Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Beyond Fascination



I sit outside in the fading light after a day at the factory with the feral cat, a male cardinal, a glass of scotch and a bad belly.  The feral cat stays around after eating much longer than usual.  She preens herself on the deck or in the mulch, ignoring my overtures of friendship but enjoying, I think, the safety I seem more and more to her to provide.  I don't want a pet, but everything desires safety if not love.  In youth, I distrusted safety, of course.  It was a bourgeois concept.  There is no safety, I would say, only the illusion and entrapment, remembering the old fable of the wolf and the dog.  But I am safety for the feral cat and she looks all the better for it.

The whiskey is merely to counter the bad belly.  It is not a terrible belly, but it is a bad belly that is actively uncertain.  The whiskey settles it for which I am grateful.  There is a utility in liquor for sure.  I don't usually have my first whiskey this early, but tonight I do out of necessity.  As it settles the stomach, it dulls the senses.  The sun is sinking.  It is dark.

I took all of these color slide images in one afternoon walking around a part of town fairly alien to me.  I must have been on fire.  I remember getting them back from the lab thinking that they were really something.  I was becoming a star at the university then, but I was soon to leave and return to a normal, working existence.  I would strive and struggle, and for a long time, photography was left behind.  These were in many ways the end of the beginning of what might have been a photographic dream.  But that story is familiar beyond fascination. 

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