else wrong, possibly blockage. Getting more life insurance today, some for the family up north, they all used to live such a good life, work is scarce up there and my mom and dad live on SS. My kids are splitting 90,000 plus not sure what I'm getting today, probably another 100k. Enough to spread around for all of them. I'm really freaked out, but I've known for a long time and in the last 3 weeks 911 has been here once and almost twice! Thank God, Casey came in when she did and the other night I wasn't alone.  On to brighter subjects.

I'm glad to hear you are working again and you know if these things were not going on now, I would love to work with you again anytime. Maybe somehow we can work something out! Let me know if you have any ideas.

Hope all is good!"

The Kindness of Strangers

I never planned to work with models when I started.  I wanted to shoot people off the street the way I always had.  When I got the studio, I thought to meet them and ask them in where I would make pictures of them, just portraits of strangers.  But way led to way, and I started a project that used the technique I had developed for Polaroid film.  And that gave me ideas.

Ideas are dangerous, of course.  First you have them, then they have you.  They take over and begin to live your life for you.  Or so it now seems.  And that is how I began to work with "models."

The models were strangers to me, too, so I felt the same thrill I always had working in the street.  Maybe not the same thrill.  I don't wish to mislead.  But nervous excitement nonetheless.  A stranger walks in, you go through the weird first minutes, explain what you will be doing, size up the person, etc.  Nothing is ever as it seems and everything is a surprise.

The "models" who show up are "models" in many different manifestations.  Some actually make a living at it, working for agencies, shooting for features in magazines and newspapers and for advertising agencies.  Some only supplement their incomes by modeling, often doing promotional work.  Some are new at it and want to do agency work.  Some might, I guess (I am no judge of this) and most won't.  Some come and are just living a dream life getting images of themselves for posterity.  Some are totally delusional.  Some are visual artist who model for others and have no other aspirations.  Some are athletes or yoga instructors or dancers.  Some. . . I haven't a clue.

It doesn't matter to me what they look like.  I am not going for an idealized image of humans.  I am not advertising anything.  I don't need to sell a product.  So for me, they are all wonderful people, collaborators helping me make a story.  The working models have their own ideas and position their bodies in expert and practiced ways.  At first I have to tell them, "no, that is too modern, too sexy."  They laugh and tell me they've never had a photographer tell them to quit being sexy before.  But they get it quickly and begin making the awkward poses that go against everything they know.  In truth, I can only control them for awhile, and when I run out of ideas, I let them do what they do and get a sort of thrill watching them practice their craft.  And often enough, I use one or two of the images.

Others of the models are not so practiced and are truly awkward.  Often, this is great.  For me.  But as I peel the Polaroids and lay them on the table, I sometimes feel a great let down in them, for the pictures are not the sexy, flattering things they had hoped for.  "Oh, these will be great," I tell them, "just what I'm going for.  Don't worry.  Wait until you see the final product."  And it is true, but I hate those sad moments and try to make some pretty images that I can lay out on the table.

The way I work is slow.  Really slow.  We may take forty pictures in two hours.  This, of course, leads to a lot of talking.  I tend to ask many questions about who they are.  I have always been fascinated by other people's lives.  Eventually, a story of them emerges for me, perhaps not very accurate in the larger version of who they are, but something that suits me.  And when we have finished shooting and they pack up their things and leave, I am happy I got to meet them.  Every time.  Of course since I live with their images, I think of them and the stories they told again and again.  I have established a relationship of a kind.  One in which they do not really partake, you know, since when they leave, the only time they will think about me is when they realize I have not sent them the pictures I had promised.  Obviously, we are not sharing the same relationship with the other.

Still, almost all of them want to work together again, and often enough, we do.  For that reason, I am able to avoid any paranoia about my talent or my personality.

Sort of.  There is a fear that is not paranoia but normal and natural fear that either the images do not say what I want them to or that they do but others don't see it.  I doubt that most of the models I work with do.  I say that only because the work they show me which they've done with other photographers are cliches, pretty things done with technical skill, images a viewer can look at without challenge.  Often enough, I envy the technical things I see.  I am working with cliches, too, of course, but I hope in a very self-aware and ironic way.  But these are not ironic times, for irony is subtle and the public taste now favors more overt sarcasm, and if the ironic point of what I am doing is lost, the images I make are very susceptible to the other.  There is that, and there is the fear I have, too, of indulging myself in this image making and dressing up and prancing about like children.  To what end?  As Matthew Arnold proposed, to educate and delight?

As the last project ended, I was weary of it all.  I was silly, I thought, to have spent so much time and energy on that while so many things in my life went neglected.  I didn't want anything to do with any of it any more.  For months, I thought about growing up again (I had once) and getting on with the serious business of life.  But a notion began to take form insisting on articulation.  All those stories I'd heard had great merit, I thought.  They need to be told.  And I thought, "I'm the fellow to do it."

The project took hold.  And I have. . . very tentatively. . . begun.  I will tell you about it after I have worked on it enough to know that I will be able to sustain the force I need to see it through.  It is both exciting and enervating at once, for it requires much on my part.  And I wonder if I have that much left in the tank.  Even if I do, though, I don't know if I have enough talent to tell the bat shit crazy stories I hear.  And as always, other commitments (like paying the mortgage, buying groceries and gas and electricity. . . and cameras and lenses and films) leave me little time.

But I have embarked.  Now I will depend, as Blanche Dubois so wonderfully said it, upon the kindness of strangers.

Crazy Times

I don't know what happened.  There was an election in which everybody lost. . . and then things turned around.  I know it is a momentary convergence, but here is the news this morning at five o'clock a.m. Eastern Standard Time:

* The assistant Attorney General in Michigan who has been harassing the openly gay student body president at the University of Michigan was fired by the Attorney General who only weeks ago said that his employee was only exercising his right to free speech.

* The city of San Francisco is expected to approve a ban on McDonald's Happy Meals today.

* Scientists collided ions together in the Large Hadron Collider to produce conditions that eventually could lead to recreating the conditions of the Big Bang (you know, the two trillion degree above absolute zero soup that contains quarks and gluons).

* Scientists have been able to convert skin into blood.  One day, doctors may be able to take a small patch of your skin and make blood with your own DNA for transfusions.

* High tech, low cost injections without needles is just around the corner.

* A nutritionist lost twenty-seven pounds on a Twinkies diet.  He ate other junk food, too.  Not only did he lose weight, but his bad cholesterol count lowered while his good cholesterol count went up.

* A female contestant on Wheel of Fortune solved the puzzle "I've got a good feeling about this" with only the letter "l".

Really, quite an amazing day.  There was more, but I don't know what to make of it yet.  Keith Olberman will be back on the air despite contributing to political campaigns, something he derided FOX news for and which is against his company's policy.  There was also a story that explains that girls are thirty percent more likely to engage in "risky" behavior the first time they have sex than are boys.  I'm trying to do that math on that one thinking it should be equal.  Let me know if you figure it out.  And finally, 884 people were arrested in a crackdown on child prostitution.  Seattle, Detroit, and Nashville were the big offenders, though Minneapolis was involved as well.  Seems there were a lot of Somali girls involved.  What did I tell you about Minneapolis just a few days ago?

It is early.  I just was astonished by this.  And it is all on CNN.  I haven't even gotten to the New York Times yet!

You Come Too

First off, let me suggest you go to the New York Times to view this photo essay.  The images have good resolution, so view it full screen.  They were shot with a medium format film camera.  Very nice.

I have made some tentative steps toward beginning my next project.  It is sort of documentary.  Sort of documentary?  We'll see.  It is at least sort of documentary.  It gets me out of the house.  There is that.  It takes me places. I see things.  And I get to do all that thinking on the drive home.  I have been a shut in for too long.  I must get out some way and explore the world again.  Just for me.  But, as Robert Frost invited us so long ago, "You come too."

Melancholy

Melancholy, a deep, pensive, and long-lasting sadness.  Given to gloom and depression.  

" Melancholy . . .  goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed." (Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy).  

Is it genetic, or is it habit?  If we change the way we stand, the way we sit, the way we hold our mouths and eyes, can we change our humor?  

Better an image, perhaps.  The puck of melancholy, masked, mysterious in the dark velvet gloom.