The Weirdness and the Jealousy

It is very odd to me how lonesome it is posting with comments turned off. It is like living too long alone. You become weird (living alone, I mean). I've lived alone a lot in my life, but one year I was REALLY alone. Didn't have a single date. It was zen-like at first, but my house is not a monastery and there were too many worldly distractions for me to feel at peace sometimes. The weirdness showed on Mondays when I went to work. After speaking to no one Friday, Saturday, and Sunday except to say things like, "I'll have the turkey sandwich" or "Fine, and you?" my ability to communicate had become awkward. During the weekend, I'd become spooky. And all my motions would slow down. It would take forever to complete a simple task.

Really, all I needed was the occasional human body in the other room reading a book or writing a letter. I didn't need constant companionship, just the occasional word. Not connection but the ability to connect.

I am not much of a networker. I still haven't reconciled the need to be anonymous and the desire to be known. As a result, I find out about everything just after it has happened. I found out about a bunch of places I should have submitted work this weekend at the workshop. "Next year you should. . . . " I won't remember. And photographers are good about putting up announcements on their sites about submission dates that are just about expired. So much of that is about connections.

But I can't stand it. Yesterday, I was talking to a friend, a photographer who told me he had some work going up in a good gallery downtown. When he told me, I felt the shock of adrenaline shoot through me and about five of the deadly sins become active. Goddamnit, I thought, I have to start getting my stuff about. I knew he knew that when he told me, knew the internal turmoil it would provoke. He was so high-toned about it all. His delivery slowed just perceptibly with the pause between words just milliseconds longer, the vowels drawn out, chewed up, thought about. Motherfucker. I wanted to tear something up.

"I have this photo of the little creek that runs through Jensen's Woods that I took with the WideLux in the early morning. . . ." Blah blah blah blah blah. He said it with such authority as if it meant anything. How do they do it, I wondered? How do they talk about their own photographs like that?

Really, it all embarrasses me. I can only apologize for what I do. It is a self-indulgence of no importance whatsoever. That is what I think if someone asks me about it. And yet. . . shit, I want them to be seen.

And that is how it is here alone in the cafe just now. I want to be left alone and I want to be famous, loved and celebrated. Stupid.

Yet people still come to make pictures with me. I laugh out loud in embarrassment and profess that I don't really know what I'm doing, wanting to separate myself from geeky men with cameras somehow standing there a geeky man with a camera in his hand. And then I'll peel apart a Polaroid and something will please me and I'll yell and I'll jump around and know I've got something and the tension and the stress begin to fall away and the people I am working with will like it too, so I'll swing them around and hoot and grin and say, "C'mon, c'mon, let's make some more."

And I like the pictures, too, though I know that if you could comment, I'd become embarrassed and ashamed and like them much less. I'd feel a compulsion to show something else, something other than what I am doing now. But I miss you all. It is odd not having a body in the other room.