Stasis

Originally Posted Tuesday, December 18, 2013

Here's a picture from another of my favorite photographers.  His photography is becoming increasingly difficult to find.  I am lucky to have stored some of his work.  He has gone into a semi-retirement I hear, but I'm hoping he isn't done for good. I'm a fool for such things. 

The season just got to me last night.  I put on a college radio station listed in iTunes, WXVU from Villanova University.  You can get it without iTunes, too.  Boys and girls, it was really very good.  I will be trying a lot of the stations listed there.  They even list the Country Club College radio station from my own home town.

But last night, Villanova was playing Christmas songs of every type, some really quirky things that I had never heard, and some of the traditional alternative songs by every band and singer you can imagine, too.  It went on and on and on.  And as I sat alone in my little office cooking up images that I have ignored for far too long, I began to feel the aloneness--palpably.  It wasn't simply a feeling, but a thing itself like hunger or disease, a thing that can be avoided to a certain extent with certain precautions.  In part, loneliness seems to prey upon things that are still.  Stasis.  It senses the lack of movement.  That is, at least, what I thought last night.

Early enough, I went to bed, but I woke in the night with the thing itself in bed with me whispering its dull horrors in my ear.  And knowing that my stasis had brought it on, there was nothing to do but move. And so, too early, long before the cloudy, humid dawn, I was up making coffee and feeding the cat.  From what I can tell, the cat has some of it, too.  She curls around my feet for protection from it.  She certainly doesn't like to move any more.  Stasis.

I will get back to laying the philosophical groundwork for this new blog, I think, but the road is twisted and the trip unplanned.  I tried writing about another author this morning, but my head was full of snakes eating toads and there was no hope for writing about other thing.  So here is my morning confession for only you.  It is a secret like this blog that hardly anyone knows about.  It has been well-kept so far.