$40 Bad Photograph

I have so many things to write about today that I am overwhelmed.  There are topics for the week, though if I don't write them today, most will probably disappear.  Even as I begin writing now, I can feel them drifting away into forgotten places.  What was it, I ask myself with slight panic, that was so startling?  I took notes on one that I guess I'll save, the thing I had originally intended for this post.  It will hold best for another time.  And there is the doubling up on Flunitrazepam and whiskey which cannot really wait.  And then there is the most wonderful shoot I had last night with the feminist painter.  I'll have to make some choices.

So the picture at the top of the page is a testament to my inabilities with the 8x10 camera.  There are too many controls.  My hands must go everywhere and check everything before I take a picture.  It takes forever as I tell the model to stand and wait and hold on and almost.  Then I put the dark cloth over my head and look at the upside down reversed and very dim image on the ground glass to check the composition and focus.  But my eyes are bad and I can't see the goddamned image well when I'm under and I begin to think of the model standing before me knowing she is wondering if I have a clue as to what I am doing and knowing that the image is instant and in four minutes she will know that I do not and I suddenly need to go to the bathroom and realize I am sweating and breathing rapidly and so I give up and put in the film and take the freaking picture.

"Oh. . . hmmm.  I guess I didn't have you framed very well.  I don't get it.  It looks like there is something wrong with the rollers.  I don't care for that dark image at the bottom of the frame.  I wonder. . . ?  Let's try this again at the end of the shoot, O.K.?"

The whole time I'm looking around for help.  Why isn't there someone here to help?  I should never have bought this camera, this processor, this film, I think in a long, slow, continuous panic.  I am not this sort of fellow.  I don't have the money for this.  I am a failure.

The rest of the shoot, though, was amazing.  She was.  She had been on the wrestling team in high school.

"They had girl's wrestling at your school?"

"I was on the boy's team."

She had sent me jpegs of some of her paintings.  She is still in college and she is really very good.  You'll see.  She does self-portraits in her own photography and so she poses for herself all the time.  She is a life drawing model at another art school.  It all showed.  The way she moved with power and grace was something.

It was a nice end to a very harrowing week.  I had to run a lot of scary meetings at the factory and was experiencing much stress as some were going to be dicey.  In the end, I came out well, but at some significant cost to my mental if not physical health.  And it was the same with photography.  I spend a lot of time trying to arrange shoots on my very limited schedule.  I had arranged four shoots.  Three did not show.  And I didn't get an email from anyone for days.  I thought that my email must be broken, so I sent a message from one account to the other to see.  Nope.  Everything worked fine.  I had simply fallen off the radar screen.  I was on the other side of the moon.  I had no significance to anyone any more.  Even visits to the blog had dwindled to pitiful numbers.  And the outing I had thought I'd have on Friday night was only vapors.

And so I made a mistake, perhaps.  I went alone to the Boulevard in my own home town to watch the lighting of the Christmas tree.  And the Boulevard was packed.  The season had begun in earnest with happy couples and happy families milling around the park and sitting in cafes and restaurants and skating in the ice rink that had recently gone up.  I felt like an oddly shaped dog.

On Saturday morning I found myself at the Christmas Parade.  I'd taken my camera thinking to make some sort of story of it all, but I can't do that in a town where I am known.  I knew that going in.  Nothing but trouble lies that way.  And so I walked from one end of the street to the other watching dancers and bands and boy and girl scouts in their slow, stuttering march.

When I got home, though, I had a package from Ellen Rogers.  I'd been waiting for this.  I opened the tube and took out the two prints she had sent me.  Well, there was some good news, at least.  I would take them for framing right away.  Quite nice.  Quite a treat.

The shoot with the feminist painter went long, over four hours.  Much of it was talking and drinking wine, but at the end of it I was hungry and tired.  I went for late sushi alone and sat on the vacant veranda in the pleasant coolness of the evening.

Dinner and day done, at home I poured another scotch and thought about bed.  One Flunitrazepam had done nothing for me, so I thought I'd better try two.  I thought about Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix, but I figured I was in better shape than they were and that I'd be O.K.  Besides, I'd still not had an email and I'd checked the stats on the blog and they were still down.  Nothing to lose, really.  Down the hatch.

I woke at four.

I don't know what's wrong with me, with my sleep patterns.  It is four, always four.  Perhaps the cat does something.  She is mean that way.  She is really a sneaky, evil cat and if it weren't for me feeding her, I know she would do me in.  But it is not with a start I wake.  It is the same sort of waking you have normally after you've slept enough, a sort of slow coming to.  Except it is very, very dark and quiet.

I guess the doubling of the drug, though, did have some effect for I drifted back off into slumberland for a while, and when I did get up, I could feel the wet sand heaviness in my arms and legs and head.

I must prepare for a dangerous holiday season.  It has begun and will last the month.  What shall I do?  Perhaps I'll buy a small live tree and hang some ornaments upon it.  I'll get the fireplace going and put on some holiday songs.  That should bring me down.  My hillbilly mother won't be here as she is going to Europe in a week and won't be back until Christmas day.  Don't ask me.  I don't get it.  My buddy who is single is headed for Italy and may even see Red while he is there.  I'd better make a serious plan.  Cuba, maybe.  Something. Some place.

Well, there's the emotional weather report.  The forecast calls for beautiful days and very dark nights and happy families all around.  I'd better think about making my holiday cards soon.  It will all be over before you even know it.