The Competition

 

I'm not sleeping.  I've started waking at four a.m. again.  I'm not eating well.  I've quit cooking and am dining from take out counters and frozen boxes and cans.  I drink too much coffee during the day and too much alcohol at night.  I know, I know. . . this isn't consistent with what I wrote in the last few days.  Do you come here for consistency?  A blog fluctuates like the life of a mind.  But look at the competition.  I have this morning.  Not competition, really.  These are blogs of famous writers and musicians.  There is one from Mark Spitz who has just published "Jagger," a biography of Mick.  Here is the link.  Remember, this is a fellow who has made a living his entire life writing for national publications.  You may enjoy it.  And I read that Sinead O'Connor has her own blog, too.  Let's see if she is able to post every day.  And neither of them are putting up their own photographs, let alone ones that take hours and hours to produce.  And unlike them, every day I go to the factory.

I'm not tooting my horn.   I'm just sayin'.

But there are more of you every week.  I think the value of my blog has doubled since The Huffington Post was sold for millions of dollars.  Mine may be worth hundreds more now.  Not that I've had any offers.  I'm just letting any potential buyers know.  This could be a franchise, I think.  Big potential for someone with a business head.

CC sent me the photo that follows.  Yes, I'm still feeling like Lee Marvin or at least Kid Shelleen from "Cat Ballou."

Feeling Like Lee Marvin

Opening Credits

(open in a separate page so you can read the blog)

A day.  Quite.  The factory gets more Draconian just when you think it can't.  No use in telling until I become a tragic hero.  Then. . . and only then.

Tonight, I went for a run.  It was reminiscent of old runs when I felt good and healthy.  A night, I say, sweaty and tired, walking home in the twilight.  I was not as hungry as before and knew I would not require as many drinks.  Brain chemicals. . . ahhh.  I ran a marathon before crushing my big toe, and I have not really run five miles at a time since.  I am trying to stretch it out to three just now.  I lie.  Less.  I run against time, imagining the sidewalk to be a treadmill that pulls the past back to me.  Minutes.  Days.  Weeks.  Run.  Run.

So feeling better tonight, I took my time, cooked, called my mother, ate.  I watched "Entourage" and and saw what my life is lacking.  Filled with endorphins and whiskey, I say I'll change.

The closing credits overlaid with a song I don't know.  I like it.  Google it.  Abbe May.  I listen to much of her music, and it is very good.  You should, too.

Whiskey.  Ice Cream.  A few good emails.  Life has potential.  I have an attitude.  I am set.

Closing Credits.

Hurricane Perry

As this last hurricane shows, we are not prepared.  It wasn't even a hurricane when it hit land, and still the estimate is one billion dollars in damage.  People died.  It was a media circus.

So what happens when Perry wins?  I am not prepared.  But I will prepare.  How?  What do I need to stock up and store?  I need a shelter, that is certain.  I would run away, but I've looked about after telling my friends that the world must think us buffoons to have the likes of Perry, Palin, Bachman, et. al., and everywhere I look. . . there are buffoons.  Maybe the fundamentalists are right.  Maybe these are End Times.  It will be if CNN has its way.  It makes great viewing.

I started a photo essay years ago called "Last Days" that I didn't continue.  I do that a lot.  But my answer for years to just about everything is, "it's the end of the world."  Everybody knows that.  I almost like the phrase "End Times," though I would rather have it be "The End of Time."  That would be better.

But End Times is what we have, and we will have to live with it, though it confuses me why Jesus was only concerned with Jews and never mentioned Moslems.  But listen, I am no Biblical scholar.  I barely know this stuff at all.  Most of my knowledge of it comes from literature, especially Milton.  "Paradise Lost" is not much of a handbook, but it sure explains things much better.

Now Perry is an End Times fellow.  The others are, too, but I think if you are a fundamentalist, you have to favor the fellow, though I imagine there are reformed fundamentalists who believe in women's rights as long as they don't go too far.  Still, I'd have to give the advantage to that crazed masculinity of Perry.  He looks like a fighter.  Well, not so much a real fighter, but someone who starts a fight when he has the numbers.  Maybe you grew up with some gentility and don't know, but if you ever had to hang out with half-demented mean ass rednecks, you know what I'm talking about, that guy who is better looking than the others and a few I.Q. points ahead who knows just enough to act tough when you are outnumbered real good and has a nasty wit when it comes down to it.  That's Perry.  A man who never backs down when he has the advantage.

Fortunately, I grew up with the types and have learned to navigate pretty well.  At some point, I'll probably have to abandon all of this.  Sorry.  But everything will go into shoe boxes that are kept in closets and only shown on drunken nights and only briefly.  I'll know where the secret places are.  I'll know the man who knows the man who can get you what you want no matter what it is, and I'll know the man who can get you out of a jam if you get in trouble, though it will cost you.  There are secret, sweaty handshakes you will have to make with fellows with eyes like Perry's, clever little pig's eyes that will know damn well if you are lying.  You will feel the unspoken danger in the handshake gripped too tightly for just too long, and you will see it in that smirk of a grin that is compliments the cold meanness of the eyes.  If you've never lived that before, you'd better read some Cormac McCarthy real quick.  Start with "Blood Meridian."  You will have trouble with the vocabulary and the brutality, but it will let you stomach "All the Pretty Horses" a bit better.  And then read "No Country for Old Men."  That should prepare you as well as you can prepare through reading and without getting your ass kicked on some dirt road by group of happy miscreants.  These are male books about the primal male experience.  Not males like Larry David and Woody Allen, but male like al Queda and and those boys on the ridges and in the hollers of Kentucky.  McCarthy is about as good as it gets.

So it's back to my roots, I guess.  It sure has been fun, though, lolling about cafes, buying antiques and decorating the house, and talking about Seinfeld and Austin Powers and those shopping and fucking movies with slick yuppies at dinner parties.  Fun may not be the right word.  No, it has been a nightmare, too, excepting the cafes.  I'll have to think this through.  We've been sleeping too long, I guess, living in la-la land.

But no time to waste.  I've got to get prepared.

Solitude

As I finished writing yesterday's entry, I walked out to give the yardman two checks, for I had not seen him in awhile.

"How's it going, Henry?"

"It's O.K. sometimes."

"Remember when it was good most times?"

"Oh yea, mon."

Henry is my longest running relationship now.  We go back over twenty years and three houses.

The day was hot and I felt like nothing.  Still, I took a run too close to noon and was even less enthusiastic about anything after.  Showered, I went to buy plastic sleeves for the Polaroids and then went on to lunch.  Beer, I thought, would be good on a day like this, and even though I had told myself that I would quit drinking. . . and it was good.  A sandwich and some sweet cucumbers and I was sluggish.  Picked up the dry cleaning (why do I have such a thing, I wonder) and went by the studio to work a little bit, then home to scan and process.  And an Americano sounded fine.  I responded to emails, mostly models and the minutia of when and what, sending off jpeg pictures, scanning and processing, and then having worked through my desired nap, it seemed time for dinner.  Sushi, I thought, and a big Kirin nuclear beer.

It was early and I was alone on the veranda.  The staff came out to say hello, bringing me sake which I did not want, and then after ordering beer, two.  A slap on my back and a hello from behind, I turned to see my friend the literary traveler.  Sit, sit, I'll buy you a drink.  No, no, my wife is in the car.  I'm picking up pizza next door.  I talked to one waiter about school, another about the tall Japanese waitress who they never let wait on me who was stuck in NYC for a wedding that had to be postponed until Monday. Apparently the Big Apple has the Big Fear.  My friend, returning with his pizza, called out, "where everybody knows your name."  Sure, I thought.  I forgot to point out to him that the music was not playing.  Spend enough money. . . .

Hot hot heat.  The barometric pressure rises so that you expect a storm, but the storm doesn't come.  It makes me fear for worse weather.  Back to the house, the air conditioner strains cooling the house.  I pour the whiskey one must consume after sushi (I think it is recommended by the Surgeon General) and returned to scanning.  I will not go out tonight, I almost said aloud in response to a phone message I had received to meet some friends at a wine bar.  I could go.  There is no reason not to.  And there is really no reason to stay in.  Alone.

I watched a documentary about Van Gogh on Netflix.  Not good, not bad, but I now want to read his letters.  He died from solitude, he writes.  All he did was paint and paint.  He was too much alone.

How much of it was madness one wonders?  How much the other?  Six months later, his brother Theo died, too.  I will look into this today.  I must know more.

Tang Wei Min and Me

I want to make a photograph like this painting.  It looks old, but it is not.  It was painted by Tang Wei Min, born 1971 in China.  The painting is titled "Moon Night."

I am right and I am wrong about the balm of lonely hours.  I am certain of it.  The longing for companionship is of the ideal type, and it is rarely found.  Even then, things are mutable.  It is an illusion that is nice for awhile.  But the exciting hours dull and become routine or worse.

And given the chance, we would repeat.

So I did what I told myself (and you) I would do, and after work I went out.  I called a friend to meet me, but the friend never showed, so I sat at the bar of a fancy dive and ate alone.  I am not bad at this and was even better than that last night as I did not look about wondering how I appeared to the beautiful women who passed by in a Friday night procession.  And I knew how I appeared to the others.  Rather, I was among the throng pure and simple.

On my way there, walking down the Boulevard past the sidewalk tables and open air cafes, I was surprised to hear my name called out.  I turned around and saw a fellow I used to know from a gym years and years ago.  He had married and had a gaggle of kids settling down with his dowdy wife and becoming a blob himself.  I would see them riding their bikes around the neighborhood in a row, helmets cinched tightly, everyone looking grim with concentration.  He had served a couple terms as City Commissioner by then and gave me only passing acknowledgment in a vaguely formal way.  He didn't want to chit-chat.

And so there he was spread out casually at a cafe table with a small group drinking wine.

"I want you to meet my friend Catherine," he said nodding to the woman who was not his wife beside him.  He looked pleased.  She was a pleasant girl, I thought, for she beamed a smile to me that was unlike the demure thing his wife would always produce.  I had to take it all in quickly trying to make some sense of what was happening.

"Well hello old friend," I said, not having much to follow with.  "You still going to the gym?"

The young woman to whom I'd been introduced continued to smile and shook her head no as he said, "Yes, some."

By then, I had exhausted the well.  Of course I wanted to ask him, "What happened to your wife and kids," being naturally curious, but I have also been socialized somewhat and put the cap on that for awhile.

Why me? I wondered as I waved goodbye with a "nice to meet you," to Catherine.  I was surprised he still knew my name.

But he was proud and happy, I guess, maybe for the first time in a long while.  I was sad for him and his troubles and the long hours of wondering what to do, but happy for him, too, having found someone to sit with him on a summer's night at a cafe table for all to see.  There were so many questions to wonder.  Did they want children?  Would he do that all again?  Did he think it would all be different this time?

I thought about this for a minute sitting alone at the bar eating a bowl of ceviche and listening to three men to my left talk about their old sexual exploits as if they happened last week.  The loudest and most crass of the three business-looking men talked in some hideous way about some woman he had. . . well, I don't want to retell his stinking tale.  In a bit, though, he talked about his wife of twenty-three years.

I am too romantic about all this and, perhaps, am what I used to mistakenly think of as too "feminine."  I know now that I have been wrong, that the notion of being romantic is not a feminine one at all.  Most women I meet think my ideas just silly if not wrong.  But that has been the mistake, I think, that I have always made.

Dinner done, I walked back to my car down the Boulevard of broken and would-be lovers feeling not so bad that I was going home.  It was early, but I was tired and knew I had nothing left for the night.  Retracing my steps, I saw my acquaintance still sitting at the same table with his friends.  Catherine looked up and gave a big, wide smile.  She was happy.

The woman in the painting haunts me.  It is my romantic addiction to such things as the image in this painting, perhaps, that makes me right and wrong.  I don't know if Tang Wei Min meant for the title of the painting to refer to the poem by Du Fu (Tu Fu) of the same name.

"The moon this night in Fu county,
Is watched alone from her chamber door.
The tenderness of son and daughter,
Wil not yet know of Chang An.
Her soft hair moistened by a fragrant mist,
Her smooth-white shoulders chilled in the pure light.
When shall we recline by humble curtains,
Both our eyes dried of tears?"

The feminist perspective on all of this, of course, is not quite as romantic.  Some are available online.  But I think I'll forego that this morning.  It is late and I have other things to do.

Covers, Revolts, and My Own True Love

I did a quick mock-up of a poster/cover yesterday.  Getting ahead of myself, I know, but I didn't want to lose the idea when I saw it.  The image just embodies so much of what I think I'm trying to say sometimes when I think about what I'm trying to say.  I sent it around to some people to see what they thought.  Even the art director in NYC liked it, and she usually renders harsh critical judgement.  I didn't hear back from some, so I am taking those as "no" responses.  I will post it here so that any of you can have your say, too.  I just think these images would make a beautifully troublesome book.

Trouble.  I don't need any more.  The factory bosses are flexing their puny muscles, but times being what they are, the proles have taken to their holes.  I am posturing myself as a Stoic, but everyone postures him or herself as something.  When trouble strikes, internal psychological shifts take place so that you can live with yourself.  You do not tell yourself you are a coward.  You tell yourself you are pragmatic.  Now is not the proper time, you say.  All the planets are not aligned.  You will bide your time with a quiet, personal revolution, you say.  But when the time comes, you'll be ready.  Who dares condemn you now?

Some are better at it than others.

The weekend comes, and I'm exhausted.  I can't wait to do nothing.  I want the lonely hours to flow through me like a desert balm.  We have been lucky.  The hurricane has passed us by.  And maybe there will be more luck, too.  I might take a chance and place myself in some sidewalk cafe for a while and see if I will happen to meet my own true love.  I've given up waiting for the tap-tap-tapping at the door.  But if it doesn't happen, I will not worry too much.  I have much and cannot kick.  If Allah wishes to punish me for having been such a beautifully sweet and loving boy. . . it is written.  I can always succor myself with "The Old Man and the Sea."

Sure.

Never Want

The sound of a semi truck in a quiet neighborhood at dawn.  The silence of friends.  You think about looking up your horoscope just to see.

Your inspirations and original ideas take concrete form now. This is a very positive time when the opportunity to do the things that you love presents itself. You feel freed from restrictions and obstacles, and your creative abilities are very strong. Your responsibilities in your job are likely to change at this time, allowing you greater freedom and additional resources to pursue the work that you love.

Wow, you think.  That is not how it feels.  Then you see you've made a mistake.  The entry is for Thursday. . . Aug. 4.  You skip ahead one week.

Duties and obligations seem burdensome or at least emotionally restricting to you, and you may feel self-pity or temporarily down in the dumps. You are not in a sociable, gregarious mood no matter what surroundings you find yourself in.

And then today.

Your vitality and courage are strong now and you are eager to meet challenges. You can accomplish a great deal of work, especially if it involves physical effort. If you are active in sports, you will be especially competitive and vigorous now. Self-confidence is high.

It might as well say a shark will eat your cat if she goes near the water.  Well. . . she and I are fighting right now, so. . . .  Which is all the commentary one needs to get a good read on how interesting my life is.  I am paralyzed by duty and by quandary.

"Be liked and you will never want" (Willy Loman, "Death of a Salesman").

Francesca Galliani

Somebody else to oppress me.  Francesca Galliani.  She is a painter, a photographer, something in between.  She exhibits in fine arts galleries globally.  Slick magazines hire her to shoot fashion.  She keeps visual diaries like Peter Beard, the kind we promise ourselves we will begin one day (and maybe do for an entry or two).  She says that talent is not enough.  An artist must be dogged and enterprising.  She speaks of making connections.  That is where she loses me.  What does that mean????  But I know she is right.  Work kept in a drawer is just that.  There is something more than confidence required.  More than talent, more than confidence.  You tell me.

Or ask Tom Waits.  He has just released his first album in seven years.  And he is . . . .  Just watch the video.  More than talent.  More than confidence.

How far would you go?

Ellen Rogers

This morning for the first time, I found Ellen Rogers' photography.  Where have I been?  No clue.  It is embarrassing.  She is an artist, a fashion photographer of repute.  She is all over the internet.  She does not try to protect her jpeg images but encourages others to blog them.  She is young.  She is pretty. She has a new photo book.   She is successful.

It makes me miserable.  I am the type.  I am thrilled to find her work.  It is all analog, shot with film and manipulated in the darkroom then hand tinted.  The only digital process is to scan the final print.  She is brave, bold, creative.  It oppresses me.

For the morning, anyway.  I will write to her and tell her.  I will make a poem of my misery and admiration.  I will copy the dialog from "Death of a Salesman" between Will Loman and his brother, Ben.

"How did you do it?" Willy asks him.

"When I was seventeen, I walked into the jungle.  And by twenty-one, I walked out.  And by God, I was rich."

Willy was nuts.  The conversation is imaginary.  But that's the way it seems.  All the intermediate steps are a blur.  Talent, undaunted will. . . success.

I'll be a fool.  But I'll get over it as I do all things.  It just takes a minute.

Look at her site.  You'll probably like it, too.

Feeling the Dolt

A million miles per hour mind.  A body that is dead with heaviness.  Waking at four, making coffee, feeding the cat, reading the news blogs that will not be updated for hours.

I lost the printer yesterday.  The studio seems empty.  Then I took a big framed piece for the opening of a new photo gallery.  I am new to this and have not shown in a photography-only show.  The image looks so different and is so much larger than the other works.  The gallery owner is a joker.  He was talking to a young couple when I walked up, and he pointed to my image and said to them,

"Look at this."

"Whoa," I said, "tell them who I am first.  I don't want to hear them say, 'My god, that is awful.'"

What the hell is wrong with people.

Some are bound to like it, some to hate it.  Whatever.  It sure is big.

Now, printer-less, I feel less of an "artist" somehow.  But I cannot justify buying anything now.  The gallery owner was talking about doing a one person show of my work.  It will cost me more than I want to tell to frame ten pieces.  But I have to begin.  Maybe someone would buy something.  I need some support to help mitigate the costs.  I'm just looking to make enough to cover some of the cost of production.

Boring talk.  Sorry.

Try this (link).  The author is very clever and performs her theory well.  And the article makes me feel the dolt.

Purple Rose

The sky is a purple rose right now as I write.  The birds have just begun to call.  Red sky at morning. . . .  I remember how I dreaded Sundays when I was in college, all the homework I had promised myself I would do when I had the luxury of time on Friday still waiting for me.  It would be put off until evening, usually.  Miserable Sundays of anxiety and guilt.

I guess not much has changed.

And one wonders where the hours of the weekend so anticipated went.  What goblin of time consumed them?  I did none of the things I intended to do.  Maybe a few, but not the right ones.  And I envy you.  You have done the things I missed--Friday night drinks with friends at a small cafe or Irish pub, dinner with someone you love or hope to.  Saturday Farmer's Market and shopping for decorative items you do not need but want, things that you will be glad you bought when all the practical stuff has long been forgotten.  A late Saturday night that wasn't supposed to be but happened spontaneously and wonderfully, drinking enough that you promise yourself later today when you actually get up that you won't do that again while remembering the boy or girl across the room who seemed to have a crush on you all night long.  It was nothing.  It was something.  It was enough.

A dark and starry summer's night the last week before school begins-- summer ending a month before autumn begins.

Sunday.  I must help lose the big printer today, help move it from my studio.  Then I will get ready for the dinner I will cook for my mother.

Anything Like You

I fell asleep in a chair at my desk at work yesterday.  Exhausted.  Luckily, almost everyone had gone.  I woke in a haze, went about the offices and got caught up in some long conversations with the few remaining people so that I didn't leave work until seven or so.  Something is wrong with me, I thought.  It is Friday night and here I am.  I had turned down an invitation for drinks earlier.  I was too tired, and worse, did not desire company.

Driving home in the fresh evening air after the rains, I began to revive.  I stopped to buy coffee and whiskey (the two stores are next to one another) and then thought of sushi.  It was too hot to sit out, so I went to the little bar, my back to the room which is O.K. when the place is empty but disconcerting when the room is full.  I thought of people looking at the awkward posture of a solitary man eating alone on a Friday night.  What would you make of such a man, I wonder.  Would you think he was anybody like you?

I steal that line from Richard Ford's "Rock Springs."  It is the story's last line, and it has stuck with me since I first read it.  He is describing a petty criminal whose life has gone bad as he peers into the cars parked in the lot of a Holiday Inn-type hotel looking for one to steal.  What do you do when you are dumb and the Fates outwit you?  It is all there.

And so I dumbly ate my meal, the waiters and waitresses coming by to say hello.  One fellow,  a new waiter, said hello to me by name.  I have only spoken with him once and it was at least a month ago.  I was sitting on the veranda alone on a slow, mid-week night, and he struck up a conversation.  My Moleskine notebook and pen lay on the table as I drank my Ichiban, tired as usual, thinking about why I was tired and alone, as usual.

"Are you a writer," he asked?

I scrunched up my face in that self-effacing way we have when we don't want to deny what we are about to deny.

"Aren't we all," I said like what is supposed to pass for a clever fellow in a bad romantic movie set in an era that you really love.  The embarrassment passed through me like a butter knife immediately.  He turned out to be a really sweet, smart kid, a college student majoring in engineering who would rather be involved in the arts.

"I just saw a movie," he said, "about writers and artists. . . 'Midnight in Paris.'  Did you see it?"

He knew much and was intrigued by Luis Buneul.  He came back several times that slow night to chat.  Still. . . who remembers someone's name?  I am terrible at that, even with people I am supposed to know socially.  Or used to.

Finished with dinner, I went to the grocery store to buy things that I could not remember once I was there, grabbing instead random items that somehow appealed to me.  And home, I struggled to get everything into the house and put away.  Off with the clothes, into the other, and a big, deep scotch to kill anything that was living in the flesh of the deep red tuna.  The couch.  The television.  Darkness.

I woke at nine with the unfinished scotch in hand and managed somehow to go to bed.

It is terrible, no?  This life?

It is better than many.  It is better than most.  And that is what bothers me.  I must do something about it. Not my life only, for I am a baby to complain.  But the people who make me think my life is bad are making other people's even worse.  And if I don't fight them, who will?  Who can?  These opulent "evil-doers" must not be allowed to continue unchallenged, even on my tiny front.

And that is the bucket of snakes in my head right now that makes me unsocial and keeps me alone.  It is not some hatred of people but some guilty love of them.  If I allow them to shut my mouth so that my lot will be both better and worse, what will they do to the fellow who brings the sushi, the one who might become an engineer with a soul?  If I can't remember their names, at least I can shout about them.

I am trying to figure it out as I'm always trying to figure things out in my own befuddled way.

And I wonder.  If you saw me sitting at the bar alone in some awkward posture, would you think that I was anything like you?

The Quiet Wisdom

Bills unpaid, house a wreck, weight loss undone.  Twelve hour days are murder.  On the ropes, near defeat.

And then, in middle of a losing battle, some bits of kindness.  A gift for something you've done for someone, another remembering to you how you are remembered.

Glitter and gold.

You begin to relax and then--POP!--another right to the jaw.

You think you're clever, you think you're good / but you're not.
You think you're stupid / you think you're bad/ but you're not.

Categorical thinking, you know.

You get mad / you get glad.

In my hillbilly youth, one of my trailer park friends' step-father who worked in a canning plant ten months a year had some advice that I've taken as gold though I don't always follow it.  The man rarely smiled an open smile for he had a mouthful of rotten teeth.  But he was never afraid to give a closed lip grin.  Maybe the teeth were the reason he said so little, too, but everyone just referred to him as a "quiet man."  People believed him "thoughtful."  When he did speak up, though, the room usually got quiet.

One day my buddy was being a fool as we often were thinking ourselves funny.  Finally, having had enough "cleverness," the step-father offered up the words of wisdom:

"If you're stupid, keep your mouth shut and nobody will know it."

You don't know how many times I wish I'd followed his advice.

Lately.

Naked Before God (And Everybody Else)

Don't walk close to the River of Shit.  If you fall in, nobody will jump to save you.  If you manage to save yourself, don't expect a lot of hugs when you reach shore.

I need to make this brief today.  The factory whistle is blowing.  They have me working the Shit River today.

I don't know who took this photograph.  That is the trouble with Tumblr and other blog groups.  They rarely give credit.  I'm giving credit here to whomever made this photograph.  1919.  More romantic than Bellocq in technique.  The lighting is subdued it seems, though if you look you can see the shadow the model is casting.  More directional is probably a better thing to say.  If I get a place to shoot with a big window. . . .

As the factory boss gets meaner, my hours become longer, so I am shooting later at night in the studio.  I shot last night and am exhausted this morning.  I am booking later and the model showed up even later than that.  She brought lots of costumes.

"I lied on my profile," she said.  "I'm thirty-seven, not twenty-seven."

She was "heavy-ish" and thought the costumes concealed it.  They didn't.  Everything made her look bigger.  She did not come to shoot naked.  Never had.  It is all O.K. with me.  Except for distress and sadness.  My studio is set up so that models are looking into a mirrored back wall, so they watch themselves as they move.  She worried much about it.  An hour after she arrived, we had taken five pictures.  Listen, I said, let's do this.  Take all of that off.  Look at that.  Aren't you something?

We shot a couple packs of Polaroids.

"I see what you mean," she said about the clothing.

She loved the pictures as I lay them on the table.

"They say the camera doesn't lie," I said.  "That's wrong.  The camera always lies.  We can make is say whatever we want.  That's the beauty of it."

She was very excited when we finished shooting.  Her boyfriend is an artist, she said, he and his friends. Well, tattoo artists.  But they are having a big art show at a gallery.  She named it.  There would be work from all over the country, she said.  She thought that I should have something in it.  I don't care to show locally much, but I pointed to one of the 32"x26" framed pieces on the wall.

"I'll do one that size of you if they want it.  One without the costumes."

She was very happy about that.

And that's the secret of it, I guess.  I try to figure it out all the time, but that's it.  People are beautiful and they want to be seen.  Maybe we all want to stand naked in front of the world and be applauded just so.  But we fear we will be laughed at and jeered.  It is true, but it shouldn't be.

As a male friend of mine said about skinny dipping, "It's always hard to show the world your shortcomings."

Amen.

The Beat Down

Tell me if you've heard this one before:  I am going to write this tonight because I know I won't have time in the morning.  I have to be at the factory especially early, and it won't be fun.

I am tired already and beat.  I had a terrible, terrible day today which I will tell you about in a moment.  This is not how I should feel so soon after a vacation, but even my vacation was somber.  I am, as I think I wrote from California, and I take this directly from Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," too much alone.  Perhaps I have become one of Anderson's Grotesques.  Probably have been.  The only joys I took in California were quiet and sweetly melancholy.  Wordsworthian, perhaps.  Jesus, though, I hope not.

But to the point.  Today I lost access to not one but both large format printers I have been using to print my works.  No kidding.  Two in the same day.  When the call came from the fellow who owns the one that is located in my studio, his voice was dead and flat.  He didn't really need to tell me.  He will move it this weekend.  The other. . . it is a long story and would reveal too much about me, but let me just say I have been able to use one at the factory.  And now, through a conspiracy of another foreman who is a mean moron of a man, my supervisor who is smart enough to favor him, and her supervisor who is second in command, I've been. . . how should I say it. . . fucked.

If I want to continue, I will have to buy an Epson Stylus 9900 Pro Printer for the new low price of $5,000. Plus ink which is hideously expensive.  And it drinks ink like a camel.

Do I wish to continue?  I was thinking about that and everything else (you see, it is not just the printer at the factory, but much more, for my career is in jeopardy) as I sat in my studio tonight waiting for the model to arrive.  My money woes, I thought. They are mounting.  And if I lose the foreman's job, well, that is another 20%.  I have been a spendthrift, I kept thinking.  I have saved no money.  I am evil.  This is what I deserve (I will write an essay on the idea of "deserve" soon).  And so I opened a bottle of wine and sat on the couch and pouted much and hard.  For a long time.

The model did not show.

No call.  No text.  Nothing.

And here is what I wrote in an email to my mother just this morning (I write to her every morning even though I call her and she lives in town) before I went to work:

"Work is hard.  I don't know if you knew that.  I am going to try to get there earlier today.  I have a lot to do.  I didn't get home from the gym until late and didn't eat my microwaved meal until quarter 'til nine. Went to bed before eleven and didn't get out of bed until close to seven.  And to think that all over the world (and even in this country), people would LOVE to have my life.  I keep reminding myself of that when I start to whine.  But I still whine.  And then I say that there are many people in the world. . . . "

Making Water Out of Wine

I don't like to comment on my own images.  People who talk about the things they make are 1) boring and 2) not so well informed.  I watched a documentary on Joe Strummer last night called "The Future Is Unwritten."  I don't know.  It was pretty dumb and I felt pretty dumb watching it.  The director made a good attempt to create something artful, but I make documentaries, too, and know there is little you can do about the quality of the responses to the questions you put out there.  If you could, it wouldn't be a documentary.  And boy, there wasn't much to work with on this one.

I'll admit, though, that "No Direction Home" seems an exception.  The interviews with Dylan speaking out of character is worth the ticket.  Still. . . Dylan talking about his music. . . nope.

So I am loathe to say this about my own images.  It will sound dumb.  I intend them to be stilted and weird and not pretty at all.  The models do not come to shoot with me to get pretty pictures.  They have those in abundance beforehand.  I tell them that I will like most the images they will probably like least.  It is not always so, however.  Some of them love the awkward pictures best, and I am not immune to beauty.

"I have lots of pretty pictures.  I want to do this."

Or something like that.

"Naked girls and a guy with a camera.  What can be creepier," I tell them.

"Not much."

I'm not saying it makes things right or that it makes the images any good.

I'm just saying.

I tend not to put some of my favorites here because they are a bit more edgy and provocative than the others.  They are much less pleasant if any of these images can said to be so.  Probably not.  But here is one today.  She is a nice woman with a new baby, a social worker with a degree from a good university. She did not think this would be a beauty shot.  She saw all the images as they dropped from the Polaroid camera.  She is writing a book about the "marvels" of her life.  I hope she gets it done.  She has stories to tell.

But all of that information doesn't help make this a better picture and all this talk detracts from it.

People who make things shouldn't talk about them, I think, but sometimes I have the hillbilly's desire to turn gold into silver.  Or steak into hamburger helper.  Or something worse.

A Woman and a Mask

I will write this on Sunday afternoon, for I know I will not have time to write it Monday morning and will not feel like writing it tonight.  It is too hot.  I have lingered here today with all good intention, making productive plans with every forethought of seeing them to fruition.  But way led to way and then it was noon and I was befuddled.  A bit later, I walked out the door.  Holy God.  By afternoon, it is simply too hot to move.  If things aren't done in the mornings now, they shouldn't be done until the sun begins to sink or until a sudden storm cools the air.  These days are O.K. as long as you are in water, but otherwise. . . .  And so by two I poured a glass of wine and wondered what I had left in the house to eat.  The air conditioner labors and the couch is calling, me wondering if I have a good book to read.

There is no reason for my lack of productivity today.  I rose at four, now haunted by the same monsters and demons I have run from for awhile.  But by nine, I had returned to my bed, and though I rose again at ten. . . the day was doomed.  And so I began the mountain of scanning and processing that I still have before me from things shot prior to vacationing.  People not on vacation do not take vacation into account in their calculations when they want something, and so I have emails asking me when the pictures will be delivered.  It takes all my psychic energy to focus on what I have to do.  It is torture.

But now that the heat and the humidity have reached lethal levels, I figure to continue that which I previously wished to avoid.  I am being productive, I say.

It is good that I do not have anyone to see just now.  It is the Danger Season.  And holy cow, I see women in their 8th or 9th month of pregnancy!  And though I haven't any idea what that is like, it looks absolutely murderous.

As the day drags on, I wonder what other people are doing.  I can get no responses to emails.  Nobody is coming to my site.  I assume the worst, of course, that they are having fun or are at least in some way content.  And it wrongs me.  Everyone apparently is enamored somewhere else.  It is terrible, but what can I do.

I pour another glass of wine.  There are only so many of those I can have before I make dinner for my mother tonight.  I must remember that.  Surely, though, another and another and I will be able to sleep it off the rest of this long, hot afternoon.

And so there was that to do and it was done.  I am as you see.  And here, a semblance.  The girl in the mask is not what she may seem.  She would not take off the mask.  She liked it, she said.  Do you think it is cultural, I asked?  What?  I don't know, I said.  I'm being silly.

Staying In

I'm convinced, as I am certain all of you are, that the key to staying young and vital is to own your own time and have enough money to pursue your passions. Oh, and to have healthy passions, of course.  All that adds up to not having to work for anyone and to have a source of wealth that allows you to do what you want.  When I came back from vacation, everything was good.  I had lost weight, looked younger, and had more vitality.  I had been sleeping until sunrise or later every day.  When I woke, I was happy.

Three days back at work.  Back to the old routine.  I woke this morning at four o'clock with the horrors again.  Why?  There can only be a few reasons.

I am, however, still a bit more at peace than before I went away (that will probably end on Monday).  Yesterday I lolled around the house until noon.  Dropped off some shirts at the cleaner's because I am always wrinkled as I take my shirts from the dryer and hang them up.  Once the cleaner presses them, they are good for awhile.  Then I dropped by to see the camera guy who is fixing up Frankencamera.  He has gotten some cool stuff for it, but still he cannot get a couple things to work.  He is stymied, and I can't help.  But the camera focuses from about three feet to twelve and so I got to walk around with the big box and look through the viewfinder--and what I saw thrilled me.  I can't wait to begin making pictures with this thing.  There were two fellows at his shop who were not together but who my friend was anxious to have meet one another.  They are both documentary photographers working on large projects, one in Venuzuela and one in Cuba.  I was introduced, too, but they  did not make much of me, I think.  I do not tend to take myself as seriously as they seemed to take themselves.  And it seemed to me that they took one another seriously as well.

But when we broke out the Frankencamera, they began to pay attention.  And then they were impressed.  At once, they spoke to me in a different manner, as one of a clan.  I am not of that type, however, and don't care one way or another.  But about that camera. . . oh, I am passionate.

I asked my camera guy if he wanted me to seek some help from the only fellow in the world who has solved the problem of how to make this Aero-Ektar lens work on this Graflex RB SLR body.  He is prideful, but he shrugged and said something like, "I mrmm k f'ya wa. . . huff huff huff."  I took that to mean Sure, if you want.

I started to write to two of the big photographers who each have one of the three or so contraptions in existence to ask for an introduction to the camera's engineer, but then I found a way to contact him directly.  I told him I was prostrating myself in this begging knowing that is was like asking the man who invented gold how he did it.  But the fellow responded tout suite, and though he did not tell me how to get infinity focus or how to get the mirror to function with this oversized lens, he gave one clue which made some sense to me.  Now we'll see if it helps the fellow with the tools.  What he really wanted me to do, though, after telling me of the hundreds of hours and all of the machining and money he spent trying to solve these problems was for me to buy one of his cameras.  And I don't blame him.  And maybe I should have started there to begin with, but I am sunk in the money mire now and have no way out, it seems, still facing the hospital and doctors' bills, the dental bill, the cost of buying a Polaroid camera I did not end up needing and all the 669 film that I could find, and finally the cost of a vacation planned the night before I went, and the who-knows-what expense of the breaking apart the rental car.

And that is only part of why I am waking up in the dark again.

But I hold out hope.  Not for paying the bills, but for my friend getting the camera to work.

I need an adult in my life.  Or better, a patron/matron.  Refer back to paragraph one.

After that, I went to the gym where I worked out and then went to the pool to soak up a bit of sun.  And there I met my friend who owns a hip bar in the big downtown area I never go to.  He began regaling me with tales and said I must come that night, that I would be treated as a Pasha, that there would be women and wine and it would all be mine.  Of course you think I'm kidding.  I told him that if I were still awake at the requisite hour, I would come, knowing that I would not be awake when he says I should be there.  Nothing good happens after midnight, I think, unless you are in bed.

In the late afternoon, I was thinking of the ceviche I had eaten the night before.  The day was too hot, and the thought of sitting at the cool bar and drinking an icy beer and eating ceviche and guacamole was overwhelming.  And that is what I did.

But it was, as I say, late afternoon, late enough that I could have been eating a blue plate special dinner with AARP, so when I got home, it was definitely the cocktail hour.  And I thought to have a little whiskey to kill anything that might have still been living in the raw/lime juice chemically cooked fish.

The first one was a little short, I believed, so I poured another, or as I told myself, the rest of it.

After that, there was not really much I wanted to do, so I decided to do something I never do before dark.  I sat down before the television.  Then darkness found me watching episodes of "Mad Men" on Netfilx.

In between episodes, I was checking my email, for I was in the middle of corresponding with the camera genius, and Slava Pirsky was sending me some images that he is working on for his next big project.  Oh, they are lovely and I can't wait for you to see them.  But he had asked me for my opinion, and maybe there is little profit in that.  What can you do?  I guess there is simply gushing, and that would probably the correct thing, but clever people like me try to make startling observations that show both our intelligence and our interest in the thing itself.  And I made these observations knowing that I hate when people who do like my work make critical observations about it.  They are sometimes correct, but there is always at first the resentment.  I hoped not to breed that with my own, but I know. . . I know.

And somewhere in the night while checking my email, I had one from a woman who got me started in all of this--sort of.  She was the first model I worked with who was not someone I already knew.  She was wonderful and encouraging when I first started, and I liked working with her though I have never been able to get her to come back.  But we stay in touch and last night she wrote to tell me that she still reads my blog.  She liked yesterday's post she said, and knew I wasn't talking about her.  She was drinking tequila, she said, and wanted to know if I was still drinking scotch.  I wrote her back to tell her scintillating tales of my evening home alone with "Mad Men."  Funny, she wrote.  She had been watching it that very day herself.  Later still, she texted me from a martini bar.  I could see her in a little dress, legs crossed, holding herself steady on a bar stool as prideful men offered to buy her drinks.  I wrote her back to tell her I was "bedward" thinking to dream of all the women who didn't get to meet me that night.  How much they must have grieved.

Now the sun is up and I am ready to go down.  I will go back to bed for awhile and sleep.  Tonight is dinner with mother and preparing for more beatings at the factory.  I have fallen back into it, this solitary, hermetic routine.  As always, I had momentary hopes of changing things, but I am only left with hopes that Frankencamera can come to fruition, and that, perhaps, my Ur-model will come back to shoot with me again, though I know that I will not hear from her for some time if she met someone she halfway liked last night.  I do not think that she is about to become a hermit, too.

Going Out

Women I know write me from time to time.  It will begin with something akin to a flurry and then will taper off.  And then, too soon, I don't hear from them at all.  I used to believe that it was something I wrote and would think and think of what that might have been.  But that is dumb.  That is not why they quit writing at all.  They only wrote at first because of some dissatisfaction in their own lives, and they believed for a moment that I might be a bright spot.  I understand that now, so when the emails I send in response to something they have written go unanswered, I know they have found a new interest in their own hometown.  Still, I wish that they would just say that.  

"Dear, You have really been a fun distraction through a boring and tender time, but you know we've been through this all before and you surely must remember now as I do why we do not see one another any longer.  And while it is not that difficult to write an email, you know this is not the era of email.  If you want to know what I'm doing, you should follow my tweets or friend me on Facebook.  But I've met someone who. . . ." 

Etc.  

But I know that is what the silence means, so really, they don't need to write it.  

Still, it is always difficult to lose an audience.  

Last night, I went out with an old friend for dinner.  We went to a new Mexican restaurant owned by some people he knows.  My town has a dearth of good restaurants, and as I told you, I will change mine, so when he called, I was in without hesitation.  It turned out to be a better restaurant than most here, but it is still a "here" place.  We ate at the bar as is our want.  Two men at a table, really. . . . So we sat and chatted with people we knew who were also there.  And the conversations would go something like this.

"Who are you all sitting with?"

"Oh, that's Jed Thomson.  He's a contractor."

"I think I've heard of him." 

"It's and old Centerville name.  The family has been here forever.  Jed and my husband have business together, but they've known one another since they were kids."

"Yea, I think I've heard of the family."  

Then the friend would turn to me.

"Why didn't you come over and say hello?"

"I didn't want to embarrass you in front of your decent friends." 

I could see it in everyone's eyes, the unspoken pain--"Why do you always have to be an asshole."  

In truth, the guacamole was good as was the ceviche and the sangria.  By the time we ordered dinner, I was no longer hungry and was a bit drunk, so my judgement on it is suspect.  And I will eat there again at quiet times when there is no crowd, and probably alone or with some scrappy girl I've just shot with who is used to eating at the Red Lobster on big occasions.  I like watching them sniff at things like guacamole and ceviche and having them wonder at the coffee beans in Sambuca after dinner.  And they are not usually dressed in the manner of people in this part of town, so that is fun, too.  

But last night the girls came in Friday night Paris Hilton dresses looking around for someone suitable and worthy of congress.  My friend, a bit younger than I, had the wrong seat and I the right one for watching the room which was fine with me, but I felt guilty because I was not a participant and he would most likely be if the opportunity arose.  A group of pretty-ish, well-dressed girls sat to his right.  I was on his left, so for him to turn and look was making the obvious more so.  Undaunted, however, he struck up a conversation with the girl next to him.  And to my surprise, she did not turn away.  I don't go out any more, so everything surprises me now.  Especially social interaction.  

And it was this--all of this--that made the restaurant less than a success for me.  I cannot socialize any more.  Sliding up the ladder, so to speak, from my hillbilly roots after college, I think this must have been fascinating.  Later, having fallen into places I never belonged, I know it was.  And later still, married to a woman of enviable but not spectacular "breeding," I was bored.  And now. . . well, my hillbilly relatives provide me with more entertainment than any of what I encountered on my Friday night outing.  

And now that I think about it, maybe I'm somewhat wrong about why women quit writing me emails.  Not completely.  I know that they eventually find someone to absorb their interest.  But my own willingness to be "an asshole" surely plays a part.  I'm starting to believe that maybe my behavior isn't as charming as I apparently think it to be.  

Blah Blah Blah

I've woken too late to really work on anything here.  Yesterday at the factory I was made a slave to a further extent, stripped of more dignity and freedom of choice.  Last night, I awoke in the dark with daytime nightmares, something that hasn't happened for weeks.  Telling myself I must rise, I fell back into a fitful sleep.  Life unfolds as it has, and I am too puny to stop it.

For now.  The thing about being human is that we can always change our mind (as long as we have one).  Mine is not yet made up.

The weather doesn't help.  It is 100/100 here, temperature and humidity.  A figurative pressure cooker.  While these summer days can be pleasant elsewhere, they never are here.  The world is deep green and lush, wild and full of molding, sweetly pungent rot.  Not even Dante came close to describing this.

It is Friday, and I have no plans.  I envision the usual solitude and (dis)quiet and early bed, some exercise and too much drink.

Or, perhaps, I'll change my ways.  Or begin something new.

You know, something daring and different. . . like a new restaurant.

"It normalizes a passive dominant idea of gender,” the feminist leader explains.

Old habits take hold without resistance.  There is simply a forgetting of what it was you wished to remember.  You can remember a general theme--Change--but the details become murky.  You were going to do more in the mornings.  You remember that.  And after work, too.  But you don't.  Tomorrow, you say.  I just got off the plane.  But tomorrow, after your first day back to work, you are sunk in the mire again.  Time.  That is what they take from you.  All of it because you are exhausted when you leave.  You are better than some and manage to steal something for yourself like a trip to the gym or a yoga session, but then it is late and you still must make dinner.  Showered, you sit down and it is over.  You have done nothing different and can't remember what it was you thought you might do.  Just change.

I tell you I work in a factory, but I must admit I have a foreman's job.  I am not on the floor, so to speak, manning a machine.  My job is to make certain others do that.  I set schedules and assign jobs and answer to the higher administration.  Right now, most of the workers are on vacation while I try to catch up on my administrative duties.  That means I spend more time in meetings with my bosses.  Everyone is nice.  They smile and are pleasant to a degree that masks the real threat that I might be sent back to the floor again.  I am no longer seen as this or that.  The floor workers know that I am not powerful and bully me a bit, and administrators make me their lapdog.  So I am careful, for truly, after the trip to the hospital, the broken crown, the expensive trip to California, the disaster with the rental car, and all the things that have been neglected around the house that MUST be taken care of, I need the extra money.  I am a whore.

When I read Gloria Steinem's comments surrounding her cry for a boycott of NBC's new series about the Playboy Club, I thought many things.  The caption with today's photo comes from that.  Substitute "class" for "gender" or any of a hundred Manichean classifications and the quote still works the same way.  Such statements that once empowered postmodern critics have by now become tired and shopworn.  It is perplexing, to be sure, for the statement undeniably has one leg in truthfulness.  Not simply for gender, but for many perceived inequalities.  And Steinem's complaint is not about sex but about exploitation of sex for profit.  I think.  And again, by extension, you can make the argument equally for all exploitation.

So I like it.

And I don't.  Mostly for the same reasons I dislike religion.  It is totalizing rather than nuanced.  It ignores as much as it notices.  It is self-satisfied and dogmatic and is its own form of tyranny.  I'll leave it to you to sort out the pronoun references.  You know, "it" does some nice things for some people.  "It" does some horrible things, too.

I like Steinem O.K.  She kicked Norman Mailer's ass.  

There is a Christian group who is also calling for a boycott of the same show.  I enjoy this yoking of causes like hitching up a goat and a donkey to a plow.

I'll probably watch the Playboy thing now where I'm sure I wouldn't have before.

But I must hurry.  The factory bosses want to see me working, not thinking about gender and class and ideology.

Maybe I'll begin eating at new restaurants and see if that works.

Faded Resolutions

Woke up in my own bed to thunder and a weird light.  The cat was meowing.  Resolutions begin to fade.  What was it I would do to change my life?  Enhance it?  Old habits.  I was going to rise early, drink one cup of coffee, and go out for a run.  Hmm.  The coffee sounds good.  Then I woke the computer and read the news.  Always a bad idea.  But there is entertainment there.  What's wrong with the world?  Oh. . . you know.  Too many ways of thinking.  And here in my own country?  Something like this, perhaps, which I read at CNN online about the flash violence this weekend in Philadelphia:

"It's very frustrating," said Perry "Vision" Divirgilio, a performance coach and poetry movement mentor.

A what?

I read Donald Ray Pollock's "The Devil All the Time" on the flight from San Francisco.  It won't make you feel better, but I'm O.K. with that.  I kept thinking, "at least I've never killed anyone."

The thunder continues and the sky grows dark.  And as they say, "ominous."  Little dribbles of rain, but the storm is somewhere in the distance, closing in, perhaps.  I'd like to stay here with the coffee and see it through, but I have to report back to the factory today.  What was I going to do to change my life?  It is all a fog, now, like the air around San Francisco.  Oh. . . yes, I was going to lose weight.

Makes me hungry.  I'll shower now and tempt the fates.

I Walk the Waterfront

Mondays are bad anywhere.  What to do on the last day before returning to the factory?  At a loss, I decided to walk along the waterfront in Berkeley close to the gentrified 4th St. and environs.  It is a crazy changing over from warehouses and factories to shops, cafes, artist's lofts, and condominiums.

And so I took my Nikon D700 and a 50mm f. 1.2 lens and began to walk.

At first, I saw what I expected to see only because I'd been there before.  But it was what I liked to do.  I need a mission, a project, a direction.

I passed unsuspected places.  4th St. chi-chiness was really spreading.  And all along, in between the yoga studios and groovy cafes, there were real working industries with bullnecked men in knee boots and hard hats and overalls.  I passed printing companies and open garage doors leading on to hundreds of huge rolls of printing papers.  Next would be the office of an attorney.  There were plenty of places for rent, big glassed wall shops on top floors that would make dreamy photo studios.  I wanted my new Frankencamera, the Graflex with the Aero-Ektar to shoot portraits of the people I came across.  

I walked to the waterfront, an estuary of the bay where the railroad once ran.  At the end of the road was a dilapidated shack, and between it and the water lay a woman's dress and brazier.  Nobody was around.  The dress was laid out flat with the bra sitting atop it as if someone had decided to skinny dip in the fetid water.  But no one was around.  

An empty bottle of wine had been placed in a hollow of the shack beside the place steps would have once been.  A mystery, I thought, that I'm not solving.  After a few photos, I was on my way. 

A bit after noon, I decided to eat in one of the small cafes that dotted the streets.  How to choose?  There was no informed way, so I simply picked one with a strange name--Tomate Cafe.  I sat outside in the almost warming sunlight and had a tri-tip beef sandwich with horseradish sauce and a Coca Cola from Mexico where they still use the original formula and cane sugar rather than the corn syrup they now use in the U.S.A.  So the sign said.  It came in the original old bottle and had an import sticker on it, so it tasted much different.  In truth, though. . . it did.  

After lunch, I got into the car and drove toward Oakland.  There things were not as gentrified, though in truth, it won't be long.  Signs were already showing.  I parked the car and walked a bit not feeling nearly as safe and comfortable but not feeling threatened, either.  Then I saw a boy with a skateboard disappear off the road.  I decided to go discover.  

But that will have to wait.  I'll be home tomorrow.  

Berkley Morning

 Berkley morning after a strange night's sleep.  I slept fine in a slanting camper van, but here in an expensive B&B, I wake too often.  I am thinking about home.  I am thinking about all the promises I've made myself that I know I'll never keep.  I'm thinking about the factory.  I'm thinking about the past and how poorly the present stacks up against it.  I am, I know, too much alone. 

Have you read "Winesburg, Ohio"?  Oh. . . if you haven't, there it is.  Anderson never wrote like that again, but there for a moment he held the secret of the universe.  I warn you--it is a quiet revelation, soft as goose down.  If you like loud, exciting things, don't go near it.  If you want something to distract you from your own life, don't read it.  But if you want twisted desires and hand-holding sweetness in a slow, nuanced style, something you will think of years later in the same way you remember your grandmother reading fairy tales to you when you were an infant. . . run, don't walk, to the nearest bookstore. 

That could be a long run, of course.  Even here in Berkley, there are few bookstores to run to.  Moe's on Telegraph Hill is still open and is good if you like used books.  Books Inc. opened up on 4th Ave, a smaller version of the Cody's that closed.  Other things have changed as well. 

And I am up today reading the news, something I've not done in over a week.  Wish I hadn't today.  I may stop completely.  My reading it makes no difference.  I learned in Civics class so many years ago that it was important to read the papers and keep myself informed.  I have, but I'm not so sure it has done anyone any good.  It seems as important now as keeping up with professional sports.  The league, the team owners, the players, and the sponsors make the decisions and keep on making the money.  The rest of us opine around the water cooler about what might have happened if Johnny hadn't fumbled the ball or if the Blue Devils had gotten a new coach.  It just doesn't make a difference in how the season turns out, though many people hate one another for wearing the wrong team jersey. 

When the fans riot, though. . . well, there's something. 

What the hell did I miss in London?  I haven't figured that out yet. 

And apparently the amount of money I am worth has changed a bit since I went into the wilderness. 

And mean, hateful  people have been killing again.  It's enough to make you wonder. 

Last day in Berkley and my breakfast is awaiting me.  I think I will go sit on the cool porch in my sweatshirt and eat my fill.  And I'll try to get my head back on. 

Maybe it is because I never prepared for this trip.  I mean I booked it on Wednesday night and left on Friday morning.  I hadn't really thought about it before I came.  Since I've been here, though, I've been walking on the moon.  Nothing seems quite right.  I've been a Stranger in a Strange Land.  The natives seem happy.  It is I who have landed out of touch.

I stayed with my friends in Yosemite, the  ones for whom I officiated their wedding.  Now they have children and things have changed.  They have by necessity.  But it is more than that, too.  Something gained, something lost as they say.

I won't talk about it too much other than to explicate the effects on me.  To keep me comfortable, they set me up in the V.W camper van--The Vanogon.  The top was popped so I could stand up straight.  The electricity was hooked up so I had light.  Everything was good but that the new carport was built to drain water at about a 20 degree angle.  Or so.  I had an inflatable mattress, and it would slide all night, as would I, so that I would wake with my feet hanging toward the floor.

In the morning, I would go into the house.  My buddy was already up with the kids.  They'd be eating breakfast and I'd make coffee and then eat some of the pancakes he made with nuts and fruits mixed in.  Afterwards, we'd adjourn to the t.v. room where dad would put on recorded reruns of Lawrence Welk.  He said he read some studies that said the quick visual editing of television shows was bad for developing brains, so he only puts on the long-cut shows of the sixties and seventies.  I saw a lot of L.W. the last week, and now I want to research what happened to all those characters after the show ended.  As nice and sweet as the show seems, I know there is a dark underbelly to be revealed.  Larry was a black tyrant, I'm certain, and all those homey, folksy singers were having '60's style drug orgies whenever they could.

That's what I kept thinking, anyway, as I watched it with the kids, certain that the writers and costume and set designers were all taking heavy doses of LSD.  Lawrence Welk is certainly the progenitor of Saturday Night Live.  There could be no Will Ferrel without the L.W. Show.

A bit later, Mom would get up and come down to breast feed the baby.  There is crying and screaming and mom and dad trying to work out the strategics of the day, all with the requisite tensions and stress.  Then dad would go to work and I would go on a hike.

Diapers and feedings.  It will last a good long while.

Yesterday, my last day in Yosemite, my friend recommended that I hike up the mountain behind his house.  Follow the old road, he said.  It goes all the way to the next town, about seven miles away.  It will kick your ass.

And so that is what I did.  Stupidly.  I felt like a refugee.  I left too late with only a gallon of water and a Tiger's Milk bar.  It had to be over 100.  But I kept walking and walking thinking that it would get better, up and up over one waterfall, then another, then another.  I was ready to turn back when I spotted a house.  I had done it!  By the time I'd returned home, I had covered fourteen miles and five thousand vertical feet.

When I got back, they were impressed.

"I've never known anyone to go there and back before.  Most people only go one way."

Destroyed and in need of calories, I ate what they had prepared for dinner which was not enough, and drank beer and wine then Mojitos like a sailor.  Not the best road to recovery.

This morning I said my goodbyes and made my way back to Berkley.  I have had one good piece of luck and it came today.  I must confess that I love to drive a rental car in California at top speeds.  Today, however, I was mellow.  I did not have my foot to the floor.  Still, I was passing everything on the road but for one car, a white Mazda with a crazy driver who thought to keep in front of me.  And so mile after mile, we wove in and out of traffic, he one way, me another, only to meet up again with one of us ahead.  Great fun.  Until I spotted the CHiPS motorcycle parked on the side of the road.  Shit, I thought, I owe money for a ticket in California.  I'll be going to jail for certain.  I thought of you all immediately and what a story that would be.  However. . . and this is the lucky part. . . the Mazda was ahead of me at this point.  I slowed down and pulled into the flow of traffic being careful to stay far behind the Mazda.  I couldn't stand to look in the rearview mirror dreading what was coming.  And suddenly--swish--the motorcycle cop flew by me and dipped in behind the Mazda.  I felt bad and good all at once.  The driver of the Mazda was surely bummed.  It would be a very big ticket.

I cruised into Berkley at a more tepid pace listening to KAT Country and the American Country Countdown with Kix Brooks all the way to #1 with the Zac Brown Band and Jimmy Buffet singing "Knee Deep."  Yessir, I was a lucky cowboy for sure.

I must confess that I have not taken any photographs this trip, and I've figured out that I needed a break from both the factory and image making.  Today, though, I took out my iPhone and snapped a few pictures down on 4th St.  It is a chi-chi part of town, but it is in what had become a derelict factory/warehouse part of town.  I remember stumbling upon it eighteen years ago by accident.  I think.  It is not as it was then. . . but I am too tired to tell the story now.

But there is that to tell sometime.