Go It Alone

It all goes to shit.  I did the right thing, but I've been played by all sides.  There ain't no winning this one.  But it's good.  Y'all go ahead and tell yourself it's the best thing.  

*     *     *     *     *     

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful (Albert Camus)

Real Trouble

I'm in trouble at the factory.  Funny thing--for something that I didn't rather than did do.  I mean, I do soooo many things.  This is ironic.  I'll inform you as things play out.  I could lose my job as foreman and a lot of money.  Still, I can't help but see it as another fiction.  It is a novel, a movie, a play.  It is an HBO series like "Luck," a story of misfits and emotional cripples slapping away every reaching hand for fear of rejection.  I watched episode five last night as I sipped what was left of the whisky and thought about what troubles I may face and how I may face them.  On my feet rather than my knees, I think.  We'll see.  But it is a dangerous thing to watch fiction and to drink whiskey and to think of what you might do.  I've made a life of it.

I can hear my friend C.C. asking, "How's that working out for you?"

He knows.

The horror of it is that it is at least more interesting than a lot of things.  Bad things can happen to me.  I feel alive.

Here is the song to the closing credits of the show.  Kind of haunting.  But what a fucking name.  Devandra.

I wrote that last night before bed.  This morning, I am tired from a sleepless night spent projecting myself into the future.  No matter what I try to tell myself. . . .  

The Weight of Days

There is no reprise to a good day.  Don't try.  Sunday was cloudy and gray.  I left the house only once--to go to the diner for breakfast.  Different day, different deal.  The rest was spent inside, reading and working on photographs.  I didn't even shower.  I made a spaghetti dinner for my mother who came over in the early evening, but she had started a new diet, didn't eat much, and left early.  After that, I drank too much whiskey at my desk.  Listened much and long to strange music.  My legs were swollen and tight when I rose to go to bed.

Monday comes thick and heavy and gray.  My batteries are low.  Give existence meaning, I tell myself, but I find  the formula reversed.  I look for quotations from Camus.

"A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession."

Confession is difficult when the people to whom you confess may be those who are complicit.  It has become too easy to find me.  I've used "Cafe Selavy" in too many places, too many times.  I do not wish to become Diogenes walking naked in his own home town.  And these are literal times.  For me, too.  I must find the titles to my "abandoned vehicles."  I don't know if I can.  My life's a jumble of messes that I'd just as soon walk away from and leave behind.  Rather, I must put them in order.  Existence gains the upper hand.

A Little Encouragement

I was inexplicably happy yesterday.  Don't know why, really, but I suspect it was the residue from going out the night before, just being somewhere unexpected.  Breakfast at the diner seemed a celebration, and, unusual for me, surrounded by rednecks and hipsters, I received texts and phone calls as if I were some college socialite.  Nothing much happened that day.  I worked in the studio cleaning up the accumulated mess from an enormous number of shoots, chatting with the fellow working on big encaustic pieces out the back door.  The anime geeks were emptying a box truck filled with equipment they had taken to Geekfest, and I had chuckles with them as well.  More emails and texts and an invitation out that night.  Boy not girl.  My luck.  Still, I found myself in a small pub I've not been to for years listening to a fellow with a guitar and a gal with a fiddle playing most fantastically.  A drunken girl bumped into me on the way somewhere, and it felt purposeful.  On her way back she stopped to apologize.  "I think you are just the neighborhood bully, " I said.  She told me no, that her tits were just too big, but that they were pretty, and then she showed me.  You know that I see a lot of breasts, but her offering made me happy, and I'm sure it inspired me as I went on to run the pool table and win the game having not played in many, many years.  When things go right, the tumblers all fall into place.  More beer and more pool as the couple onstage were joined by other musicians--an upright bass, a steel guitar, a drum set--the night was kicking.

I got home too late and stood in the cool night air with mon chat at my feet.  The only sounds came from things that stir in the night and the kids from Country Club College making their rounds.  Hungry, I grabbed the pistachios from the kitchen and thought awhile as I broke open the shells with my thumbnails.    I'd peed before I left the bar which was disappointing me as I stood in the kitchen's half light.  There is nothing like peeing outside in the late night before turning in.  But it had been a good day, nonetheless, and I was happy.  I dared not think ahead.

Sometimes, all it takes is a little encouragement.

Saturday Morning

I just worked an hour on what could not be finished.  It had to be trashed.  Best thing.

Yesterday morning, as I reported, was bad.  The day turned evil.  Home from the factory, I found my cars tagged as "abandoned vehicles" by the city.  Shit fuck goddamn.  This is it.  This is what I've become.  Enraged.  Embarrassed.  Pathetic.

I went downtown to see my buddy in a play.  Afterwards we went out.  I should have been scared.  The bars and side streets were full of goblins and freaks.  It was horrible.  It was fascinating.

I was up too long, slept too late.  The day slides by.  The cat, too much alone, whines and complains and lies upon my feet.  I get irritated and then realize that is what I do here.  She needs a blog.  It might help.

I want breakfast and will go soon to eat bacon and eggs and toast and grits.  I will leave the diner smelling of rancid grease.  I should do something about the cars, I know.  But there is so little free time. I want to walk among the living.

Uh-oh.  I've done it again.  There is no helping it this morning, I guess.  Some days are just like that.

Dissemble

(Meredith Frampton)

Disastrous start to an early day.  I have a mandatory meeting early at the factory.  The maids come today, so I must clean before they come, picking up the accumulated dirty clothing from various parts of the house, stripping the bedsheets and pillow cases, taking care of the massive pile of mail laying on the floor.  I hear it before I see it.  The coffee maker has malfunctioned and coffee covers the countertops, drips onto the floor.  The cleanup takes my minutes for coffee and computer away. I will have to dash.

The meeting is with the CEO and the anti-union lawyer.  All the foremen and women will be there.  There are only a few of us who are radical left.  I need to be careful today.  But I am tired and worn and still have a little of my psychosomatic cold.  Stress kills.  I may don a jacket to remind myself that I am not who I am today, a tangible reminder of the role I should play.  It should be easy to remain quiet so early in the morning.  My voice will still be weak, my joints creaky, my mind a heavy mess.  I will strive to think of foreign ports in other times, of daring men and seductive women, of danger and escape, all the romantic images with which I was filled as a young boy.  This to counter the sanitized evil that passes for clever thinking in many arenas today.

I love the civility in this Frampton painting, the sensuality of the flowers, the tight suppression of the hair, the suggestiveness of the red shoes.  I should do this, do a series the reverse of what I have been doing, suggest repressed desire rather than the other.  In the "Lonesomeville" series, what emotions are locked behind the seeming sexuality of the bodies displayed?  Please reference theories influenced by the Postmodern Andro/Menopausal era.  Open book. Feel free to discuss among yourselves.

Somatic

I've done it again, of course, have taken on too much, and now my throat is scratchy and my nose begins to run.  It is psychosomatic, I know.  For instance, yesterday my stomach began to churn as I ate leftover food from a Thai restaurant that I had. . . oh, I don't know. . . since Monday, maybe.  Not long.  Been refrigerated.  Still, fried pork rice from a sleazy Thai restaurant. That is what I kept thinking as I ate.  Of course there was nothing wrong with the food, but for the next hour I could feel the coming food poisoning as my stomach. . . no need for details.  Then I had a shoot in the studio that went late. And I started drinking early.  So by the time I began to clean up after the model was gone, I could feel the disease taking hold.  I am not really sick.  Not physically.  It is nothing more than the mental illness that haunts me.  You see, I am really Theodore Cleaver at heart, but like Fritz the Cat, I fall into adventures that stun and excite me.  One need not have these adventures, and indeed for much of my life, I kept myself from them.  But living alone. . . well, you begin to give yourself permissions.  And once you realize that there is no one at home to tell you no. . . .

But "Mom" is always right.  I put "Mom" in quotes to indicate June Cleaver and not that drunken, insane woman you might have had masquerading in your house as "mother."  No, the "Mom" who told you in sweet though sometime stern tones to make your bed and shine your shoes and brush your teeth.

"You don't want to end up like poor old Mr. Jones, do you?"

Maybe Mr. Jones looked like fun to you, but you knew what she meant.  And later in life when you let yourself slide down that slippery slope, when you quit combing your hair and shining your shoes, after too many late nights doing questionable things, the image of Mr. Jones would appear, and you would fear that somewhere some "Mom" was warning their children that they didn't want to end up like you.  Did they?

So, yea.  The sore scratchy throat and runny nose are manifestations of the other thing.  But I swear, I am beginning soon to clean up everything.  I will re-landscape and repair the sprinklers.  I will give away the 1985 Volvo that has sat in the driveway for a year now collecting. . . oh. . . it is such a painful symbol of who I have become.  I will take everything out of all the rooms in the house, clean, paint, and put back just what is needed, and maybe not even that.  I will buy new things and make a showcase home.  I will pressure wash and begin to paint both mine and my mother's houses.  I will mulch the driveways and talk to an architect about designing the sunroom I want to add.  I will buy new clothes and become present on the Boulevard once again.  You'll see.

Of course, I will have to give up everything else, for doing all that alone will consume me.

It will be uncharacteristically gray here for days.  The air is sticky and clothes are impossible.  My hair has a life of its own.  I'd best stay low at the factory for I feel that anything I say will indict me.  I am guilty of anything they want to pin on me.  Theodore Cleaver.  Wild at Heart.  

"I'm a glam waitress," she said.

"A What?"

"A glam waitress." 

"What is that?"

"I work at an upscale restaurant.  They hire the girls for their looks.  We are really models who serve food.  The money is really good.  People are ther to be seen, to be known.  They pay extravagantly for the opportunity, and they have to leave a good tip.  Twenty percent would be embarrassing.  They tip thirty percetn or more.  They leave $30 on a $100 lunch.  And we don't even have to be good or nice.  We just have to carry the food and look right.  Busboys take care of the dirty stuff.  I make $300 to $400 a shift."

"A glam waitress." 

She was pretty alright.  He could see how it would work.  It was all based on the same system that paid CEOs ridiculous amounts of money.  She just got what was left on the lower end.  Lower end?  She was twenty-two, a juniour college student, and she made as much as he did teaching at the university with a Ph.D.  And he felt inferior.  He could not figure this part out.  She was beautiful, arrogant, and unenlightened, and all he wanted was to please her.  They were sitting side by side at a posh and trendy bar.  He tried to control his interest in her, or at least to subdue his desire to stare at her with a stupid grin.  She smiled at him for a moment, then swept the room with her eyes taking apart the crowd.  She apparently found nothing of interest, and she turned for the moment back to him.

"What do you do?" she asked. 

He took a breath and tried to seem coy.

"I'm a school marm." 

"What?"

Well, that was stupid, he thought. 

"I teach." 

'Oh?  What subject."

"English." 

He felt foolish.  Why had h not just answered her question? 

"O, god, I suck at English.  It's like my worst subject." 

A Certain Crowd

(Hippolyte Flandrin)

As a white male Evangelical, I am very impressed with the Rick Santorum.  He just makes sense.  Think about it.  If you were the Devil, who would you go after?  The United States of America.  Right?

Of course, I am not an Evangelical, and being of sound mind, Santorum is simply one of the funniest figures in town.  He's passed Chris Christie even though he is not so physically comical.  Christy said yesterday that he wished Warren Buffet would just shut up.  Ditto.

Neither of them are scary figures. . . but the people who take them seriously sure are.  It would be as if Colbert fans thought he was really a conservative.  I will take a poll of professional wrestling fans on who they want for president and get back to you.

And that is why I do not write overt political entries here.  It is just awful stuff.  It is stupid stuff.  It is funny, but only at a pathetic level.  It is obvious.  It is best left to the midcult minds of late night t.v.

But here is another story, the kind I do write, that is really as simple minded as this.  I was in the YMCA last evening trying to be nice to all the stand around talkers who block up the place instead of working out.  A woman I know from yoga classes and who I talk to from time to time moved in to use a machine I'd been working on.  I've always thought her a nice woman for no reason, really, other than she was in my yoga class.  There is a residue that clings to the yoga practitioner, I apparently believe without ever giving it real thought, of enlightenment.  And if I do this, of course, it flies in the face of my own yoga experience.  But this woman is older than I, I would guess, and bone thin with alabaster skin and hair that does not speak of age, hair that is boldly modern and not the hair helmet that is too often evident in women of a certain. . .  um. . . type.  She is calm and regal and yes, she is attractive.

I stood by as she worked on the machine, and I noticed she was wearing a orthotic boot.

"Been fighting again, eh?" I said with what I thought must be a twinkle in my eye.  She paused.

"I'm trying to think of something clever to say, but I can't.  It is a stress fracture.  No reason, no trauma, I mean."

I almost said that getting old is hell, but I thought again.  What I did say, however, suggested it.

"That's a difficult place to heal.  Hard to get much oxygen to the feet."  I left off "for old people."  "You need to huff some 'O's," I said, holding my hand to my mouth like I was sucking on a respirator.

What happened next was so subtle, I might have let it pass without noticing, but there was a faint shift in her features, a subdued but definite disapproving, and then a verbal tone, subtle, too, but present.

"Oh, no. . ." she said shaking her head as if I'd just offered her a shot of tequila while asking her if she wanted me to stick a hit of Ecstasy in her butt.  "I'm doing some blah blah blah blah blah."  I was so consumed with the subtle stuff that I didn't hear the stupid shit she said about healing bones with herbs.

Cut to the quick, I tried to recover.  "All the NBA players do it.  You know, they have a hyperbaric chamber over at the sports complex.  You ought to go sit in there for awhile.  You'll be playing basketball again before you know it."

But the gig was up.  It was as if one of us had farted a little on the first kiss and were each blaming the other.  I would never really enjoy encountering her again.

You see, it doesn't really matter that I'm a foreman at the factory.  I still work at the factory.  You don't escape that, not in her crowd.  I am suspect in both word and deed.  And, truth be told, I play it a little.  I mean, if you were the devil. . . etc.

Soap

(Boris Grigoriev)

I shot last night with a model I'd shot with once before.  We shot in dresses, a coat, costume shooting of a sort though not costumes really.  But I'm trying to make the transition from Cat House to Carnival and it is taking some doing.  And so. . . I resisted temptation and kept her in her clothes.  It was awful.  Not the photos.  They will be wonderful.  But I was like a crack addict in a halfway house.

We shot slowly but efficiently, and so we finished early.  A good night, I thought.  It is easier shooting this way.  So few emotions, so little stress.  Simply technical.  

I walked her to the car and we hugged goodbye.  I could smell the scented soap upon her skin.  Fresh.  Clean.  Simple.  

Early to bed, I woke in the deep darkness.  It was useless.  I was filled with it.  

Coffee made, cat fed, I turned on the computer, read the news, and looked at some websites I visit from time to time.  I went to Ellen Rogers' blog.  She had a new post, something that only happens a few times a month.  She had new images and a longish (for her) bit of writing about her new project.  She'd had some problems on set with two models who did not share her vision, she said.  Then this: 

I was left with a very unnatural and hesitant feeling throughout the day. It wasn’t their fault but it’s always difficult when coming across those who are so naturally different in taste to you that they make you feel ashamed of who you are and what you love.

Oh, Ellen, I think, there is a simpler way.  Dress things up in pretty clothing, don't strip it bare.  But she knows that.  She is in London, she says, going to Fashion Week.  There is something.  There's a curing there. 

A Sunday Kind of Love

I promise you, I was going to quit.  I told myself I was gone for good.  I would no longer offer myself up for complaint, disgrace, discredit, and general criticism.  I have become repetitive, I've told myself.  The pictures, the whining.  It is not that I am the only one who is, but perhaps there are not so many who are every day.  EVERY DAY!  What am I getting for it?

Things were going well.  They were.  They were going fine.  And then. . . I don't know, I watched the numbers fade.  People just fell away.  Perhaps it was the season.  It didn't matter.  I have a tender heart.

Then I got this from a woman I shot with a few days ago.

I've sat here on what you call endless time, reading your blog. It's an addiction, I'm forcing myself to close my computer and take a shower.

And that, I guess, is all it takes.  A sweet compliment, a new reader.

It is not just the writing and the photos, of course.  It is everything else as well, the holidays, birthdays, Valentine Days. . .

It is Sunday.  Dinah Washington (link) and Etta James (link) can tell it.

O.K.  I'll just struggle on.  Do your worst.

I don't know.  Enough is enough.  Maybe you will miss it when it's gone, but I don't count on that.  I'm worn out.  Too many complaints, too much abandoning, not enough glory.  It was a good idea for awhile.  But I'm tired.  Eliot is right.  A whimper, not a bang.  Sorry, but it's over.  This was for free.  Next time, it is for the money.  Ciao, baby.  I'm leaving it to Q.

Purpose

I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feelings for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright... Or maybe "stupid" is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I... And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots (Hunter S. Thompson).

Sometimes there is nothing you can do to help people but not be mean to them.

I made a mistake and asked The Traveler what she wanted to do, how she saw her future life unfolding.  I don't know what I was thinking.  I wasn't.  I guess I just wanted to hear a tale.  She was uncertain, she said, and was trying to figure it out.  Most of what she dreamed I considered terribly unrealistic, and so I made a bigger mistake and tried to point some of that out to her.  This is too vague a statement, I know, and it wants details, but I am not prepared to give them.  Mostly, I worried that she had already made some irrevocable decisions that would limit some of her choices about things.  O.K.  It needs an example. I will give one.

Her tats.  She told me that people did not like her, that they treated her differently, and I, ignoramus that I am, asked her, "What did you think would happen when you started inking yourself up?  Did you not think you were putting yourself outside something?"

The look in her eye. . . oy.

"No. . . I wasn't trying to piss anybody off.  I wanted to make them happy.  It is art!  This is a new generation.  We are changing things.  It is time.  Young people are different now.  I feel I have a purpose in life.  Didn't you feel you had a purpose when you were my age?" She was earnest and eager.

I thought about her question for a minute, trying to remember.

"No," I said.  "I didn't feel I had a purpose."

I tried to recall what I felt about life.  But it wasn't that.  I felt no mysticism, spoke to no invisible friends.  I had art and literature.  Or aspired to, anyway.  I believed I was like the statue of the man carving himself from stone.

I could only hope that she was right, that things would turn out alright for her.  But I didn't see how sleeping under overpasses and scamming people for gas and getting more tats was going to change the world.  I thought about her competition, all the kids in the Middle East and India and China.  They all wanted something, too.

The day after the shoot, she posted a sweet note.  Better than most.

AMAZING time last night, I love shooting with you it's like being photographed by Van gough, you have tons of brilliant ideas and a great eye to catch things in one click(polaroid) rather than 500 million digitals and 5 good ones!! LOVE LOVE!!

She is on the Mardi Gras streets now.  I hope that is working out.

My Funny Valentine

Last night, I worked in the studio with a "traveler" that I shot with about a year ago.  She was passing through town and wrote to me such a sweet message that I couldn't resist.  Besides, I wanted an update on things.

She showed up with a puppy and a carful of clothes.  She'd driven up from her ancestral home in Palm Beach.  I take it that she grew up well, rebelled after graduating from high school, and took to the road.  She is twenty-three now and has been traveling for five years.

"Did you have a good trip from Palm Beach," I asked?

"Yea, it took a while."

"It's about three hours, isn't it?"

"I take it slow.  Gas is expensive so I stop a lot."

"How does that help your gas mileage?"

"I have a gas can," she said.  I looked at her, eyes pinched, brow furrowed.  "I tell people I ran out of gas and they fill up my gas can," she said matter of factly as if I were a dolt.

"I guess that could slow you down."

"I've got time."

She had more tattoos than when we last shot, one now on her face.  At five foot five and ninety-eight pounds, there isn't a lot of skin to ink up.

"You've put on weight since I saw you.  Looks good."

"I'm trying to eat more.  I put on weight when we were out in California.  Smoking makes me hungry."

In California, they'd been hired to pick pot for one of the State sanctioned growers.

"Your hair has grown quite a bit, too."

She'd gotten lice and had shaved her head a few months before we shot last.

She started pulling things out of her boxes.

"Look at this."  She held up a crazy red skirt with pleats and trimming.  "My mother gave it to me when I was leaving for this shoot.  She rides horses and wore this for a show.  I don't even know what this part is."  She held up something with ribbons for tying.  It was beautiful, all of it.  Then she opened an old leather case and pulled out an accordion.

"Wow," I said.

"It was made in the '20s." It was bone white and silver pearl and smallish.

"Can you play it," I asked.

"Here's a song I'm writing."

She began playing a sailor's jig.  She could really play.

"Did you teach yourself?"

"Yes.  It came with some books and old music.  I've been using the kids book for now."  She was playing smoothly with both hands.

I had thought to shoot quickly and get home.  She had other ideas.  The evening stretched out before us as she began pulling out more costumes.

"Do you have anything to drink?"  I didn't have much because I remembered that she and her boyfriend were trying to get sober last time they were here.  "That was him, not me," she said.  I had two half bottles of wine and a half pint of tequila.  I hoped she wouldn't spot the bottle of absinthe.

She was on her way to Mardi Gras.  Her boyfriend was playing with a bluegrass group.  They would be busking on the streets.

"I just drove up here to shoot with you," she said.  "We had so much fun last time we were here.  I've been getting paid for shooting, but you and me, we are alike.  That's why I don't charge you.  That's why I came."

O.K.  O.K.  I poured a glass of old wine and settled in.  It was going to be a long night.  I played with the puppy and took him out to pee while she mucked around with makeup.  The artist in the studio across the lot was packing up and going home.  He had a wife.  It was Valentine's Day. I had no reason to hurry, I thought just as the dog sunk his puppy teeth into my toe.  I'd be home by midnight.

Be Mine. . .

I couldn't leave it that way, of course.  I am more romantic than cynic, though the two fight for my soul.  Let's hope for eternal love even if it is only brief, whether it comes early or late.  Be Mine, Valentine.   

dirty little valentine

I had four shoots scheduled this week.  Four of them have cancelled.  I'm both pissed and glad.  I'm shooting too much, and I keep saying I will slow down.  I will now, just not at my volition.  I try to accommodate people.  And when I say I'll do something. . . . 

"O.K., Grandpa."  

It's their world.  I'm just living in it.  

I have this premonition that I am in trouble, but I don't know why.  I mean I do plenty of stuff for which to be in trouble, but I don't know what I am in for particularly.  It is just something hanging on me.

It is Valentine's Day.  I bought my mother flowers.  I am a sweet boy, no?

Q's friend posted a link to a video of Q's Tijuana girlfriend's boyfriend just in time for Valentine's Day, I think.  Metaphorically.  I can't quite figure it out.  Q says to delete the comment.  But truly, I thought that particular entry some of Q's most brilliant writing.  And so I post today's picture, a reference to my own Mexican Brothel.  Q suggests I start a new series called "Domino."  Clever.

I hope you have big love today.  Every day.  It beats a dirty little valentine.  

Quite a Life

All I want to do / Is have some fun. . .

I've got a feeling / I'm not the only one. . . 

Why are new tattoos so bright?  I don't know anything about them, but I'm wondering, did they come out with a new kind of ink?  All the colors are far too loud.  It reminds me of Oriental rugs after the 1920's when they began to use synthetic rather than vegetable dyes.  Suddenly the rugs looked electric.  Now the value of rugs with synthetic dyes is much below those that used vegetable.  What will be the value of old tattoos?

Bu really, I don't like tats one way or the other.

Whitney Houston died, they say.  My mother reported it at dinner tonight.  I'd seen the news this morning, I said, and I told her I couldn't name a single song she sung.  Oh. . . but my mother could.

"She sang "The Star Spangled Banner" at a game once."

My mother kills me.

A minute later, the woman who rents me my studio space stopped by the table to say hello.  My heart stopped.  Mother still does not know.

I did not leave the house today until four o'clock.  I stayed in and worked on photos all day long.  In my pajamas, of course.  I've decided I will buy some that are made of silk.  Warm in the winter, cool in the summer.  That's what they say.

My mother came to take me to dinner tonight.  Before we left, the woman I was with for many years, the one with the son, stopped by to give me a piece of cake she had just made.  I don't care, but my mother was not nice at all.  Good old mom is quite loyal to her son.

And that is all I have.  That's what happens when you don't go anywhere for days, when you sit in the house and listen to a jazz channel on cable t.v.  But I will be forced outside tomorrow when I go to work.  Then the shit will hit the fan, as they say.  For now, home from dinner, I will sit in the dim light and drink some whiskey and work on images.  And really, it's O.K.  It is quite a life.

*     *     *     *     *     

And of course, my mother was right.  Here is a list of the "greatest" Whitney Houston songs.  "Star Spangled" tops the list.  I don't think I've ever heard any of the other songs before.  They are awful.  

Ultimate Whitney Playlist

Living LIke Hugh

Fuck it.  I only have pictures of the models I've worked with to post.  And I find them soooooo wonderful that I just don't care.  I have files and files and files of pictures I've never gotten to work on.  This image is over a year old, a digital file from when I was only doing Polaroids.  I love it.  It is a miracle.  So what the fuck.  Consider me Hugh Hefner.  Might as well.  Tonight, I was in my pajamas at six o'clock.  They are really all I want to wear, and tonight I thought of old Hugh.  He was right all along.  Work in your pajamas.  Clothing is horrible and only for show or for covering up the flaws.  I am home on a Saturday night with no plans to go out at all.  I have invitations to go to "Nude Night," an annual art and performance art program downtown that has been going on for years.  I've never been.  I've been asked to show, but I am not interested.  Nude is sleazy.  Naked. . . now that is another thing.

It is hard to explain, but I am happy tonight.  The day was perfect with the blue skies of memory, and as is often the case with such beautiful things, I was not its equal.  I worked on old photo files all morning and then dressed without showering and went to the Farmer's Market up the street.  People flock to the thing, though I can't quite figure out why.  But they do, and it is a social event where you should be seen.  So I was.  Then I walked a bit and got into my car and went to a diner for breakfast.  It was noon.  Three eggs, bacon, wheat toast, and grits.  I sat at the counter and wondered once again if the young hispanic waitress was flirting with me or if she did that with everyone.  She was flirting with me, but probably not seriously, so I put away my desire to ask if I could photograph her.  Still, when I caught her stealing glances, she was unrepentant.

After breakfast, I went to see my camera repair guy just to shoot the shit.  Another friend of mine was there, so it was a good trip.  And then, mid-afternoon, I geared up for the gym.  Finally awake, I went to Whole Foods and bought the fixin's for the evening meal and a bunch of red tulips, too.  They caught me eye on the way in, and I thought, "I haven't had flowers for awhile."  Twenty tulips for $17.  O.K.  I bought them anyway.  Then, checking out, I saw that many people had flowers--and cards.  Oh!  Tuesday is Valentine's Day.  I will need to go back and get a bunch for my mother.  But for now, I had bought myself some birthday/V'Day tulips.

Home and finally showered, it was six o'clock.  What did I want to do?  Nothing.  I wanted to watch the episodes of "Boss" that I had DVR'd and some episodes of "The Wire," too.  I wanted to read and to work on pictures, and all of that was too much for the few hours I had left before bed. I would do it all in my pajamas.  Six o'clock, Saturday night.

I am happy now.  I've eaten and cleaned up and the cat has had her fill.  The tulips are a perfect red.  I've watched an episode of "Boss" as I ate and may watch another one, too.  I have no desire to see anyone but my own true love.  And she will have to be someone who likes to see me in my pajamas.

Yup.  Me and Hugh.  We know how to live.  I am considering buying more expensive wines.  It is a big decision, but I make more money than I ever have, and I don't think that I will live forever.  What price range?  I'm thinking $35-$45, just a couple a week.  I've been a nigger all my life.  I've driven old beaters for cars.  I've scrimped on everything but travel.  I've exercised until my body is broken to pieces.  Now it is time for good bottles of wine.  If you like to eat good food that someone else (me) has made and you would like to eat in your pajamas and then drink good wine and watch "Downton Abbey" on t.v., you're the girl for me.  I've got your flowers already.  I can make you laugh and regale you with unlikely tales.  And there is more, too, that we will not tell.  And I make a mean pot of coffee in the morning, just in case.

O.K.  That's pretty grandiose for an old guy sitting in his pajamas after dinner alone, having drunk half a bottle of wine and ready for most of what is left of the scotch at 8:30 p.m. E.S.T.  I am content on a Saturday night.  We'll see what lies ahead. . . (though, I think we know).

Stick with the Classics

There was nothing from Peppy, of course.  So I returned the call of another madman, a fellow who owes me a camera.  He may have it even worse than I which gives him the advantage.  We talked awhile about why I don't have it yet--the camera, I mean--and then a bit about the strangeness of life.

"What scares you most," he asked me.  I could picture him sitting in his room, the front office of an old motor court, with mounds of camera gear all about.

"The inevitable," I said.

There was a pause.

"You afraid of death?"

"Not in particular.  Just things I can't influence the outcome."

What I did get, however, was commentary from someone very charming, I'm sure, who wanted to let me know s/he came over to read the blog because a friend had said that there was some good writing.  S/he wanted to assure me that s/he found none.  I thanked the person for the input, but really I was confounded.  It's like telling a stupid person that s/he's stupid.  What good does that do?  It doesn't even make you feel better, I hope.  It's like taunting the physically handicapped or beating an old homeless person.  For what purpose?  Where's the gain?  I guess I could try to write better, but really. . . ?

I'm trying to do what I can't do, trying to see what I can't see.  Really I am.  I'm trying to be handsomer and smarter and more interesting and even younger.  Oh. . . yes. . . and sweeter, too.

A good critic is one that helps us find meaning or gives us insight into why we like what we do.  The process is analytical and informative.  A good critic informs and delights and may change tastes.  Even someone like Dwight McDonald, that fallen Trotskyite from The Partisan days, gets kudos for his wit and wisdom from those who disagree with him.

And so I told my new critic that I was sorry s/he'd been tricked by his/her friend, but there was nothing like that here.  Stick with the classics, I recommended.  There are plenty of them, and you can rarely go wrong.

Waiting Something

I didn't think much about my birthday this year.  I woke at dawn and didn't even remember the day.  I had to go early to a conference to which the factory was sending me, and I was occupied by that, I guess until my mother called and began singing into the recorder, "Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. . . . "  I picked up the phone just as she was finishing.

"Jesus Christ, mom, that was hideous."

She was busy, too, she said.  She was playing cards with the girls and would not be able to see me.  We'd get together sometime, she offered.  "Have a nice day!"

The conference was hideous, but at least it wasn't the factory.  I am pretty much spectacular in my profession anywhere that is not the factory.  Even there, except with management.  So I showed off some and kept a crowd entertained and delighted as is my natural tendency.  I spoke with other foremen and forewomen from other factories and had it confirmed once again that I work in one of the most unenlightened, dictatorial factories in America.  Good to know, I guess.

After lunch, I went to another presentation, but it was awful and there were too many people and not enough chairs, and so after awhile, I decided I'd had enough and went to my car and drove home.  I wasn't paying attention and didn't take a turn I should have and I was in an unfamiliar part of town, so I just enjoyed being lost for awhile, enjoyed driving somewhere I'd never been.  It was mid-afternoon.  This is what I should be doing every day, I thought, just driving with a camera an shooting and thinking instead of sitting at a desk in an office in a factory.  I wanted to stay lost.

But slave to routine, I found my way back to a road I knew and headed for my house.  I would go to the gym and for once be done before dark.  And then I'd. . . but wait.  It was my birthday.

Yea, yea, yea.  I'm no kid, I thought.  What'd'ya want, a pony or something?

At home, I threw in a load of laundry and started the dishwasher.  Then, dreading it, I went to the gym.  It was not what I wanted to do, but I had nothing else that was pressing.  A workout would make me feel better, I told myself.  It is what keeps me young.  At least now.  There used to be other things, too, but not so much of late.

When I was finished at the gym and had shopped for some needed things, I thought about the evening ahead.  I thought about dinner and that I certainly did not want to cook a meal for one this night.  Then I thought--"The Artist."  I had not seen it yet and it was still playing at the little art theater in town, the famous one with the Film Festival that is supported by Sundance.  I would go.

I don't go there much any more.  It has gotten to be too popular.  For years, you could just walk in and get a good seat.  But the town has grown and now it is always packed.  Sometimes you can not get tickets and other times, if you do, your seats are simply terrible.  But I was one and I am not always shy, so when I went in, I walked up to a young couple sitting at a table for four and asked, "Would you mind if I join you?"  I've done this many times before, though I've never seen anyone else be that bold. I figure I have good karma in this for I always ask people looking for a place to sit if they would like to join me if I have empty seats at the table.  And for "The Artist," I had an excellent seat.

But seeing "The Artist" alone on my birthday may not have been the best decision I've made this year.  It wasn't the worst, but I felt too much like George Valentin.  Out with the old, in with the new.  Dujardin played it so well, you know, with so much tragic dignity and despair.  He was perfect, but he had Peppy Miller in the background as a hovering baby angel.  I watched and remembered that those were the stories I could not tell at Selavy, for they are not stories you can tell about yourself.  And so, sitting with a happy young couple alone in the dark, I faded like old film into silence.

At home, everything was as I left it.  No emails, no calls.  Just a pesky cat.  I checked the mail.  The only birthday card I received this year was from Bradley's Bar in Palm Beach.  A free drink awaited me.  I'd been getting this card every year since sometime in the 1970's when both Bradley's and I were something.  Now we both were something else.

But I had a text from Q.

"Happy Birthday, old man.  Don't kill yourself.  I know how you are."

That was not what it said, but it was what I thought it said at first.  "No, man, not tonight," I thought.  The night was not yet through.  I still might get something from Peppy.

An Invisible Man

I've stared at the empty screen too long this morning.  I've found neither wit nor wisdom.  I can neither entertain nor delight.  What to do in such a case?  Best not to try.

My eyes are not to be trusted.  Now I wonder about my voice.  I take another involuntary step closer to invisibility today.  I am nearer to becoming An Invisible Man.

Categorical Thinking

The Negro

Never saw him,
Never can,
Hypothetical haunting man.
Eyes a saucer,
"Yes sir, boss sir."
Dice a clicking,
Razors flicking.
The-ness froze him
In a dance,
A-ness never
Had a chance.

I had to recount this from memory.  I did a quick Google search and couldn't find it.  I can't remember the author.  But the poem (and I hope I haven't made too many mistakes in remembering) sticks with me.  It is quick.  It has wit.  It bites.  Damn near a miracle.

The-ness and A-ness.  Reminds me somewhat of e.e. cummings.  I grew up in a vile, incredibly stupid environment.  Such a thing, if you are any good at all, makes you tough and never lets you forget.  I've told the stories somewhere in the blog of being beaten by a group of black kids for being white and for being beaten by crackers because I was a liberal hippie in the same week.  I wasn't yet old enough to have a drivers license.  I still remember hearing racist songs on the Rebel label, I think it was, stacks of them, with lyrics like this:

Nigger, nigger, tell those lies,
Kinky hair and bloodshot eyes,
Crooked toes and crooked nose,
That's the way a nigger grows.

And so on.

I'm not much for categorical thinking except when it pleases me.  It is, however, surely an evolutionary trait.  I did grad work in anthropology long ago and learned the advantages of prejudicial thinking to one group in competition for resources with another.  It is a survival tool.

For the individual, I don't know.  But as global resources dwindle and populations increase, individualism seems a punishable act.  Populations place their hope instead in leaders, people who will give voice to what the group wishes to hear.  The individual is lost in the herd mentality, and survival depends upon vilification.   Borders and party lines and nationalism grow.

I like stereotypes.  They are funny in times of plenty or among enlightened friends, or even to enrage the "other."  I am quickly bored with successful "isms" even if I agree, because once they gain acceptance, thinking quickly becomes monotonous and routine as people rush to learn to use the vocabulary for personal ascension.  I am no Derridean and probably don't understand his writing as well as many of my friends, but what I've taken from what I think I've understood is his idea of "free play."  It is essential to everything else he has written, I think.  It is what all of us who have "rebelled" against any hierarchy have done since we were in grade school, any of us who were "mouthy" and who got in trouble for espousing contrary ideas.  But Derrida warns us against standing still, against making our argument the center of things.  Our arguments create new structures that must be attacked lest they become as intellectually deadening and dictatorial as the one that replaced.  It is intellectual "play," both serious and fun.

But it is difficult for those who want to control the power.  That is what all arguments are about.  Who has it?  Who wants it?  Who are you willing to throw under the bus to get it?

We live in a world embroiled in a struggle for power.  The arguments are tired and old and worn out.  And comfortable.  What can we do?

Be aware, I guess.  And quit it.  Try to be ironic.  And always remember what The Idiot Savant once said:

Don't follow leaders,
Watch the parking meters.

O.K.  That's enough polemic.  I'll be late to the factory again.  As the song says,

Twenty years of schooling
And they put you on the day shift.

There Is No Failure Like Success

Yesterday's post may have been a mistake.  I proposed a "You Might Be American If" site where people could submit their own humorous descriptions of what it means to be American.  What was I thinking?  The first thing to come to me was cliched vitriol.  It wasn't funny, it wasn't clever.  I thought about doing something I've never done before and remove the post from the blog.  I was taking no pleasure from it.  But I've left it up, let it stand on its own, a testament to my own naive optimism.  Also, to my own jingoism.  But witty jingoism, I hope.  I don't care which side of the ideological spectrum an idea falls on if it has wit.  It is the dull, witless, ideological, cliched rants that make me cringe.

And my response to yesterday's comment section is two words: Belgian Congo.  There is plenty of wit in that.

Now. . . about the Sundance narrative.  I really can't write it without sounding gross.  It would sound like bragging.  It would sound like I was living on the set of "Mad Men."  I had a Donald Draper moment.  I had a wonderful time because the veil of invisibility was lifted, because I was WAY cooler in the west than I am in my own home town, or so it seemed.  Everything went right from where I left off the narrative, and who wants to read that?  I might be able to tell you what happened in brief, but I sure as hell can't narrate it.  I would set myself up for untold but not unsuspected criticism.  The master narrative of our culture has changed without acknowledgement.  At least in that part of the culture I inhabit.  There are ideological epithets awaiting me if I tell the tale.  Not one.  Many.  Nobody likes to hear about someone getting what they want, especially if he fits my profile.  I am on the wrong end of every hierarchy for this to go right.

But for a moment, brief and everlasting, I was Hollywood.

You Might Be American If. . .

(My ad for Superbowl Sunday)

I was determined not to write about the Super Bowl, but I can't help it.  It is the ultimate American experience.  If people around the world want to know about Americans, they can do no better than to watch it.  It is THE American game.  I know what baseball fans are going to say, but the World Series isn't gauche enough a spectacle to be the ultimate American expression.  Nope.  Last night was the thing.  If your heartstrings were tugged as Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton crooned "America the Beautiful," if tears rolled up on you as Kelly Clarkson sang "The Star Spangled Banner," and/or if you pulled for an arthritic version of Madonna to make it through halftime without injury. . . you might be American.

Hell, America needs one of those corn pone comedians to do a "You Might Be American If. . ." routine.  Maybe we should start a blog, at least.  It will become very, very big.  Global.  Imagine the input from other cultures.  We could see ourselves as never before.  I just went to create one, but Google keeps all blogs by one person together, and I wouldn't want it linked back to here.  But THIS IS MY IDEA.  I CLAIM IT AND WILL SUE ANYONE WHO TRIES TO STEAL IT FROM ME.  You think that will hold up in court?  I will definitely set up the website as soon as I get to a neutral computer.

The Super Bowl had approximately fifty minutes of advertising.  And this is good if you are an American.  Today at work, you will need to be able to talk about the best and worst ads.  If you missed some of them, you can go to YouTube and see what you missed.  People will stand around Bob or Al or Frank's computer today as he pulls it up to watch again.

"Did you see this one?  Come here, come here. . . hey, you guys, look at this."

"Make it full screen so we can see it."

Nobody will watch the presentation of the Walter Payton Award, but it was necessary, part and parcel of Being American.  There were the Marines, of course, a color guard, and everyone cheered for a moment.  The fairness of the coin toss.  The booming voice of the stadium announcer, a throwback to more conservative times.  And of course, the Game itself.  Injury reports.  Tributes to NFL veterans who can barely walk or talk.  The manhood of playing hurt is an essential part of teaching the kids to "man up."  Drinking and Driving commercials.  Skinny, sexy women.

Nope, the Super Bowl had it all.  It is a tribute to dullness and cliched thinking, but so is Christmas mass.  They exist in Sacred Time where the temporal world becomes timeless, where participants reenter an eternal event, enduring and everlasting.

There Is Nothing That Competes With Habit

Here's a photo somewhere between "Lonesomeville" and "Carnival Selavy."  I like it.  It makes me happy.  Or was it "Circus Selavy"?  The lines are open.  Vote for your favorite now.

Life has fallen back into the same old routine.  As the song goes,

There is nothing that competes with habit,
And I know it's neither deep nor tragic.

(go listen here if you want)

And all the "new" feelings and emotions and desires are suppressed by the dead, dull lives that do not want you to live them or to speak them out loud.  Nurse Ratched gives the tepid, evil smile and speaks in a sloe, slippery voice:  "Do you want me to tell your mother?  You don't want that, do you?"

I wish I was both young and stupid,
Then I could have the fun that you did.

 I've tried to take the medicine, but I get so little pleasure from ideology.  It is an effective weapon, of course, especially against those who do not know the language.  Something must resist, though, that incessant droning.

I could follow you and search the rubble,
Or stay right here and save myself the trouble.

They walk so carefully in conservative clothes, turning slowly and gently afraid they will break the China.  The medicine helps with that.  I'll run away, I think.  I will join the carnival.  I will travel with a circus.

I could make a killing.

Tarnished, not Guilded

I tried again today to write the narrative.  I wrote it for a long time.  It sucked.  I'm afraid it won't get written.  It is terrible, I know.  Everything is.  Perhaps if I let myself make things up, if I just created events that didn't happen, it would fly, but I can't do it.  I want to tell what happened in an unbelievable way.  I want to guild the tale rather than tarnish it.  Perhaps it will come to me later surprisingly.  This is the danger I run of doing everything live rather than sitting on it until it is complete.

Of course, that might not be the problem at all.

Repress or Exult

I just wrote for an hour and deleted.  I was up until wee hours last night shooting for a second night in a row.  I'm beat.  I tried to tell you about it, but I didn't come off so well.  That's what happens when you try to tell people about yourself, though, when you try to explain the internal shift that is occurring and try to explain desire.  You can't explain desire.  You can only repress it or exult in it.  But you will regret it any way you go, whether you talk or repress or act.  There is no winning with desire.

So no narrative today.  I'll get back to Sundance tomorrow, I hope.  It is Friday and my desire has turned upon itself since last night.  I only want to sleep.  I have not abandoned anything, though.  I am only (temporarily) incompetent.

Ruined.  I shot again last night, just pretty fluff the model wanted, something she could put up in the house and show mom and dad.  I pay back.  All digital.  850 frames.  Again, I figure there have to be five or six good ones.  But she got there late and we took a long time as she changed outfits and then it was late and I pushed the button once more and approached for a high five.  Good job, I said.

She is not a bubbly girl.  She is even kind of mean.  She is very critical and is mostly negative in her comments.  The last time we shot together, she hurt my feelings a bit (lot), but when the shoot was done, I thought at least I don't have to see her any more.  Perhaps, though, the images seduced her because she has been bothering me about coming back.  I don't hold grudges if I can help it, and though I couldn't be as vulnerable with her as I was before (expecting that they are going to be very vulnerable, too), I said sure.  I thought she would show up with a trunk full of cheesy clothes from the mall that are a little redneck girl's idea of fashion, but she showed up with nothing at all.

"What are we going to shoot tonight," she asked me.  I was flummoxed.

"You didn't bring anything?"

"Just what I have on."

My mind was racing.  What were we going to do?  I'd already shot with her twice and have been gone a lot since, so the studio hasn't anything new.  I grabbed together some things lying around and we put together a couple different looks.

"I want to try a shot I saw on the internet," she said.  Try a shot?  And then she was on the ground in her underwear stretching out like a gymnast.  "I have to loosen up for this," she said.  I couldn't wait for this.  Then she draped over the back of the couch with her head on the floor and her back bent, bringing her legs behind her head.  Sort of.  She grunted and her face went from red to purple, big veins popping out in her forehead.  "How's that," she grunted.  I wasn't sure.  "Here," I said grabbing my camera, "let me take a picture and you can see."  After she looked at the photo, she gave me instructions on how her legs should be.  I have to say, she was determined.  She would get up and pant and puff and sit on the couch for a minute and then try it again.  I had no idea what she had in mind, but I kept taking pictures.  After about half an hour of this (successful or not I don't know), she said, "Well, maybe I'll just appreciate the other model's picture."

As I said, it was late when we finished, and I never get the idea that this girl particularly likes me but think that she simply comes for the pictures I can give her, so I began to clean up the studio as she got back into the clothing she came in.  Then she grabbed a beer and sat on the couch.  She didn't say anything, just sort of got comfortable.  I wasn't so much, though, and started making conversation.

"So tell me a story," I said.  But she didn't.  She did, but it wasn't a story in that it had no conflict, no resolution.  It was just flat.

"I'm pretty boring," she said.  "I don't do much."

"No fear," I said.  "I have plenty of stories."

So I told some.  She didn't react to them very much, but she made no move to leave.  I felt like a bad club performer with an audience who was talking among themselves, that same sort of tension gripping my gut.  What do I do, I wondered?  It was now past midnight.  I had only five hours sleep the night before.  I dreaded the morning and the factory the next day.  And so I said, "You're gonna love me when I send you these pictures.  You're gonna beg for me to shoot you again."

"I'm excited," she said.

"But we will have to shoot for me next time."

"O.K."

And Then I Hit "Publish" at the Top of the Page

Just spent an hour writing more of the Sundance narrative, but it was forced shitty clunky stuff that was far too literal a telling, so I have abandoned it for now.  Last night, I shot with Drug Skinny again.  I did it because I like her.  I did it because she wanted to.  I did it because I am back at the factory leading the deadening dull life I lived before.  And so she came in an outfit she wanted to shoot in.  I got her out of that as quickly as I could, of course, but I had no idea beyond that and I was wrong.  I love her, though, for indulging me, and when she was back in costume, I said, "Were you posing in the mirror in this today?"

"Maybe," she giggled.  I didn't have to say anything to her.  She just moved from place to place and I simply pulled the trigger again and again--over seven hundred digital times.  She was happy, so I was happy, too.

"You want to get something to eat?" I asked her.  I had sweated through my shirt.  When I am shooting for me, everything is very slow and deliberate and I take very few pictures.  The yield, however, is very, very high.  Seven hundred digital images.  I was hoping for a few good ones.

But I am being cavalier rather than truthful.  I had anticipated shooting something else with her this night, something we'd talked about over email too late at night while I was working at my computer on images I need to process and send out and listening to a large library of music that makes life seem better than it is.  She was there, too, on the other end of the internet sending me messages, and I spoke in precarious metaphors not wanting to say the thing itself for fear of. . . just for fear.  I would shoot with my Leica, I thought, black and white film, low light and grainy, unholy, exciting things that would transcend the act itself. . . .  I'd not slept very well at all anticipating it.

But like most outrageous people I've met, Drug Skinny's outrage is a defense, and not far below the surface lies a very conventional person, and even more than that.  She and I had not been speaking of the same thing at all.  Besides, I told myself, the batteries on the little Leica flash were dead.  Maybe I was relieved.  I would settle for shocking tales over sake.

Since I've been home, I have been swamped with requests to shoot from models I've shot with before and from new models who have simply seen my stuff.  I am trying to limit myself to shooting once a week.  I am too far behind as it is, and truly, all of it in the end is work on top of work and my health begins to deteriorate.  I want, rather, to go to yoga and come home and read.  I want to visit with friends and have slow dinners.  And. . . dare I speak it. . . I may even wish for. . . romance.

And so, of course, I've agreed to another shoot tonight.  And the coming week's calendars are already filling up.  I wasn't going to do this any more, I remember.  I was going to go out with the big camera and shoot in the streets.  Daylight.  Fresh air.  Social content.

I am too easily flattered, of course, and this other is like a drug.  Just one more and then I'm done.  O.K.  One more.

Well, this is no better than what I wrote about Sundance, but it is late and the factory whistle is blowing.  This is it.  "Publish."

I, of course, didn't want to go out that night.  Why?  We had a lovely place to chill after a long day.  We'd gone to the convenience store that was downstairs and gotten beer and nuts and things for breakfast.  And now I was on the couch, feet up, watching the 49ers play the Giants in the NFC Championship Game.  If I turned my head to the right, I could see the snowy slopes and powdered rooftops of other buildings.

"Where do you want to eat," Dick asked as the game wore down.

"I don't know.  Here's a list of places in the Canyons.  Do you see anything?"  I was hungry, but I didn't want to go to Park City.  Dick picked out two restaurants a few walking minutes from our room and said, "Let's go."

Downstairs, Dick decided to ask the pretty adolescent girl behind the desk for her recommendations.  Her advice was a place that served everything with a Mexican theme.

"They've got the best nachos in the world," she cooed.  Dick said, "Really," with real earnest.  It was not a question but an affirmation.

Outside I told him, "We're not going for nachos, I can tell you that now."

We ate instead in a little tapas lounge with intimate seating, two televisions showing the football game, and an extended family of Giants fans wearing Jerseys.  There was that and a big picture window which looked out onto the slopes and Dick and I still in our ski clothes.  The game went into overtime.

"You want to go for a drink in town?"

Sundance.  We'd heard it was wall to wall people, the streets crowded shoulder to shoulder.

"I don't know," I said.  "Maybe we should just shower up tonight and hang.  We can go into town fro dinner tomorrow."

"Let's just go in for one," Dick said.

We'd travelled to hard places together, and in our little adventure group there was only one rule.

"Sure," I said.  "Sure, let's go."

We didn't shower, didn't change.  This was going to be quick.  We simply got onto the shuttle bus and took the ten minute ride.  And then. . . we were in the middle of it all.  And it was beautiful.  We were dropped at the bottom of the hill looking up Main Street as it climbed, drifting to the right slightly, the old buildings looking as it must have when the town was founded.  Except tonight it was Hollywood.

We wandered up the street one time looking into windows, then came back the other side.

"Let's go in here and get a drink," he said.  There was a line to get in.  There were lines everywhere.  I don't do lines, but Dick wanted to go, so we queued up with the others.