That Old Bitch Time

Originally Posted Wednesday, November 20, 2013

I've gotten some emails from a model I shot with maybe a year or so ago.  She was one of those Disney kids.  Not literally, but an African-American girl who listened to top forty music.  After we shot, I sent her the images we made, and she asked me not to post some of them.  O.K. I said, and then I heard from her no more.  Imagine my surprise the first time she wrote to ask me how I was doing. 

"Remember me?" she asked.  "I'll be coming home next month.  Do you want to shoot?"

"Do you remember me?" I wrote back.  "Do you remember what I do?" 

Last night she wrote again, told me she was in Los Angeles going to school.  She included a photo of herself there on the streets of L.A. looking as pretty as ever still smiling like a Disney Kid.  It just brightens my waking and sleeping hours. 

Which sometimes get dark.  Sometimes I feel like the Smokey Mountains, those gentle, rolling low "mountains" that were once like the Himalayas, tall and sharp and hard.  Now moss grows on those Smokeys.  They are still attractive, just not so amazing or dangerous.  Its a place to take the kids. 

"C'mon kids, we're going camping in the Smokey Mountains.  We'll go fishing and see the Ruby Mines."

"Yaaaay!" 

The onward rush of time. 

I fell asleep on the couch last night watching the Mike Tyson special on HBO.  I didn't even eat dinner.  I just had a bowl of edamame and then didn't have the energy for cooking.   I had been up late the night before.  No big deal.  I just don't enjoy it any more.  I like the way I feel when I am rested.  I love the way it feels when you are fully in the present sucking the life out of the day.  The night, as Hemingway said, is another thing.  I like the Hemingway lifestyle, up early working, down early sleeping.  What comes between is ferocious and without compromise.  More than anything, I think, this is what separated him from Fitzgerald.  Poor old Fitzgerald as Hem called him.  People think it was the drinking that did Hemingway in, but it wasn't.  It was two airplane crashes back to back.  Damaged his liver.  After that, the drinking didn't help.  But take two airplane crashes back to back in less than twenty-four hours and see how you feel.  It was the drinking that ruined Fitzgerald, the world that broke Hemingway. 

Either way, they were both like the Smokeys.  Life will wear you down.  It is in no hurry, as Hem said, too.  But you can count on it. 

Anyway. . . the Disney Kid wants to go camping and maybe to the Ruby Mines, and there is that. Thank God Apple Radio has a top forty station.  I need to catch up on the culture.