WTF

Originally Posted Friday, December 21, 2012

This is my last day at the factory for awhile.  I am nervous as I don't know how to do anything but work and worry any more.  Suddenly, the luxury of free time seems a burden, something that demands to be used wisely, productively, and I feel neither wise nor productive.  Surely you will say, "Relax, just enjoy not being at work," but learning to relax again could take the entire vacation.  And then, just as I begin to feel mostly human--POW!--there is the cruel return to the factory.  You can see the terrible state I am in.

I am not enamored with the layout of this site.  I keep trying to fix it, but I can't.  I want a simpler design like the one I had on the site I shut down, but Google doesn't seem to have that option any longer.  There are too many variables with this one but too few where I want them.  I don't even know if you see the post titles.  They show up on my screen sometimes in either pale gray or pumpkin, but sometimes I have to move my cursor over them to see them.  No, I am far from pleased. 

Everyone I know is either going away or having family in for the next week or so, and so this monkish life becomes something tangible, something real.  It is most of the time a mere abstraction for there is so much else to do that I barely even notice.  I read about an eighty-nine year old man who lived alone in an apartment in Newark.  SuperStorm Sandy damaged his building and knocked out power.  That is how he spent the end of his life.  Holy shit, I says. Of course he could have spent it with his eighty-five year old girlfriend that he met ten years ago.  See?  There are lots of good options. 

And that is why I keep telling myself (and you) that I must get out of the studio and quit making up fancies and get into the streets and photograph a little REALITY.  Whatever that is.  My realities all end up being so much different from those of others that I wonder if I don't make them up as well.  Once you begin, you know, it is difficult ever to stop.  Your vision is altered and you begin to see everything in a different way.  It is O.K. until you begin to express yourself.  And then the trouble begins. 

I want the text centered under the title of the blog.  Why can't I do that?  It is driving me crazy.  I can't write any more until I attempt to fix it.  WTF.