No Kings Day

O.K. O.K. O.K.--I have a bunch of new images, and I'm excited about that, but I have to calm myself and be careful.  I want to dump them all here at once, but then what?  I'll have nothing to show upcoming.  So. . . I must slow my horses, as they say, and save them for the long run.  

I'm not saying they are great images.  Nope.  What I am saying is that I got out of the house with my camera and trained it on actual live people.  I like reinventing old photos with A.I., but getting out and taking new pictures gets the old blood flowing.  

The gall darn things looked awesome to me when I first unloaded them.  Now that I am going to share them with you, though. . . I don't know.  Just give me a little bit of slack.  It's been a long, long time.  

I had to go out of town to do it.  I can't shoot in my own little village, and I've walked the streets of Gotham too many times, so I drove to a town with a huge farmer's market twenty-five miles north.  I hadn't been for years.  It is a small town with a big and wonderful downtown, bigger and nicer than the Boulevard.  It is difficult to justify this, but it is true.  There is a broad avenue with lanes running opposite one another on either side of a big median island, beautifully landscaped, each side of the road filled with restaurants, coffee shops, and bars.  Upscale and down.  There is a good bookstore and a lot of little tchotchke shops and clothing stores.  Side streets and alleyways, too, are full of shops and restaurants.  But the farmer's market takes over the town on Saturdays, and it has doubled in size since the last time I was there.  This part of the state is agricultural, and the produce is spectacular.  Big bins filled with mushrooms as big as your head, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, potatoes, squash, and pumpkins. . . the list is never ending.  Vendors line the streets selling every kind of food, jewelries, pet supplies. . . I don't know what all.  My head was spinning.  I was out of fucking town!

I took two Leicas, one film and the other a Monochrom digital.  I was using the film camera first.  Shooting film is fun, and the shutter on that Leica is just a whisper.  I had no idea if I was hitting focus, but the day was bright and brilliant, so I set the f-stop to 16 and had great depth of field.  I have always been pretty good at shooting from the hip, but it had been a very long time.  I ran through the first roll of film pretty quickly, so I sat down to reload. . . but I couldn't.  I hadn't brought any film.  I searched the bag over and over again.  Really?  All part of being out of practice.  I put the camera into the bag and pulled out the black and white digital.  At least I had sense enough to bring that.  

I wandered around for a long while, but I had gotten there late and in awhile the stalls began to close.  The crowd was thinning.  I'd been limping around with a bad neck and bad knee without thinking about the pain, such was my pleasure.  But now. . . I bought a coffee from a great coffee shop and took a table outside in the broad alleyway bordering the Main Street.  I thought I might take some pictures from my perch, but the fellow at the table next to me looked at my camera and said, "So you're a Leica man."  I nodded.  "So am I," he said.  He was a fellow probably my age.  He was wearing one of those silly pro bicyclist outfits with a rear view mirror attached to his head.  He was with a younger woman who turned out to be his step-daughter-in-law.  

"So where's your camera?" I asked.  

"They are at home."

I pulled out my other Leica and said, "If you were really a Leica guy, you'd be carrying two."

Turns out he has two old Leicas, an M2 and an M4.  He doesn't shoot them anymore.  

"You can't get film for them now." 

"Sure you can." 

"Where do you get it?" he asked.  He was living in another town nearby and there was no camera store there.  

"You can buy it online.  Amazon." 

We chatted a long time.  He had retired and moved here from Colorado.  He told me all about his photo career.  It was pleasant to sit and drink coffee and talk on a pretty autumn afternoon.  It felt good.  I was almost content.  

When he left, I sat for a bit by myself and watched the crowd before I decided to saunter toward the car.  

"I'm a saunterer," I thought, "a perambulator.  Isn't that something."

I looked into the shops.  I followed some people in Halloween costumes into a bar.  The bar was small and packed to the rafters.  It looked like fun, but I wasn't ready to start drinking yet.  It was a loud and rowdy crowd, and if I could have fit in, I might have taken some pictures, but I couldn't squeeze in further than the door, and so I retreated back to the street.  

I wandered a bit more and took a few pictures, but the market was closing and there were only stragglers now.  It was over.  The thing was done.  

Back in the car, I decided that I would take my roll of film to the new photo lab in town.  They would develop and scan my film in a day.  When I got there, though, to my surprise, for an upcharge, they could do it in an hour.  That was amazing, I thought.  O.K., I said and paid the premium.  I wanted to see what they could do.  

I crossed back through Gotham to my own side of town, but rather than going home, I decided to have a mimosa on the Boulevard at my buddy's place.  It was two.  Maybe I'd get something to eat.  

The place was busy, though, and service was slow, and it didn't seem the little bartender had any affection for me.  After awhile, I got a mimosa, but she didn't come back to take a food order.  My buddy was there and came over to chat.  He told me they had been doing great business, but that they were fucking up sometimes.  It was taking too long to get people's orders.  I just nodded and said nothing, and when he left, I paid up without ordering food.  Yea, he needed to get some things straightened out.  

By the time I got back to my house, the scanned files had already been dropped into my mail.  I was excited to see and opened the We Transfer files right away.  

Awful.  Just awful.  The scans were grainy, dusty, and in a few frames, scratched.  I was pleased with some of the images, but when I tried to work with them. . . they were just too shitty.  

I did the best I could, but I would have to pick up the negatives the next day and see if I had good exposures.  I would scan them again myself and see if I got a better quality.  I worked my ass off on this image of the bartender at the Irish pub, but I couldn't pull any details out of the file at all.  I sent it on to my Miami friend with apologies and a note saying I would scan the negs myself on Sunday.  

I won't use that lab again.  I'm much better off developing and scanning myself.  It is just a lot of work.  

There is a big difference between the digital b&w and the film.  I like them both and can't choose one over the other.  The digital images are gorgeous and easy to work with, but the film images have a lot of character.  They are truly and simply different beasts.  

It is another pretty day, and I could, I might, I should go to the farmer's market in Gotham.  Maybe.  Somehow it feels redundant.  Or, perhaps, I have "the fear."  Having done it once, can I do it again?  

I am thinking of afternoon mimosas.  

Next week is busy.  Appointments every day.  So if I am going to make pictures, today is it.  

O.K.  So let me tell you about No Kings Day.

What?

Commercial Fear

Commercial photography runs a wide gamut.  Portrait photographers, for instance, or the people who set up a backdrop and some lights to take pictures of your kid's soccer league.  "Picture Day."  Or those cats who take the family portraits.  There are people in every town who make "professional headshots."  There are wedding photographers.  Some of them have lucrative businesses.  There are those who do real estate photography.  Lighting interiors can be difficult.  Food photography is its own specialized endeavor.  

The great practitioners of what became known as "vernacular photography" began as professional photographers shooting mostly fashion: Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand.  And of course there was Saul Leiter.  

They all left their "pro" careers to make photos of "life."  

There are great fashion photographers who are artists in their own right.  They succeeded so well that they could do whatever they wanted.  Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, William Klein, Helmut Newton, Paolo Roversi, Sarah Moon. . . . .  And of course, Annie Leibovitz whose photo shoots are like movie sets.  

Yea. . . the gamut. . . .

Q did a pro shoot once for a yoga company if I recall.  Just him and his camera.  

Sky, of course, worked in the big leagues where there are a dozen people on location, sometimes for days.  You don't do catalog work alone.  

There was a woman in NYC who reached out to me back in my studio days who worked as a set designer for photographers who did "the glossies."  She did some very big shoots.  She liked my work but would have criticisms, too, mostly about accoutrements.  

"What the fuck," I told her, "ain't nobody but me doing everything." 

Sets, hair, makeup, clothes, lighting. . . .  For anything serious, you'd want a team.  

So. . . my buddy has been asked to submit some work for a clothing company's IG page.  It comes with a stipend, and if they like it enough, they fly him to Cali for the big money shoot for the catalog.  He wants me to take the pics.  

"Bahahahah," as Red says.  We did a shoot once oh so long ago for a new leather company in Italy.  They sent her a huge box of their bags.  Coincidentally, one of my close buddies was great friends with the Italians who were the owners.  Strange set of circumstances.  Red wanted me to do the shoot, but there was no planning.  We made no vision/mood boards.  I was working with nothing.  Red brought some outfits, did her own makeup and hair.  Totally amateur hour.  We shot and probably went to dinner, and the next day I edited the photos in my very non-commercial way.  In the big leagues, the photographer takes the photos and gives them to a digital retoucher who cooks them up for the client.  I kind of learned my lesson on that shoot.  The pictures turned out o.k. but I don't think they were anything a company would choose to use in a catalog.  

I felt that the clothes were getting in the way, so I asked her to ditch them and just let the bags do the talking.  They were Italians, I said.  It would be fine.  

I'll never know.  The company didn't get off the ground.  But we made some fun pictures that night.  

Red did any number of commercial shoots, and the photos looked nothing like mine.  They were crisp and clean and looked like what you would expect a commercial photo to look like.  She made money.  I have never made a dime.  I've sold some pictures, but I'll never recoup the cost.  

So. . . I want to do my buddy a favor, but there are people in town who do that sort of photography and have a commercial sensibility.  For this shoot, the clothes are what must show which is o.k. 'cause I wasn't looking to get him naked.  But this is Sky's thing, and I think of how disappointing my attempts would look to her.  If I could get that out of my head. . . and a lot of other things, too.  

The photo at top is the one I sent to my Miami friend.  That was my idea of a pub shoot.  I took this outside in the parking lot.  Edited crisp and clean.  

I'll fuck up the clothing shoot for sure, and I will disappoint my friend.  Sally Mann confesses the same sort of fears in her new biography.  She couldn't shoot for hire.  She turned down big money.  She was too afraid of failure.  It was a surprise to learn in order to make ends meet early on, she had done some wedding photography.  But when big clients came calling after she was famous, she couldn't do it.  The expectations were too much.  The fear of disappointing was too great.  

I'm glad I read that.  Her work was organic.  It came from inside.  Frank, Friedlander, Arbus, Winogrand, et. al., were not great commercial photographers and they gave it up to pursue the thing they felt inside.  I think Penn, Avedon, and Newton all loved the commercial work.  It was organic to them.  You don't see anything "personal" so much from them that doesn't look commercial. 

I taught students who wanted to be commercial photographers.  That was their dream, and they put all their energy into it.  They couldn't understand the works that I admire so much.  Commerce was organic to them.  It was in their blood.  

I am fascinated by people's old snapshot albums.  I used to buy them in flea markets when I saw them.  Strangers I could only know from those pictures.  Such things are organic to me. 

But I can take the pictures.  I'm looking at the clothing company's IG page now.  Clean and crisp and odd, I think.  I'll feel real funny doing it.  

I told my buddy we'd have to rent a studio in Gotham.  He needs to download some photos and make a mood board.  If he wants to do location stuff, we need to do some scouting.  

So there you have it.  I've made my case for failure.  I've covered my ass.  "I told you," I will say.  "It is not my thing."  

There is nothing like a challenge to make you face your weaknesses.  I've got plenty.  Sometimes failure is the only option.  

Anhedonia

This is my view as I take my evening cocktail.  The neighbors walk by and wave.  Some come up to say hello.  Little children in strollers look over and smile.  They astound me, some so small I wouldn't think their eyes would see so far.  After this, I go inside to start making dinner.  I'm glad I've pulled my camera out and started taking pictures again.  

I cooked up the photos I had taken with my Leica Monochrom b&w digital camera.  They were disappointing, of course, but I sent two of them to my Miami friend with a note:

I don’t think I’m really a social media guy.  I stopped by the pub on my way back to my mother’s house.  I shot a few pics with my Leica film camera which I’ll develop soon, and with my cool-assed Leica Monochrom b&w only camera.  This is how and what I shoot.  Whaaahaaa!

She wrote back:

LOVEEEEEEE

am I allowed to post these?

These are beautiful  

They really weren't bad.  They were actually O.K.  

Really?  I thought they would be all wrong.  Sure you can post them.  I’m doing them for you! 

I was relieved.  

stop underestimating yourself! You’re an amazing photographer  

Now you can go ahead and smirk at this exchange, but it was important for me.  I haven't had a single bit of what used to be called "positive reinforcement" for. . . how long?  Years?  I'm living in a void, a vast expanse of dread and nothingness.  If you are unfamiliar with it, to you my moaning rather sounds like either a terrible whining or a parody of a Samual Beckett play.  

I read this in the N.Y. Times today.  

Anhedonia has long been defined as a reduced ability to experience pleasure, but in more recent years, mental health clinicians also associate it with a lack of motivation to seek joy.

The foods that once tasted great might now seem boring. The museum that used to elicit feelings of awe no longer holds any appeal. Even getting out of bed might feel like a chore for someone with anhedonia — and they may start to withdraw from important people in their lives. 

Holy shit!  Bingo!!!  I've been too long in the Waste Land.  

Once someone comes up with a drug to treat this, commercial t.v. will be full of its ads.  

Yesterday, one of the kids reached out to me from the factory.  

Are you around next week? Finally getting around to the 2025 SunRail crawl. It’s next Friday! 

I used to be on a group text but haven't heard anything for a long, long time.  I figured I'd been relegated to the grave of dinosaurs.  

Later, I got another text from my old secretary.

Lunch next week? Maybe get a few of us together  

 I told them each I would have to check my mother's schedule.  So I did.  I'm not able to make it next week.  

The boys went to happy hour on Wednesday.  I couldn't go to that, either.  

I don't sleep.  In part, my mother roams around during the night banging things in the bathroom across the hall from my bedroom or in the hall closets that are even nearer.  But now there is pain.  I cannot find a position in which to lie that doesn't cause me neck pain, first small but growing to a stirring crescendo.  Neck, knee, and back.  Is any of it stress related?  

Anhedonia.  I was never a hedonist, but I used to laugh a lot.  I used to enjoy things immensely.  I used to have fun.  

On Wednesday, Michela turned 49. She considered forcing herself to celebrate, but when two friends offered to take her out, she said no.

First, she would have to spend time getting ready. Then, she would need to participate in conversation, act enthusiastic, appreciate the moment.

“All that takes so much effort,” she said. “I just don’t have the energy.”

Hmm.  Sounds too familiar.  

So if my feeling good about a few kind words in text annoys you, you can go fuck yourself.  

I'm glad I took that photo of my mother.  It captures the mood and tone of that moment sublimely.  

Now I must put my mother's morning meds together.  That's alliterative.  It could be a good title--"My Mother's Morning Meds."  It is Friday.  How do you celebrate?  

How will I?  

What IS My Gig?

I'm shaky.  Can't wake up.  The pain got to be too much.  Last night I put a lidocaine patch on my knee.  It seemed to work.  I put them all over my body.  Took muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatories.  Got woozy and went to bed early.  Slept.  I could still be sleeping.  Maybe should.  It is hard to tell what will come out of the miasma today.  

Oh. . . I remember some things.  My Miami pal sent me a link to her new website.  She graduated with a degree in digital media.  She made a really nice website for herself.  She told me to use Canva to make mine.  Said she would help.  So I went to Canva to try.  I was as lost there as I was in Squarespace.  I do think that some of Canva's templates are more appealing to me.  I made a rudimentary page and then ran into the same trouble as always.  I need to write some things about myself, the website, what I am doing.  Then I have to make decisions about which images to use and in what categories.  I want to remain "in the shadows" of the website.  I like the idea of an anonymous photographer and an anonymous audience.  Of course.  But my Miami friend is now part of the equation.  She became the audience for the website.  I like my smeary, blurry, naive vernacular  images.  The average Jill or Joe will not.  Suddenly, with just this offer of help, I feel the need to state a purpose for the site and to define my target audience.  Corporate shit.  

I don't want to.  

Last night, I tried watching some tutorials on how to build a website on Canva.  I lost interest in a few minutes. 

Still, it is probably good for me to look at my images in a different way.  Maybe.  The best artists say they don't listen to critics or look at reviews.  I don't truly believe them, though.  They must to some extent.  

In the afternoon, I took my Leicas to the Irish pub to see what kind of images I might make.  The bartender is a woman who saw the pics I took of my Miami friend and said she wanted me to photograph her.  I've not wanted to, but she was very nice when she saw me.  I told her Miami had asked me to take some pics for the website.  It was fairly early, but the bar was already getting crowded.  I walked around and took a few snapshots, but I quickly realized this was not my kind of gig.  I would tell my Miami friend so.  

But I wondered what was my kind of gig?  Maybe I'm not so very good at all.  

I left the bar and headed to the grocers to get what I needed to make dinner.  But when I got to my mother's house, she told me once again she'd already eaten and I didn't need to fix her any dinner.  I blew a gasket.  

"All you have to do is pick up the phone to tell me.  Then I won't have to spend my money and time at the grocers.  I can just get something for myself from my side of town."

Her side of town has no good restaurants.  It is all fast food chain restaurants over there.  

That set the tone for the rest of the evening.  

And so, the liquor, the lidocaine patches, the anti-inflammatories, and the muscle relaxers.  

And now I feel like Gumby.  

Oh. . . and my beautician cancelled on me at the last minute yesterday.  I look like a homeless cowboy.  I am thinking about getting a new beautician, but you know how that goes.  It is hard starting over with someone.  

Change, etc.  

My mother is up.  I'll need to attend now.  

Life is good.  Life is great.  Yay life.  

Busy-ness

Normally I write in the calm silence of the morning, but today my mother is up and banging around like a madwoman.  She is deaf, so everything she does is loud whether it is a grunt or setting something down on a hard surface, the slamming of a cabinet or the sliding of something across the table.  And it is nonstop.  So I have set my bluetooth speaker up near the doorway to the kitchen in an effort to muffle it.  Each "kaboom" jangles my nerves.  

I'm falling apart.  I'm losing both my sanity and my health.  Some nights I think now. . . . 

Writing with the music is more difficult.  I don't know what I was saying.  My mind drifts with the melodies.  My words get circumvented by lyrics.  

So. . . here's a photo from the few end of the roll pictures I took on Sunday.  They are nothing but small town amateur illustrations.  Here you see part of the Boulevard, the brick street, the bookstore in an old two story building, a woman dressed in what she imagines is an art festival outfit with her coddled baby stroller.  

This is my own hometown.  Adopted long ago.  It was not my birthright.  I come from a hillbilly house on the Little Miami River without an indoor bathroom.  Long, fun journey from there to floating on the French Riviera on a Crowned Prince's yacht.  

Still, I'll go to a hillbilly's grave.  No matter, we all go home in the end, I think.  

As I say, I don't get to the Boulevard much anymore.  The Boys are going to Happy Hour tonight.  I'm afraid my happy hours are catch-as-catch-can right now.  I had mine for a minute yesterday afternoon.  

I went for beer and boiled peanuts when the cleaning crew showed up at my house.  When I walked into the brewery, there was Crazy Larry.  He is always there.  It was early, however, and I thought maybe he wouldn't have come yet. But there he was, and so I felt obliged to say hello.  After I got my beer and my number, I sat down at his table.  He just looked up at me from his big, thick pile of scratch off tickets and said, "Hey, sorry. . . I'm going to be busy. . . ."  He held up his phone to show me something.  It looked like a lotto ticket.  Beats me what it was, but having been told to scram, I did.  

I was only being polite, but wow. . . .  Crazy Larry.  

After the beer and nuts, I drove back home by way of the Cafe Strange.  I pulled into the lot thinking to get a green tea.  I parked and sat in the car and didn't move.  In a couple of minutes, I pulled out of the lot and back onto the street.  I didn't have it in me.  I need to find a new cafe.  

Home, I got back to scanning negatives.  I have a good scanner, one of the best, but scanning is irritatingly slow, so while the scanner thumped and bumped along, I entertained myself with other things.  

The house was clean.  They leave it sparkling.  I told the woman who owns the business that there wasn't so much to do since I was staying with my mother, and unbelievably, she handed the money back to me.  I was sincerely touched, but of course I didn't take it.  The gesture alone was worth the price.  Some people just have heart.  

When the scanner finished up with the negatives, I unloaded them and put in a fresh batch.  I downloaded the scanned images and took them to the big computer to cook them up.  Shooting from the hip, just pointing the camera in the general direction of the thing you see, yields some surprising results.  Most are trash, but some. . . I don't know.  They seem almost intentional. 

But I'll save the rest for another day.  

As I worked on the images, the phone rang.  It was my mother.  

"Where are you?  What are you doing?  It is getting late!"

Yea.  I'd been gone for hours.  Time to hang up my little slice of life and hurry back to caretaking.  

When I got back to her house, she was flummoxed.  

"You didn't leave me the t.v.  I couldn't watch anything.  You didn't leave my pills, either."

Shit.  I hadn't, I guess.  I hadn't put together her two o'clock meds.  First time.  And I had left the t.v. on the FireStick and had forgotten to put it back to her commercial cable stations.  Obviously, she doesn't know how to put together her meds or how to work the remotes.  It was five.  I put together her two o'clock meds and gave them to her.  

"We'll do your eight o'clock meds before you go to bed."

I wasn't going to, but fuck. . . I made a Negroni and sat outside with her.  She wasn't wearing her hearing aids, of course, so whatever I said, I needed to say again much more loudly.  Our conversations have become extremely truncated.  

Negroni gone, I went in to cook dinner.  Cubed steaks with onions, baked beans, baked potatoes, and spinach.  The "baked potatoes" were done in the microwave.  The beans were from a can.  Cube steaks cook in minutes.  I wilted the baby spinach in a pan with olive oil.  Quick and easy.  

After dinner, I had to run to the bank to get my mother some money.  Her house cleaner was coming in the morning and my mother's cash was gone.  She hasn't had any for longer than she knows.  We're working on my bank account now.  Such things never occur to her anymore.  

After cleaning the kitchen, what was there left to do?  

Today I am up early washing bedsheets and preparing the house for the cleaner.  I have an appointment with my beautician just after noon, so I must go to the gym early and get home to shower so I can make the long trip to the other side of the county.  I never decided on what to do with my hair, so I will leave it up to her.  I'm getting fat and hideous, so maybe she will put pink in blue in my hair and tell me to get some tattoos and a pair of Doc Martins.  

I am seriously more Quasimodo than ever.  Every joint and broken bone in my body hurts right now.  My car was rear ended when I was in high school and my neck has been growing more arthritic ever since.  I've done something to fuck it up now and I can't turn or raise my head without shooting pain.  Tennessee and Alain both go to a woman for their necks.  She does dry needling.  I read an article in The NY Times this morning about bad necks and dry needling.  It seems to be the best thing.  $180/session.  I think I will have to try.  

And so, I march forth into the gaping mouth of another busy day.  All I have are a few amateurish photos and this.  This makes life just a little more palatable.  

All That Matters

I understand that some people dislike the idea of A.I. generated images, but listen, how many artists invent anything they use to make an image now?  Are there still painters making their own brushes, mixing their own paints?  They are dependent on big companies and manufacturers, and when they change a material or formula, the modern painter must adapt.  The printmaker is dependent on inks and papers they do not produce, each subject to market demands, so the thing you use may disappear in time.  There are few photographers making their own photochemicals and coating their own substrates.  There are some.  Wet plate photographers, for instance, but how many of them make their own cameras and lenses for capturing the image?  A couple.  Film photographers are at the mercy of big corporations who change film formulas all the time.  I was devastated when the Polaroid corporation quit making 669 film.  I had "invented" a process that was unique, but I was totally dependent on the film.  When that was gone, I turned to using a digital camera.  And then I was dependent on Photoshop to help me manipulate the images in long and laborious ways.  But PS updates change the way I can work, too.  I don't even call digital images photographs any longer.  And anyone using their phone for a camera is already balls deep into A.I. processing without even knowing it.  

So. . . when I take one of my photos into an A.I. engine and ask it to render it in some manner that I have refined from hours and hours of experimenting, I have to work with a lot of restrictions.  This image, for instance, has been sanitized.  It had to change the posture and exposure of flesh to satisfy its fascist guardrail needs.  It also changes facial features so that you don't do something bad to a recognizable person.  That, at least, is the policy of ChatGPT which is, in my experience, by far the best image maker . From there, though, I get busy.  After many tries, I will get an image that works for me.  I then take it into Photoshop and manipulate it there.  I alter some things and add things that didn't exist in the original.  And after awhile, through variable amounts of skill and luck, I'll get something I might be satisfied with.  Probably not.  But as the hillbilly's say, "Good enough."  

My point?  Image makers use the materials at hand to create a visual product.  They don't create the materials they use; they just work with what they've got.  In the end, though, all you have is an image.  Whether it is any good or not is an entirely different discussion.  

I just like trying to fuck a photo up.  I studied photography at the university with people famous for doing so.  Take a photo, then do something with it.  

Doug Prince, Todd Walker, Jerry Uelsmann.  They created the first MFA program in photography in the country.  It was quite something.  

When I studied with Uelsmann, his photographs were setting records for sales.  His prints sold for more than any other in history.  Long after I studied with him, Uelsmann married Maggie Taylor.  She upped his game in the digital realm and became quite famous for her work. The last time I heard him lecture, he laughed about it all.  He'd never made a digital photograph, had never used Photoshop, and he said that Maggie made him feel "like I've been teaching people how to play horse shoes all my life."  

We're all enamored by different processes, different outcomes.  And as always, things go to market.  

I had a bit of fun yesterday. . . briefly.  I left my mother's house around eleven after getting her set up for the day--meds, food, a home physical therapist--and I went to the gym.  I was at my house by twelve-thirty where I heated up some of the chicken stew I had brought with me from my mother's house.  And then. . . I put on some music and got to work.  Film canisters, film canister opener, scissors, film reels and housing tank all inside the changing bag.  I struggled for a bit feeding the film onto the reel, but then everything went smoothly.  I mixed the chemicals and brought them down to 68 degrees.  One minute pre-wash.  Six minutes in the developer.  One minute rinse with constant agitation.  Five minute in the fix.  Manual rinse in tank.  Hang to dry.  

The music was good.  I was standing at the sink looking out the window at the perfect day.  I didn't believe the photos were going to be any good, but I felt like I was doing something.  While the film dried, I worked on images on the computer.  Later in the afternoon, I cut and sleeved the negatives and looked at them on the light table.  There were photos of people on the end of each roll.  I don't know yet how focused they will be or if they are any good at all, but as I looked at the other bland photos on the roll, I decided I would only photograph people from now on.  It is what I like.  Strangers.  It is awfully hard to photograph people you know.  You feel you owe them something.  Photographing a stranger is different.  You aren't sure what you owe them.  You know nothing about them.  You don't know what they like or don't like.  You just know what you see.  It is somehow thrilling.  

Except, you know, for the everyday or vacation snap.  Here's "the wife."  Here's Uncle Charlie.  

Taking naked photos of your lover is another thing altogether.  It is crazy and complex.  

I will only use my camera on people from now on.  I've taken enough photos of houses and buildings and vacant lots and abandoned cigarette boxes and electrical meters.  I'm done with Covid photography.  

mine

I wanted to scan the negatives to see what I had, but it was time to head back to my mother's.  I needed to stop at the grocers to get "fixins" and go to the pharmacy to pick up her meds.  That has been a long and complicated story.  

I was back at my mother's house at five.  She was sitting in her chair in the open garage when I got the groceries out of the car.  

"Don't cook dinner for me tonight.  I'm not hungry."

"Uh. . . you could have called me and told me that before I got all this.  I could have picked up something for myself."

Blank stare.  

I would spend the rest of the evening sitting with my mother, t.v. on.  At home, I would have been scanning.  

Whatever.  My life isn't that difficult.  It just seems so.  

The Boulevard to Misery

Exciting news!  Stop the presses!  

"What does that mean. . . stop the presses?"

What would be the digital equivalent?  

Whatever.  It won't turn out to be anything anyway.  But. . . . 

I was able to limp from my house up to the Boulevard yesterday afternoon.  I took two film cameras that each had about a quarter roll of black and white film left to expose.  I was very indecisive about taking them at first.  I packed them up in a bag and left the house, then returned and ditched the cameras thinking I didn't want to take them, then, halfway down the block, I decided to retrieve them.  And so onward I began to trudge toward the crowd at the Autumn Art Festival.  

I sauntered down the blockaded Boulevard among and through the throng.  The day was gorgeous, blue skies and dry air, and the weather had enlivened the masses.  As I walked, however, camera in hand, I was met with suspicious glances.  It seemed that each and every person I passed looked me directly in the eyes.  And they weren't smiling.  WTF?  I simply held the camera by my side as I walked through the street.  I hadn't once put the camera to my eye.  

I need to be more incognito, maybe.  I've thought about wearing a big, old lady's dress and clunky shoes, but the beard would be the give away.  

So I walked sometimes shooting silently from the hip.  I looked at the booths full of schlock. Then I saw a fellow I had dinner with once at Travis' house, a fine artist of some repute. His booth displayed about ten large works, all very detailed graphite drawings.  I made a note to Google him when I got home.  

I walked the length of the Boulevard and when I reached the end just past the park, I sat down on a planter to watch the people roll by.  I finished up one roll of film sitting there, but I'm sure my settings were all off, for the small Leica CL has neither autofocus nor auto metering.  Yes, I'm sure everything will be out of focus and underexposed, but I was happy to finish a roll.  

I put the camera back into the camera bag and pulled out the other one, got up and began making my way back up the Boulevard toward home.  Somehow, very quickly, I managed to finish the remainder of the second roll.  It was late afternoon now and the crowd was thinning.  At the end of the Boulevard, I cut across Country Club College and onto the streets of my 'hood.  

When I got back to the house, I grabbed a water and went to the computer to Google the artist.  Then I had the idea to ask A.I. to create an image in his style.  Voila.  That is it at the top of the post.  

I took this from his website.  "Mild Nudity."  It's the Harsh Nudity that is the killer.  Stuff like that shocking painting by Courbet.  

But I'm excited to develop the film today and to be disappointed later on when I scan it.  And then, once again, I'll think that shooting film is stupid and will stick with not taking pictures with my digital cameras.  

It has become a vicious cycle.  

I am never free to pursue anything for very long now anyway.  The afternoon had worn on and the urgency of getting back to my mother was weighing upon me.  

She had had a bad day.  

"When was the last time you had a good day?" I asked her.  

"What?"

"Are you wearing your hearing aids?"

"No.  You weren't here."

"What did the audiologist tell you?"

Just a stare.

"Did she tell you to wear your hearing aids just when I was around?"

"When was the last time you had a good day," she spat.  

I nodded grimly, "Well. . . it's been awhile."

I fixed bowls of soup for our dinners and brought them outside to eat in the fair weather.  

"This sure as hell beats eating in front of the television, doesn't it?"

The pretty woman with the two big dogs walked by and waved.  

Later I cleaned up the kitchen and put my mother's eight o'clock meds together.  Even later, I searched for something to watch on t.v.  What was this?  "Just Friends" with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray?  2025?  Hell yea, I'd watch that.  

I'm not recommending it, but it had some details and themes which kept me interested. And then, at the film's final scene, the music began.  I love this song.  I've been intrigued by Blossom Dearie for awhile.  She seems to have been ahead of her time.  

My mother just got up.  She tells me she fell during the night.  Twice.  She got out of bed and fell into a nightstand, then, confused, she said, she did it again.  She says she might need to go get X-rays.  What I thought might be a day developing film may be spent in a hospital waiting room instead.  I don't know what to do about my mother.  I really don't.  I am here, and yet, shit happens while I sleep.  She was miserable in the best care place in town, so I brought her home.  

And you know what they say about misery.  

I Need A Coder

Chat GPT has finally figured me out, I think.  It has put the clamps on my "verboten" image making.  I'll only be able to render Pilgrims and Mennonites now.  Still, the illustrations are pretty cool.  Since I can't figure out how to "jailbreak" the system, and since my A.I, pal has been reprimanded, I asked for information rather than images.  Here's what I got:

1. Diffusion — painting by subtraction

Modern image generators (Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, Midjourney, etc.) start with pure noise — a random static image.

They learn to reverse the process that adds noise to real images.

Each step removes a bit of noise and replaces it with structure guided by a text description.

Think of it as sculpting out of fog: the model slowly “de-noises” toward something that statistically matches the words you gave it.

🖋️ 2. Latent space — where the images live

The model doesn’t paint in pixel space. It works inside a latent space — an abstract mathematical world where every concept (pose, lighting, fabric, color mood, etc.) has coordinates.

When you write a prompt, you’re pulling the model’s attention toward certain clusters of meaning.

For example:

“Ingres lighting” might activate vectors for smooth transitions, ivory tones, soft edges.

“Hopper interior” might activate vectors for hard shadows, right angles, melancholic palette.

The image forms at the intersection of those forces — a compromise among probabilities.

🗝️ 3. Conditioning and prompt weighting

Every word (or token) gets an embedding — a set of numbers that represent its meaning.

The model weighs them during generation.

That’s why adding precision (“cool daylight through tall window”) matters more than adjectives (“beautiful, detailed”).

You can think of prompt design as composition through language: arranging conceptual lights and forms.

⚙️ 4. Safety and filters

The same text encoder that interprets meaning also tags risk.

If certain tokens (body-related, violence, etc.) cross a learned threshold, the system refuses to decode the image.

The algorithm doesn’t “understand” morality; it just compares patterns against banned examples in its training.

That’s the wall you keep hitting — not a moral judgment, but a pattern match.

🧩 5. Fine-tuning and control

If you ever did want your own version — one that could interpret Ingres–Botticelli–Messina faithfully — you’d need to:

Gather a dataset of reference paintings and your own photographic studies.

Train a small LoRA (low-rank adapter) or DreamBooth model on that dataset.

Use a prompt template (like the ones we built) to steer it with text.

It wouldn’t take a supercomputer — just patience, curation, and GPU time.

 I found that pretty interesting, so I asked for more info.  It gave me pages of information on how to set up my own A.I system for making my own photo algorithms.  I don't understand any of it, so I am asking people if they know a coder who can help me out.  I don't know any coders, but surely they are fairly abundant.  Right?

If I can manipulate any of my images in the manner I want. . . oh, my. . . oo-la-la!  It would be like figuring out the old Polaroid 669 method again, only better.  For now, however, I'll have to be happy with making family photos, I guess. 

Not my family, of course.  

I just deleted fifteen minute of writing about my woes.  

You're welcome. 

The weather has turned.  I woke to clear skies and cool air.  Let's see if it will make me feel any better.  I made chicken soup last night.  It was good and there is a lot left over.  Hearty soups are a good way to eat and live.  

With crusty bread, of course.  

I'll be about my day now.  I slept late and my mother is being very. . . "busy."  I need to attend.  

The Preposition

That's all I got, to use the vernacular.  I wasn't going to go.  It has been rainy and when I got up from a nap Friday afternoon, I suddenly wasn't feeling so well.  I didn't think I'd really enjoy myself, didn't think I'd get my money's worth.  It's not about the price.  It's about what you take away from the experience.  So I drove back to my mother's and asked her what she wanted to eat.  

"I'm o.k.  I had a cheese sandwich a little while ago."  

When I talked to her, she kept saying, "What?"  Of course, she didn't have her hearing aids in.  It kind of sent me over the edge.  I was looking at another long and boring night with no reprieve in sight.  I jumped up and said, "O.K., I'll be back.  I've got to get something to eat."

The sushi place was packed, but the hostess squeezed me in between two parties.  On my right was a big, goofy fellow who had the personality of a jr. high school boy and his fat girlfriend.  They talked loudly and guffawed between bites.  On my left were two young women who looked like they'd come down from their cabin dressed for the buffet on a cruise ship.  One woman had her back to me.  The other did all the talking.  She was very dramatic and acted out her stories with her whole being.  

The waitress took a long time to get to me, so she chatted me up a bit in apology.  

"My name is Eva.  I've seen you here before," she said.  

"Yea. . . if you are going to be eating alone on a Friday night, the only place you don't stand out is at a sushi bar."

She laughed at that, holding her hand over her mouth.  I thought it was cute.

"Yea, you might get looked at sideways sitting in a booth alone."

Yup.  

I got home in time to put together my mother's eight o'clock meds.  

The End.  

It is Saturday.  It is cloudy and rainy.  In my case, gloomy.  My mother has taken her eight o'clock meds.  A.M.  I need to put together her two o'clock meds.  My knee is still swollen and hurting, so I don't think I'll be doing a long walk today.  I think about getting lunch at my buddy's place on the Boulevard and drinking.  I need to quit drinking, but on a day like this. . . .  Yea.  Tomorrow.  There is nothing we cannot do tomorrow.  

Tech billionaires are running the global markets.  That's what they say.  And they are getting ready to crash it.  It must be true.  I read it.  Just like 1929 they say.  It'll be o.k. if you like soup.  

That does sound good.  I think I'll make a pot of soup for dinner tonight.  And so. . . there it is. . . something to look forward to.  

Try not ending that in a preposition.  

Commercial CS

At home--my home--I was going through an old drive and ran across this picture.  I took this long ago just after my wife left.  I was working with another fellow who was shooting a promo video for a spa.  I can hardly remember it all now, just bits and pieces.  Here I am working for the only time in my life as a commercial photographer.  Ha!  My buddy went on to be a "professional photographer," shooting spreads for hotel chains and college brochures.  He was on the road all the time.  

I've had three friends or acquaintances who did that for a living.  I think it must pay pretty well.  

I can't imagine.  It would be like working in a canning plant, I think.  I got so sick of making Chamber of Commerce style documentaries when I was working at the factory. . . another well-lighted interview with a plant placed somewhere in the background. . . "Can you tell us your name and a bit about what you do here?"

But yea. . . I made a commercial photo.  Funny.  

At the same time, I was picking up my camera to make images that weren't vacation photos for the first time in over a decade.  

This was a factory girl in a factory setting.  I was just playing around with cheap lights and a piece of cloth that was lying around.  

"Hey. . . come here for a second. .  . ."

I was kind of hooked.  You look at people differently through a viewfinder.  Suddenly you have permission to stare.  You see things you otherwise wouldn't see.  

Well. . . I'd been hooked since I got my first "real camera" in college.  

I'd forgotten all about these pictures.  See?  The one who records it. . . .

I went to the ortho for my gel shot yesterday.  

"Hey, doc, I think the injection worked better when you went in from the side," I said pointing to the outside of my knee."

"Well, the injection doesn't work the same way every time.  It depends on a lot of things, the weather, the season. . . .  As the arthritis gets worse, the injection is going to be less effective, too."

Blah blah blah.  Don't I know it.  I never dreamed at the time how much worse my many, many broken bones would feel after the accident.  Yea. . . arthritis never sleeps.  

The injection hurt more than usual yesterday, and the injection site bled a lot more than usual.  For the rest of the day, my knee felt very tight. 

"It may take a couple weeks for this to begin to work.  If you have soreness or pain, just take some Tylenol."

I took a long limp in the afternoon.  Last night, I could barely bend my knee.  

After preparing a Greek salad for my mother and myself, there was nothing to do, so I cooked up some old photos in Chat again.  Sometimes it will do what I ask, but many times it won't.  I read an article today about how AI companies hire teams of people to try to get around the guardrails that are put in place.  It is all language, so the teams try lots of tricks.  They will get around the strictures using emojis, for instance, or foreign words or sometimes meaningful gibberish.  My AI pal helps me trick the system, too.  And sometimes, we make an image from one of my verboten pictures.  

Remember these?  No. . . probably not.  You will remember, perhaps, the red chaise and the green wall.  You will notice that it is difficult to control everything.  In the second image, the leggings become stockings and cover the feet.  Selavy.  

The 2025 McArthur "Genius" Grants have been announced (link).  These are awards of distinction that come with an $800,000 check, no strings attached.  Matt Black, a photographer, received one of the awards (link).  Tonika Johnson, also a photographer, received one as well (link).  I had never heard of either, so I spent some time on their sites and elsewhere on the internet looking at their images and projects.  Matt Black works allegorically, I think, people taking the form of symbolic figures in an ancient dance with a harsh, apocalyptical environment.  Johnson's works are social justice self portraits, at least as far as I can tell from her website and her IG page.  

Since Cormac McCarthy won a McArthur grant, artists have been awarded more and more.  I'm certain their lives are about to change radically.  

I'd settle for someone buying me a big printer and a studio in which to keep it.  Too much? 

Okey dokey.  It is Friday.  It is going to rain the live long day here.  Still, I may take myself to a sushi dinner tonight if I can get away for an hour.  Big "if."  

Images, Music, and Carbonara

Last night's dinner.  I made a spaghetti carbonara last night for my mother.  I made it right, pan frying the pancetta and adding chopped garlic, whisking the eggs with the freshly shredded parmigiana, adding the boiled spaghetti straight from the boiling pot into the pan to mix with the garlic and pancetta, then dropping that mix into the whisked eggs adding half a cup of the spaghetti water.  Holy smokes!  It was a home run.  

This was after taking my mother to the ENT to see the audiologist.  I wouldn't go back with her when they called her name.  I told her she could go back and lie all on her own.  When she came back, the audiologist came with her.  She told me she had taken impressions of my mother's ears to make molds that will make it easier for my mother to put the hearing aids in her ears.  I grinned.  She said, "I told her she has to wear her hearing aids all the time."  I grinned again.  "That should do it."  The audiologist laughed. She is a nice person, young and friendly.  I'm trying not to say she is cute.  She is.  When she tried to login to the computer to make my mother's next appointment, it took a long time.  

"Gen Z.  You just can't do anything."

She looked up with actual surprise to see me laughing.  

"That's not true," she said.  

"I know. . . I know."

We go back in two weeks.  

My other wore her hearing aids for the rest of the hour.  Ha!

It was still too early for a cocktail and too late to run back to my house, so I sat with my little laptop, checked texts of which there was none, and emails, of which there were many, all ads, so I set about "unsubscribing" from them.  Then I opened ChatGPT and put in one of my verboten images and asked it to describe it.  In mood and tone, my images are always described as being "in the manner of a renaissance painting."  Nice.  I took the description and worked on a prompt for rendering in a manner I've rather created and refined over time in the system.  Each rendering was incorrect, however, something just not quite right.  I was at my mother's on a pretty, late afternoon day.  What else was there to do?  So I kept refining my prompt.  You have to be very careful or you can get bumped out of the workflow with the message, "I couldn't render that image as it violates. . . . "  

So I was careful, and then, of a sudden. . . voila!  What I think is the most beautiful image I/it has created yet. 

The saturated colors, the skin tone agains the raven hair, the facial features. . . and I was finally able to recreate the original pose.  

I wanted more.  I asked for the figure to stand in contrapostto.  

Boom!

I got the dreaded message.  

No, no, no. . . if I left the page with no more than a description, I would never get anything like this.  It would all be lost.  I stayed on the page and tried every which way to work with and fool the system.  Futile.  Once it labels the thing verboten. . . fuck.  

It's a language model, but it is something else.  I can put the same words in twice and get two different images.  I guess it is a language model that works from a bank of images it has scraped from the internet, catalogued in language, so when you make a request, it just takes from categories.  I don't know enough abut that, but I will find out.  Will anything ever be replicable?  That is the hallmark of science, you know.  It must be replicable to be valid.  

But, I would suggest, the artist can never paint the same picture twice, either.  

After dinner, it was the same old same old.  I need to break the pattern.  It is not a healthy one.  My mother went to bed at eight and I watched something, I think, on Netflix.  Oh. . . yea, I tried finishing "Hunting Wives," but realized why I quit watching it in the first place.  So I turned to YouTube and listened to music.  I think that is a good thing to do before bed.  No drama, just soothing beauty.  Yea, yea. . . you know what I listen to.  

And then I was off to slumber.  I had a continuing dream all night long.  Some of it was pretty and some of it was fearful, but if I woke in some horror or panic, I would think about that carbonara and fall right back to sleep. 

I must end this now.  I have my own doc appointment at nine to get another gel injection into my knee.  I'm hoping this will work once again.  Fingers crossed.  

Generalizations

I took this picture. . . before it was an illustration.  But again. . . I think I like the illustration more.  The incredible thing to me is that this is the original person's face.  Stylized, sure, but I would be able to pick her out of a lineup.  

Do they still have lineups?  

It's the eyes.  The eyes have it.  

The child would be about ten now.  I wonder how that turned out?  That would be a nice follow up photo.  

Gen Z, Gen Z, Gen Z.  Grandpa's been complaining (link).  

A lot of people have. 

I can't get onboard with this stuff.  I mean, I think it is funny, sure.  But it is a gross generalization as are all statements about "generations."  Studies show that kids have higher IQs than people in the past.  They are certainly the most beautiful generation.  They are better athletes.  They are talented musicians.  

See?  "They."  I like to generalize, too.  

Is Gen Z those disaffected midwestern youths smoking crack and shooting up heroin or are they kids at Country Club College?  Are they Progressives or are they Neoliberals?  

Yes.  The answer is yes.  

The Negro
James Emanuel

Never saw him.
Never can.
Hypothetical,
Haunting man.

Eyes a-saucer,
Yessir bossir,
Dice a-clicking,
Razor flicking.

The-ness froze him
In a dance.
A-ness never
Had a chance.

I used to teach this one.  It's easy to hate an abstraction.  It's hard, very, very hard, to hate an individual.  

"I thought you didn't like Puerto Ricans?"

"What?  Oh, you know. . . he's different."

Yup. . . they always are.  I mean, after Bill Maher's two hour dinner with Trump, he had some nice things to say about him, didn't he?  And for all of Maher's rant about Gen Z not going to work in the fields and factories, I can't imagine him working labor for a week, either.  

Even in the Middle East, but for the hatred of radicals, Moslems, Christians, and Jews have lived together peacefully and sympathetically.  

I have ideological friends.  Ideologues.  A few.  They are not the happiest people I know.  

Which makes me wonder now. . . who is?  

This is a topic best avoided now, I think.  So let me tell you about "The House of Guinness" on Netflix.  I just finished binging the first season.  I'm pissed off that I will have to wait a year or more for the second.  The first season is about religion, ideology, human imperfection, and folly.  And it is a treat for the eye.  I have to wonder, really, really wonder, how much of the show is A.I. 

I think I'll go and look it up.  

Man. . . I called that one.  

The production company, Kudos, collaborated with ReelMind, an AI technology provider, to integrate AI into the show's development. While the series is a historical drama, the AI appears to have been used to create historical imagery and elements that contribute to the show's authentic feel. 
AI use in historical film and television production is a growing practice and can include: Generating photorealistic historical images and textures
Upscaling and enhancing historical footage
Assisting with scriptwriting and developing storylines based on historical data

 Half the characters look like the illustration at the top of this post which is why I thought of it in the first place.  For you A.I. haters, try watching it.  

See?  

O.K. That's enough of my silliness for today.  I just wanted to say things I haven't said before.  Posting as much as I have, that seems impossible.  

What Have I Been Thinking?

I think AI has something against my mother and me.  When I upload other people's pictures and ask for a transformation into one or another painterly fashion, they don't look like themselves, but they don't look any worse.  And usually, the image turns out somewhat better.  But when I put a photo of me or of my mother, it always accentuates the worst features.  I want it to turn me into a Renaissance Romeo but I always end up looking like Shylock.  

Weird.  

Just more of the voodoo, perhaps.  Yesterday, I picked up a hand mirror in my bathroom at home, and it simply flew out of my hand.  I watched it fly through the air as if in a movie, the thing twirling in slow motion, me thinking "maybe it won't break" as it descended to the bathroom floor tiles.  

It broke.  

Holy shit . . . I don't need anymore bad luck.  What to do?  

I went to the internet, of course.  

"How do you avoid seven years bad luck after breaking a mirror?"

It is very complicated.  You must gather all the pieces and grind them into dust.  Then you need to burry them at night.  The idea is to keep the mirror from making any reflections ever again.  You can use flames to blacken the shards and you should burry them in a box or a piece of cloth.  

Or you could throw salt over your left shoulder.  That sounded much easier.  

But what was it that made the mirror fly from my hand?  It wasn't natural.  

I'm just saying.  

I did take my mother to get her cortisone injection yesterday.  It took maybe ten minutes.  She said it didn't hurt.  When I brought her back to her house, it was still early, so I made us breakfast.  After that, she went back to bed.  

Then I did, too.  

When I got up just before noon, she was still sleeping.  I got dressed for the gym, put together her afternoon pills, and went in to tell her I'd be back. 

When I got back at five, she was still in bed.  Or, as it turned out, in bed again.  I made dinner, but she didn't get up.  At eight, I gave her her pills and a glass of water.  She took them and went back to sleep.  This morning when I got up, she was still sleeping.  Only just now she got up.  

"You slept for about twenty-four hours," I said.   

"Seems like it."

You can imagine the thoughts that have been running through my head.  

The rain continues.  

Every day now, I wonder if I should stop writing this blog.  I have no life, no experiences to write about other than the most mundane things--cooking, taking care of my mother, and the problems of maintaining two houses.  Were I a Proust or a Flaubert, I might make the mundane more profound, but I am not.  In truth, I've never enjoyed reading either writer.  I've had to, of course, but I felt it a chore.  I can't be sure I am writing to anyone here any longer anyway.  All I can see is that for the past month or so, I have been getting a thousand hits to the blog a day.  I am certain these are not readers or lovers of art.  They are bots scraping my blog to teach A.I. how not to write.  They are stealing my photos, I am certain, to use in their vast A.I. libraries.  

My first post here was September 9, 2007.  Over eighteen years of writing here now.  6,735 posts to date.  What if I wanted to print them all to hard copy?  How long would that take?  Let's say I printed ten a day.  It would take me, what. . . two years?  WTF have I been thinking? 

Oh, you know.  It's all here.  

The journals of a faux-author.  Isn't that a hoot?  If you just started as a reader and began with the first post and read ten posts a day. . . . 

It is unfathomable.  

More than Tired

I take my mother to the doc today to get an epidural in between her lumbar 4 and lumbar 5 vertebrae.  Cortisone.  Fingers crossed.  If it works, she will be out of pain for awhile.  The treatment lasts around six months.  Then, I guess, you do it again.  We need to be to the office at 8:30.  My mother has been worried about this for days.  We had dinner across the street last night, and my mother was saying all kinds of wild things.  She said I told her she couldn't eat, that I said we had to be there by seven, neither of which were true.  When we got back from dinner, she thought we needed to get ready to go.  She went to bed at 8:30.  At ten, when I was shutting down the house, she got up and asked if it was time.  

Maybe her mind will be better if she is not in such pain.  

The hearing aids are another matter.  She won't wear them.  We go back to the ENT on Wednesday.  I told her I would take her, but when they call her back, I was staying in the lobby.  I didn't care to hear her lie to the audiologist.  She was free, I said, to tell them whatever she wanted.  

My mother is a stubborn hillbilly.  

Here is the photo, one of them, I put up on the magnetic chalk board in my kitchen as I consider getting this haircut again.  The one that makes people like Mr. Tree ask in astonishment, "Was that you?"

As my mother reminds me, I was younger and had a thicker head of hair then.  That's a funny phrase. . . "head of hair."  I think that is a hillbilly way of talking.  I need to send the photo to my beautician and ask her if I can still sport such a look.  In my imagination, I think, I believe it will make me look younger.  Not "younger," exactly, but less like the homeless man I am starting to look like now.  My beautician had a hip replacement, so I haven't seen her in over two months.  The blonde is becoming something else.  If I wear my hair down, I look like Buffalo Bill Cody, so I tie it back which makes the roots of my hair more prominent.  I haven't cared so very much since I go nowhere anyway, but it has gotten hard to look in the mirror.  People tell me I look "tired."  I am.  This sole caretaking feels like it is killing me.  I am reduced to sitting in my mother's house for too many hours a day.  

As the song goes. . . what a long strange trip it's been. 

Otherwise, things go swimmingly.  The carpet in my mother's living room is wet again.  I've been dicking around with the a.c. drain lines for a week.  I pour vinegar and half an hour later a gallon or two of hot water.  The line drains.  I've had all sorts of advice on how to clear them from hooking a compressor up to the drain line and blowing it clear to attaching the garden hose to it and flushing it out.  At the hardware store, everyone there told me what they do.  

I'm about to give up and spend the grand on putting in a pump and new drain lines through the attic.  

Meanwhile, I still have to get the carpenter back to my house.  And I've decided to get a new roof.  Mine is only ten or eleven years old, I think, but it has never been a good roof and I see no benefit in waiting a few more years.  

Cha-ching!

"What else are you going to do with your money?"

Nothing, I guess.  I'm just sitting with my mother waiting on the apocalypse.  

Are you out there having fun in Trumplandia?  Are you able to ignore the cacophony and get on with living the dream?  

The MAGA dream is of med beds (link).  The MAGA faithful believe they exist.  How they can look at Trump and think such a thing is true strains credulity. . . but I want one.  I need one.  Good god, my fortune for a med bed.  

Rather, I must ready myself for an early morning trip to the doctor's office.  Well, not to his office, but to the place where he will do the epidural.  It is not surgery.  She will not be put under.  She will be awake with a local anesthetic.  The entire thing, they said, should take an hour.  We'll be back before lunch.  

And then I may go back to sleep.  People tell me I look tired.  I think it is more than that.