Legacy

I've been having crazy dreams.  Does that mean that I'm sleeping well or not sleeping well?  I think it might be "not," for I also have crazy thoughts during the night.  I had to get up earlier than I would have liked this morning because I was remembering a boy who was ancillary to my life from the 9th grade on.  I can't really give much information about him here for some people might know who he is.  He was kind of a well-known local sports star.  He and I went to different schools across town then, but there was much interconnectedness and rivalry.  I was in a band that had been on the local morning tv show and we played some big events, so I was "visible," too.  We were two different types, though.  He was a sports star and dated a pretty cheerleader, a cute Dick and Jane style affair.  They were class "royalty," school leaders, in the right clubs, etc.  I was of a lower social order and ran with the feared criminal underbelly.  

As it turned out, having never met him but having heard his acclaim, I "went out" with his girlfriend.  That meant meeting up with some mutual friends at a school event.  Her request.  As kids would do then, much of the "affair" was over the telephone.  And, of course, in school gossip.  It lasted for a few weeks, but being young and in different schools. . . there is just so much to be said over the telephone.

The two schools combined in high school, and that is where I met him.  I think I'd had a car for about a week or two, and in the school parking lot, I backed into another car.  Turned out to be his.  He was not around, so I went to "the office" and left a note.  A few days later, he showed up at my house with his father with a bill for the repair.  

In college, we were associated through a mutual friend.  He was living with a different cheerleader from our high school now who was of some ill-repute.  I'm trying to be delicate here.  She "took a liking" to me.  Over one Christmas break when we all went home, she moved her bed to her sister's house as an invitation that turned into a plea.

One I couldn't accept. 

They got married and after graduation moved away to some small Georgia town.  The marriage didn't last too long. 

Skip ahead.  I met a woman in my new hometown at a bar on The Boulevard.  He did, too, and he took a liking to her.  She didn't care for him and said she wanted to go out with me.  In the end, however, he convinced her, and they got married and "raised a family."  Still married as far as I know.  

Why was this popping into my head in the wee hours?  It was nothing I wished to think about.  But the mind works like lightning, and there was much, much more.  

All this after staying up and watching old "You Bet Your Life" clips with my mother.  Groucho Marx was a mean man trying to be funny, and he sometimes was.  The entire show revolved around his unscripted quips, and the YouTube clips were full of outtakes that never made it to broadcast  Those unguarded moments were some of the best.  We stayed up too late, though, watching a show at various times sponsored by DeSoto motor cars and Chesterfield cigarettes.  Marx spent much of the show's time lighting his big cigars.  I'm guessing it gave him time to think.  The show was about as ribald as anything on broadcast television today.  

But that is not what I am really here to tell you. 

"In the morning, I got up and shot an elephant in my pajamas.  How it got into my pajamas I'll never know."

I have never been a Dolly Parton fan.  I have never had anything against her, but that hillbilly cornpone persona and the silly pop tunes never had an appeal for me.  And I didn't know that Tim Curry had ever done anything beyond "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."  They both died at 80.  A lot of people do, I guess, and it makes me think.  There isn't a lot of time.  

Perhaps that is what gave me a hankering to make a video of the photographs I took one weekend spent in Manhattan early this century.  I made a lot of pictures in a few days as I always do in New York.  Yesterday, searching for something else in my horribly extensive and messy trove of photo files, I stumbled upon some of them.  A lot of them, really, though not all of them.  I was stunned by the impact they made in a short viewing.  One by one, perhaps, they are not so powerful, but taken together. . . wow.  While most street photographers strive to show the figure in the city, I was simply making portraits with little context.  That I could get so close to people unnoticed and capture them lost in their thoughts on a busy street in a busy city seemed amazing.

I decided I wanted to show the photographs and had an idea.  I opened a video editing app and dumped all the pictures in.  About two hundred and eighty of them.  Now there were not two hundred and eighty great and wonderful photos, and I culled them down to. . . 256.  Too many?  Too much?  That is what I wanted to find out.  So I simply put them on a timeline in random order and tried to upload the file to YouTube.  I was not going to make it public.  I simply wanted to be able to watch it on a television and start to think about how I might edit them.  I tried three times, however, and never succeeded.  I still don't know why.  Here is what I do know, though.  Trying to arrange those little thumbnail images in the editing app ain't easy.  Not that many of them.  It is near impossible. 

There were other considerations, too.  I don't do much video editing, and I keep forgetting how to use the app, so I have to pause often and watch a tutorial.  Many questions, many tutorials.  But there was more to think about.

Watching a stream of photos on a screen without narration maybe isn't the thing; maybe I need to write a script.  I realized, however, I have little to say.  

"Here are some photographs I took one weekend in Manhattan, mostly in the SoHo, all within a couple blocks of one another."

That's about it.  I don't want to be on camera talking about the photos anyway.  I'd probably use an AI narrator. I'd need a script.

It just keeps getting more complicated.  It is easier just to forget about it.  

Why do I want to show the photographs anyway?  By my quick calculation, I have shared seven or eight thousand photographs here on the blog, so of course the quality is diluted.  Take thirty of the best images, though.  Thirty out of seven or eight thousand.  You'd get a distinctly different impression, I think.  I've thought the same about the writing.  I had an idea of turning twenty years of blogging into an epistolary novel.  Twenty years of daily writing curated into two hundred pages or so.  It would seem very different.  

How much time do I have to do all that?  Not just one weekend in Manhattan, either.  Jesus, there are so many images that impress me.  But I am indecisive and lazy.  I can't even curate the Lonesomeville series into a book.  I did.  I have.  But it still needs work.  I need help.  I need assistance.  

I'll make the fucking video of my weekend in Manhattan one way or another, for good or ill, without narration, just a twenty minute slideshow set to street sounds and music.  I need to get somebody to record an hour of street noise and send it to me because I'll never get out of my mother's house to do it.  

People just don't get that.  Q was in town with his family.  He texted that he was on my side of town if I wanted to get together.  T is coming to town and wants me to go with him and Alain to the fights on Saturday night.  My life is not flexible.  If I make plans, I can get away for a lunch or a brief happy hour.  That is all.  Otherwise, I'm in the service of someone unable to take care of herself.  

It is not an easy concept to grasp, apparently.  Given that, I can't expect anyone to understand the devastating impact that years of this with the prospect of years more ahead have had on my mental and physical wellbeing.  

I am not well.  

But I am beginning to think about "legacy."  I've done a lot of work.  I hate to think of it all just going to the dump.  I'm no Dolly Parton or Tim Curry, but I'd like to get my shit together and give it a shot.  It will probably take me forty hours to put the video together.  I need to quit jerking off and napping in the few hours I have to myself every day and get to work with a purpose.  I'm absolutely certain I will be disappointed once it is done and feel as if I have humiliated myself once again, but, you know. . . that never stopped Dolly.  That shit could just as easily have gone the other way.  I mean. . . she ain't no Mozart.  

And I ain't no Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, no Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or Hemingway.  But fuck, man. . . such things don't seem to stop a lot of people. It didn't stop Dolly Parton, and look what happened.  There seems to be room in the world for all sorts of things.