Shutterbug

I have a lot of cameras.  I have a lot of Leica M cameras, and I love them.  They are beautiful and elegant.  But the best pictures I take are very often with that clunker Canon 5D DSLR with the 24-105mm lens.  That "kit" is as big as anything you'll ever want to carry, and yet. . . almost all of my good street photos in NYC were made with it.  How?  Really. How?  There is no way to hide the thing which is why in just about every photo, somebody is staring straight into the lens.  No, not so many as that, but many.  

I took this photo of the boxer/murderer with it.  He is standing behind the apartment building where he lived with his mother in the same spot he and "the boys" once built their cardboard fort.  I took several photos using the zoom lens at different focal lengths.  It is a very wonderful tool which offers many options. This one shot at or near 24mm reminds me of those lonesome empty photos I made for my college photography classes using an old Mamiya film camera and a 24mm lens.  It was then my favorite way of seeing.  

I love those Leicas, but damn, that Canon 5D never lets me down.  

While slower and more laborious to use, I am enamored with the Fuji GFX Sii medium format camera, too.  

If you look closely, you can see little specks of the rain that had just begun to fall.  The richness of the images this camera produces is not to be denied.  

But enough camera talk.  That is just for the shutterbugs in the crowd.  A "professional" photographer, a real cocky, smarmy guy, once called me that.  He was being snide, but I loved it.  I'll never claim to be more than a real shutterbug.  It is outstanding.  My most favorite photographers were all just that.  It was their personal work, not their professional stuff, that is collected by museums and galleries.  

Just to let you know, I'm concerned about my health.  The left side of my body from my cervical vertebrae to my fingertips is functioning poorly, and I am taking too many drugs to deal with the pain.  It doesn't seem to want to get better.  Not sure of my next move.  I have no one to talk it over with.  It is impossible to talk to my mother about any of it.  

"We're a pair, aren't we?"

She truly has no concern for my plight.  Her own consumes her.  I'm just part of God's plan to take care of her.  So she has said.  I tried to tell her last night that I wasn't feeling so well, but she interrupted me to tell me about one of her CDs that comes due next month.  I feel a bit like an astronaut taking a space walk who realizes he has become untethered from the ship.  As they say, in space, no one can hear you scream.  You can scream, of course, but it will not do you any good. 

I went to the compounding pharmacy where my doc had sent a 'script.  It was in a crummy building in a crummy part of town, but inside it looked like the George Lucas film THX 1138.  I stood at a counter before a plate glass window that ran the entire length of the building looking into a huge white room with white counters where four people in white lab coats were, I assumed, "compounding."  A man came to the window and asked me my name and birth date.  Then he went to talk to another, older man who came back and said the drug required prior approval by the insurance company before they could make it.  I asked how much it would be if I just paid for it .  He smiled.

"Over a thousand dollars."

I'm supposed to call my doctor and blah blah blah blah blah.  

In the afternoon, I went to meet with my financial guy, the new one, the kid.  He wasn't there.  He was out sick, I was told.  

"Didn't he contact you?"

Then I began to think--maybe my appointment was for Thursday.  The reception lady checked.  

"Your appointment is tomorrow at 2:30."

I walked slowly and unsteadily across the parking lot back to my car.  Something is going wrong with my legs.  Or maybe it is in my brain.  

I drove across town to pick up negatives from the hipster film lab.  Then, unsure of what to do, I went to the cafe for a coffee.  Since the old fashioned photo booth went down, the place has been boring.  All the cool kids coming in "costumes" to make photo booth pictures are gone.  All that is left are a few sad sacks on computers taking up the most desirable tables hour after hour.  

I've been trying to write the next paragraph for too long now.  I can find no good way of telling it.  Back at my mother's, I was feeling desperate.  That's as far as I can get.  The rest is just too whiny and too grim. I'm being sucked downward in a vortex from which there is no escape.  Life as I have known it is over.  Done for.  All there is now, I think, is the waiting.  

Once upon a time, though. . . .