Neglected Things

Exhausted.  I've not had a day to myself in a month.  I want a month of days to myself.  Wake up in the dark, panicked by nightmares that are thoughts of all the things I've left undone.  They begin to multiply like the Mickey's mops in "Fantasia" (something that has affected and influenced my dreams in terrible ways since I saw it as a child) and to grow in stature.  I wake heart racing, gulping for air.  Without thinking I will rise, my body jerks upright, feet on the floor, my head just beginning to understand what I am doing, that I am awake again long before sunrise.  I look forward to the quiet time, the coffee, but it is no way to awaken.  I must take care of neglected things.

I just Googled "neglected things" to see if I would find a poem.  What I found was a phrase--"the beauty of neglected things."  They are wonderful to find.  Treasures.  Someone else's things.  But not your own.

I will find no treasures today, I am fairly certain.  I will be lucky if I can scan a good number of images and cook them up for viewing.  My dining room table is littered with them, piles and piles of sleeved Polaroids.  The disappearing, extinct kind.

But last night, I stumbled upon some promising news.  There is a New 55 project.  A group of people in Massachusetts is working to make a new Polaroid 55 film.  I can't tell if they have had any success or not, but there are some people who are working with Fuji films in strange new ways, ways that have a certain dark appeal to me.  I will experiment this weekend with what I learned last night and see if there might not be a dark new photo future for me.

I will say this, though.  Polaroid was stupid in handling its instant film division and malicious in not letting anyone know the secrets of their Land formulas so that someone else could produce the film.  It is like owning the secret formula for an antibiotic, then halting production without allowing anyone else do it. No, it is not.  But it is like something.