Coming Home

My mother comes/goes home tomorrow.  This will be my last night staying in my own house, sleeping in my own bed, for who knows how long.  Years?  No matter, I guess.  On my second to last night of sleeping in my own bed, I barely did.  Rough night.  I finally gave up and put on the coffee just before five.  Maybe I don't always sleep well here, but I do love the nights I spend listening to music while working on pictures in the office on my big computer.  Those are not lonely nights, and I will miss them.  

When I went to see my mother yesterday, she wasn't in her room, nor was she in the Great Room or on the veranda.  One of the workers told me she had gone upstairs to listen to the concert on the 4th floor.  The concert started at three.  It was three-o-five.  

When I got to the "concert," there was half a room full of people, many of whom were sitting in wheelchairs.  I'd not seen any of these people before, and I realized this was where the residents of assisted living were housed.  My mother was sitting with another woman from her floor in a row of chairs.  The other woman saw me and tapped my mother.  There was nowhere to sit with them, so I waved and sat at a table in the back where I had a disadvantageous view of the unfortunate crowd.  It was obvious that many didn't know where they were.  Heads hung, chins on chests.  

The "concert" was a man singing karaoke.  He wore a tropical shirt and played a Tamborine along with the recorded music.  In truth, he wasn't bad.  He had a good voice and a nice selection of songs, and watching him, you might think he was performing on t.v. before a live studio audience.  A few in the crowd were able to bounce their heads along with the music while the caregivers who worked there were smiling and giving the singer all the support they could.  The caregivers were all women, most Jamaican.  They busied themselves with shuffling people around to make room for the new patients who were rolled in.  It was obvious these people were not going home.  This is where they would spend the rest of their days.  

I applauded the singer after each song and smiled and nodded my head.  As I said, you wouldn't know if you didn't see the crowd that he wasn't performing before a lively bunch, but I knew that, as nice as this facility is, my mother needed to get out of here.  

The singer finished another song, something like "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," and said, "Alright. . . now we're going to kick it up a notch."  The crowd went breathless.  O.K. Joke.  But when he dove into The Temptations "My Girl," two of the staff stepped up before the small stage and began to dance.  God, I have to give it to them.  They were really going at it like they must have on some club's dance floor in their disco days.  And all around me, the caregiving staff started dancing and singing, too.  At first, I thought it was spontaneous, that the song really registered, but of course it was part of the schtick.  Throughout the room, people in industrial wheelchairs, akin to couches, drooled along.  

As heart wrenching as it all was, I was giggling because back in the days when my band was performing, I used to sing a little New Wave version of this song.  I have a live recording from one of the pubs were played in.  I certainly was no Smokey Robinson.  This guy, however, was nailing it.  

My mother kept looking back to see if I was still there, and about forty-five minutes in, she got up with her walker and came back to where I was sitting.  

"Let's go," she said, and so we took the elevator back to her floor.  I made us a couple cups of coffee and we went out to sit on the veranda.  

"Are you feeling better?" she asked.  

"Yea.  I went to the gym today and was talking to a fellow.  I told him I'd had a bad gut for the past few days and he said yea, it was going around.  Some stomach virus that causes diarrhea and vomiting for three days.  Bingo, I said, that is what I had.  I was glad to know it wasn't just me."

"This is my last night here," she said with enthusiasm. "I get to go home tomorrow."

"No you don't."

"Why?"

"You go home on Friday.  Today is Wednesday."

"You mean I have two more nights here?"

"Yup." 

She was really upset by this.  I didn't blame her.  I wouldn't want to be stuck in this place, either.  I can't imagine what it would be like in one of the other places.  The one she is in is top of the line.  

In a bit, her across the street neighbors came out.  

"We've been sitting inside waiting on you," the woman said.  

"Well, I'm glad you are here because I was just leaving," I said.  "You can keep my mother company."

Of course, I couldn't leave right away, and I was stuck hanging around for another half hour.  

Earlier in the day, when I was at the gym, I was talking to the retired nurse who was asking about my mother when a big Brazilian girl waked into the room, grinned, and said hello.  She is a three or five time world Brazilian Ju-Jitso World Champion, a real badass who has a twin brother who is also a fighter.  When she walked over to shake hands, I did something that Tennessee told me he had done to her before.  It is a Krav Maga move meant to counter someone who is aggressively grabbing hold of you.  He has shown me how to do it several times, so I thought I would do it to her.  As we clasped hands, I pulled her toward me while hooking the back of her elbow for leverage.  Fortunately for me, she thought it was funny.  She was quite chatty, and in a bit my retired nurse friend excused herself.  I don't really remember now how the conversation went, but it was settled that I would be photographing her in the gym where she teaches.  I was excited at the time, but when I got home from visiting my mother, the reality of it set in.  Shit.  When I had the studio, I used to take a thousand or more photographs a week.  I knew what I was doing.  I was confident.  Now I don't take any pictures and I was overtaken by the epiphany. . .  WTF was I thinking?  

I decided I would photograph her with the beautiful 4x5 camera that I haven't taken out of its case for. . . how long?  More than a year.  Before making a Negroni, I thought I should go get it out and set it up.  

But I had forgotten how!  After futzing about for a bit, however, I started to remember.  There are a whole lot of movements with the camera's front and back standards that are crucial, and I was recalling how many times I had not set them properly and had strangely out of focus pictures.  And "how many times" was not so many times as I never really used the camera much because it was a pain in the ass.  But holy mackerel, sitting there on the tripod, it sure was beautiful.  

I told the fighter I'd come to look around the gym at noon today without a camera, just to get an idea.  Once I do that, I am fairly committed I'd guess.  I can see the picture in my mind, but I'd sure as heck better be able to translate that into something everyone else can see.  

Oy!

So today, my last day of semi-freedom, will be very busy.  I need to prepare my mother's house for her return.  I need to pack up all the things she has had me take to the rehab center and truck them back to the place.  I need to clean out the refrigerator and go grocery shopping for victuals.  And I need to pack up a whole lot of my stuff to take over there.  

I wish I had slept better.  Maybe tonight.  I am trying not to take any sleep aides before bed, and I am cutting back on the alcohol, so. . . .  Last night I had two cups of hot chocolate while I listened to music and worked on pictures.  

O.K.  "My Girl."  You can imagine that this is EXACTLY how my band performed the song every single time!

The Educated

I felt so bad yesterday, I didn't manage to visit my mother.  I'm trying to figure out what is causing this.  I do wish I'd wake one morning soon and not feel tremendous dread.  I used to love two things: going to bed at night and rising in the morning.  Silly, I know.  It runs counter to a hip/bohemian thing to say.  The old saw:  Ghandi said that a man should do two things every day that he doesn't wish to do every day.  Churchill said he did.  He went to bed every night and got up every morning.  That's clever, and Churchill led a tremendously interesting life.  But I've always been an early to bed, early to rise kind of fellow, and it always made me happy.  

But this year, for the most part, I have dreaded both.  

Selavy.  

I know I've already said that Charlie Kirk was a dope, factory made for the anti-intellectual.  I watched three YouTube videos last night that were released a week before the shooting of Kirk debating some kids at Cambridge.  They were prepared for him.  They had his schtick figured out, as predictable as a drumbeat.  If you are interested, here are links to the three videos: (link) (link) and (link).  If you are not, I understand.  Watching his bullshit is tedious.  But here's the teaser for a Vanity Fair article.

“It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. “It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry.” 

By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, Coates argues, pundits and politicians are sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s legacy.

Duh.  

Of course, there is the morally required disclaimer that must be made: His murder is a horrible and terrible thing.  And I mean it, too.  Having such a person as a standard bearer for the Republican Party was like shooting retarded fish in a very small barrel.  

He also showed, by and large, how unprepared American college students are for debate.  An education system run by congressional republicans has failed the country pitifully.  O.K.  Maybe it isn't just republicans.  "Every kid a winner, every child a success" rhetoric from the left has been equally harmful.  But the idea that everyone deserves a non-competitive college degree has not been helpful.  Funding based on "success rates" has been a travesty.  Even the Ivy Leagues schools have fallen victim.  Look at what has happened to GPAs there in the last twenty years and you'll see the cost of the easy "A."  

But enough of that.  

Last night, I watched a documentary on Goya.  I guess I really knew nothing of Goya.  His biography is a crazy narrative of tragedy, and yet he succeeded through multiple political wars and the rapid changing of monarchs, survived the Inquisition, and managed to make insane portraits of he Royal families which one critic claimed made them all look like "butchers who had just won the lottery."  And it's true.  They are the most unflattering portraits of royals ever created.  And they loved him.  He was being paid a salary of $250,000 a year in today's money--plus perks.  

And for half his life, he was totally deaf.  

He was, I learned, the first painter to paint a nude that was not allegorical, The Nude Maja.  Even before the more well known "Olympia" by Manet.  

And it just goes to show that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough and keep at it.  

Ha!  Just kidding.  That is one of those idiotic things people who win some award usually say.  

These painterly illustrations of my photos are killing me.  As you know, I am not opposed to the straight old photograph, but I've spent much of my time messing them up.  I've scratched negatives and solarized them in the days before digital processing.  I "invented" a process for using Polaroid 669 film to make grungy, painterly things, and when the film was gone, I began to make encaustic works and used alternative processes like image transfers and hand colored and drawn on prints.  So using A.I. to fool around with my images is just another step toward "the next thing."  

But I have yet to find an A.I. platform that will process much of my body of photographs.  So yesterday, I asked ChatGPT if it could give me some prompts that would allow me to do much the same thing in Photoshop.  It did.  It gave me a whole lot.  

When I tried it, however, it was too tedious and didn't really work.  I will spend some more time with what it told me, though, and maybe find some new tools to let me "mess up" my photos.  I've been printing out some of the altered versions to see how they look on different types of paper, and I am impressed.  Now I am trying to think of ways to work with them so that they become "mine" again.  

A fool's errand, probably. . . but I am enjoying it and it helps distract me from my current situation.  

And so. . . .  

That k.d. lang version of "Angel Eyes" from yesterday's post was a lovely surprise, but you know, that's what happens to the educated ear.  Often now, the algorithms give me things like this. . . and the algorithms are right.  Here's one from yesterday that soothes me.  Hey. . . let's go to the Cafe Carlyle and sit, have a drink, listen, and relax.  

Subsets

I have as many bad days as good ones now: glass half full or half empty?  Is the mental killing the physical body or is the body killing the mind?  I just know this year has been shitty and I don't see any way out of it.  I could use a good dose of mania again.  

Just as I wrote this, a banner flicked across my computer screen from the N.Y. Times.  Robert Redford died, age 89.  With his money, I imagine he went peacefully.  Money makes the difference.  Have you ever read an article about the wealthy who have long term residency care suites at Mount Sinai Hospital?  My mother's place is the nicest in town, but it ain't anything like that.  

When I visited my mother yesterday, she said the woman we have eaten with a few times at the rehab center asked her how old I was.  The woman replied, "No way!  He's the same age as I am."  

"So was the fellow we ate with yesterday.  He was a couple years older than I."

The Golden Years.  

And yet. . . 

When I came home from the gym yesterday, there was a big van parked in my driveway, the rear doors open, tools on the ground.  

"!!!"

When I walked up, I looked in back of the house, and there was a guy working on my gas line.

"Hey, you're the gas guy?"

"Yes."

"Are you putting on a new meter?"

"I was just shutting you off."

"Holy smokes, I didn't realize that you were coming today."

"We're here."

I started scrolling through messages on my phone thinking he was wrong.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.  

"About five minutes.  I'll go ahead and put in your new meter now that you are here."

They needed me to be here so they could get into the house to restart all the pilot lights.  

"Oh, man. . . thank you.  I'm sure glad I got here when I did."

When he'd finished putting on the new meter, he came in to check the pilot lights.  

"Are you a photographer?" 

He saw the cameras on the dining room table I had taken out on Sunday.  

"I guess."

"Me, too."

"Really?  What do you take photos of?" 

"I do mostly astro photography but I just started taking pictures of cars, too."

Oh, boy.  I didn't want to get into this.  But he started asking me a whole lot of questions about cameras, so I should him some of mine.  He saw some of the big framed Pola-things I have hanging.  He got excited and started showing me his photos on his phone.  The astro stuff was interesting.  And as always, I was finding out about his life.  Like I say, people like to tell things.  He was from New York, Westchester County.  He was a plumber there but had a friend who got him a job here with the gas company.  Easier work, he said.  He didn't have to crawl around in dark basements with rats the size of dogs that didn't fear you.  His parents lived here.  He was a tall, half-Black kid.  He said he'd been spending a lot of time in his parent's pool and was starting to get dark.  He liked road trips.  He'd just bought a new sporty Saab and was going to a car show this weekend on the far coast.  But, he said. . . we should get together after that. He'd bring over his cameras.  

Yea, yea, yea.  Just what I wanted.  Reluctantly, I gave him my phone number.  What could I do?  He'd done me a solid by putting in the new meter.  

I had a new twenty-something pal of the wrong gender.  

Whatever.  

Later on, I got a call from the carpenter.  Just checking in.  Considers me a friend, he said.  Wanted me to know he was taking off for a week in Hillbilly Country, Ohio, the next day.  

I'm overwhelmed with my shitty life, so I told him I had decided to hire someone to pressure wash and paint the house and apartment.  He said that he should do it.  

Cha-ching.  

"You've got something that people like," my mother said.  

"Yes. . . all the wrong people."

People talk about charisma.  I've said long ago that I think I have figured out what it is.  It is a form of hypnotism, I believe.  Some people learn early in life that they can command people's attention and unconsciously develop the skill with inflections and movements.  Maybe it is a cadence of speech.  Maybe it is the way they look into your eyes.  These were the ideas I got, anyway, from being in the classroom and working with people in my studio.  There is a power of suggestion, I think.  

Isn't that the title of a famous book?

Brando had it.  I watched him work it.  But not everyone can be hypnotized.  There is always a subset with which one can work.  Just like those televangelists.  Watch them.  They have their audience in a trance, but it only works on some.  

Maybe all forms of attraction develop this way.  I've certainly been hypnotized by the women I've fallen for.  They absolutely put me in a trance.  

I think one of them is still working her bad juju on me . 

It was too bad I didn't have it with the girl in the fur hat and boots on Sunday.  I did, I think, but the spell was broken by her two friends.  But her eyes were saying "yes."  

So, yea. . . I went to the outskirts of proper society to make pictures then.  Got photos of a couple strip clubs.  That photo at the top needs one of the strippers leaning against that hurricane fence to make it good.  

The "Milk Spa" was long gone.  I think.  It looked like it was abandoned, but who knows.  Probably shut down by the authorities if the name of the place is a suggestion of what went on in there. 

The old "Asian Massage."  Releases tensions, they say.  Probably. 

I have to admit, I am not as confident running around certain parts of town as I used to be.  "Running" is a joke.  That's the problem now--I can neither run nor fight--and there are often some unruly looking characters lurking in the corners and the shadows.  In the past, I was a little nervous, too, but I always figured I could get myself out of trouble.  Now I just look like a wounded fish flopping around in water filled with reef sharks.  

Still. . . I try to soldier on.  

It is house cleaning day.  I have a lot of mess to put away before the wrecking crew comes, mostly photographic, but there is a lot of paperwork I've been dealing with concerning my mother, too.  

Fortuitously, yesterday I got something in the mail about a seminar right here in my own hometown giving information about services and resources available for caregivers.  It is one of those stiff cardboard adverts that you get tons of, ones I don't usually glance at before tossing them into the trash. Yup.  Providence, I guess.  I'm signing up for it.  Next Saturday.  

"Enchantment."  That is what I think they call it, that spell one falls under that we identify as love.  

I could use a little enchantment right now.  

The Wolf at the Door

I wanted to rally yesterday, but I was still feeling punky.  I wanted to get out of the house, but I sat.  I talked to my mother and told her I was still feeling poorly.  It was ten.  I futzed around some more and wondered how much of my illness was mental.  I decided I had to put on some shoes and go.  I grabbed my big Fuji camera and headed to a part of town I decided I wanted to photograph a week or so ago.  

I parked my car around the corner on a side street beside the Goodwill on a busy highway on the east side of town.  Most of the businesses are Asian, but this is not the hip part of Little Hanoi where the expensive bars and restaurants abide.  This part is run down and filled with nail and lashes shops, massage and acupuncture salons, mixed martial arts gyms, tax preparation offices, a skateboard shop, and weirdly enough, the Haitian Embassy.  

Right?  

I grabbed my bag and walked around the corner.  On the sidewalk a crazy man was dancing and yelling at cars and passerby's.  O.K. I thought.  Just a nice Sunday afternoon. It was getting hot.  Just a few yards more, there was a fellow sitting in a low camp chair on the sidewalk with his possessions around him.  I don't have interest in photographing human misery which is all too common here, but I raised my camera to my eye to photograph a building across the highway.  When I turned back, the man addressed me.  

"Are you from Seattle?"

"What?  No." I laughed.  "Why would you think that?"

"Where are you from?"

"Here.  I live here."

"Oh, you just looked like you were from Seattle.  I know a woman in Seattle.  I thought you were a tourist taking pictures."

"Well that would be a strange vacation photo, wouldn't it?"

"How much did you pay for that camera?"

"Not as much as it cost when it was new.  Here. I'll take a picture for you," I said.  

"O.K.  Wait a minute.  I have a picture in here."  

He began searching through the bag at his feet searching through the many sheafs of papers, pictures, objects and who knows what, mumbling all the while.  He couldn't find what he was looking for and started again.  Then. . . BINGO. . . he pulled out a drugstore print of a girl.  

"I want this in the picture.  Can you see it?" 

He held it onto his chest.  

"Yes," I said.  

"I want to send it to her."

I took the photo for him, not for me.  

"She's from Seattle," he said. 

"Here, let me take on of you not smiling."

"You don't want me to smile?"

"No."

"O.K.  Let me get something first."

Again he dove into his bag, searching, and in a minute he brought out a little gold chain with a pendant and slipped it over his head.  

"Do you have someplace you want me to send these?"

"Oh. . . yea. . . here. . . ."

He reached down to fumble in his bag again.  He had pads of paper that he skipped over looking for some scrap, I guessed.  I'd been with him about ten minutes now.  He was still digging.  

"Why don't you just tear off a little piece from that pad?" I asked.  

"Oh . . ."

He started writing something very slowly as if he were trying to remember.  When he handed me the slip of paper, I saw that he had written down a P.O. address.  

"O.K. my friend.  I'll send you copies."

"O.K." he said.  "Take care."

"Wow!" I thought, "Just getting out of the house. . . "

I walked slowly down the street taking photos of billboards and signs and shop windows.  Then I came to what appeared to be a popular restaurant.  In the parking lot, I saw three young girls walking toward the entrance.  We reached the walkway about the same time.  One of the girls was half Asian and wearing an outrageous outfit--a fur hat with earflaps, fur boots that came halfway up her shins, and the smallest jeans shorts she could legally wear.  Her eyes were darkly outlined and her lips were bright red.  

Oh shit. . . oh shit. . . .  I'd photographed one person.  Maybe I was on a roll.  As they approached, I raised my camera in the air and said, "I just have to ask."  She hesitated, smiled, then looked at her friends.  I knew this was a bad sign.  She looked back to me and shook her head minutely in the negative, but her face was saying yes.  Fuck, fuck, fuck. . . I just smiled and put the camera to my side and nodded.  

Piss shit fuck goddamn. . . it would have been a perfect bookend to the photo of the Goodwill man.  But hell, I was looking pretty homeless, I guessed, and so the fellow on the sidewalk engaged me.  I needed to look young and hip, I assumed, to get the other picture.  

"You just look like a creepy old man with a camera," I laughed to myself without humor.  

I spent the next couple of hours walking about but didn't get any more pictures of humans, just the dilapidated buildings and closed businesses that I tried to make look interesting.  When I got back to the car, I decided to drive to a different part of town, more distant, to make some photos of things I had in mind.  But more of that in other days.  

When I got home, I was beat.  I had done alright, but I still wasn't feeling well.  I made a little salad and had part of a beer, then ran a hot tub and crawled in.  It was three.  By the time I had finished my soak and had showered, it was four.  I took the card out of my camera and downloaded the day's images into the computer.  As I did, the phone rang.  It was in the kitchen, and so I didn't answer.  A bit later, it rang again.  It was the tenant.

"Are you o.k." she asked?  

"Yea, why?"

"Where are you?"

"I'm at home."

"Your mother called me and said she has been calling you and couldn't reach you and she said she was afraid because you said you weren't feeling well."

"Jesus, what the fuck?  I was in the tub and shower."

"Well call her back.  She's worried."

That's it, though.  I can't have even hours to myself any longer.  I was just getting into the car when I called my mom and told her I was on my way to see her.

"O.K.," she said.  

My mother was in her room when I got to the rehab center.  She wanted to go sit in the t.v. room.  She got her walker, and she was slow, slower than she has been.  She was looking very frail and deformed, her shoulders and arms getting thinner.  When we got to the tv room which is connected to the dining room, she stopped and looked around.  She was in pain, she said.  She wanted medicine.  She just stood and looked at everyone who walked by thinking they would give her something.  They were servers and janitors and I don't know what all, but they weren't nurses.  My mother couldn't tell.  Finally, she turned and took a chair.  That meant we wouldn't be sitting together on the couch which meant we couldn't easily talk.  On the big tv was the after game football show, so I watched the highlights of the day's games while my mother stared out through cataract eyes.  It was quarter 'til five.

"They are going to serve dinner at five.  Let's go in and get a table," she said.

"Whatever you want."

She sat down at a table with someone else's drink on it.  I sat beside her.  We were the only ones in the dining room.  

"I'm not really hungry," my mother said.  "We just had lunch."

"And yet you are the first to the table."

One of the servers came over and asked my mother if she would like the soup.

"No," she spat with a hillbilly distaste.  "I didn't like it at lunch."

I felt a little embarrassment, but I was sure that they see this sort of thing here all the time.  

"The food has gotten worse," she said.  "When I first got here, it was good, but now. . . I think they only give you the good food when you first get here."

A nice woman who has been sitting with and talking to my mother came out.  

"Have a seat," my mother said, but mom had picked a littered table, so the woman sat at the table next to us.  The server brought my mother a plate of food.  

"What's that," the woman at the next table asked me?

"Beats me."

The plate had two pieces of meat, one white and one brown, and a roll.

"Is that it?" asked the lady at the next table. 

"That's all she ordered," said the server.  

"I don't know how to order," my mother said, and it was true.  I don't know why, but she cannot fill out a menu card.  

"Would you like some vegetables?"

"Sure," my mother said offhandedly.  The hillbilly was just coming out of her all over.  

The server brought out vegetables, a fruit cup, a desert, and a salad.  Just then, a man rolled his way in slowly in a wheelchair.  He joined the lady at the other table.  He was fairly formal of speech and said he hadn't been coming down for his meals because of his catheter.  He was embarrassed, he said.  We made introductions and they brought him his food.  

"The food here is great," he said.  I laughed inwardly at my mother.  It turned out that the man had been at another rehab center.  It hadn't been nearly as nice.  

"Yes, this is the nicest rehab place in town," I said.  

"The other place was horrible.  No, everyone is nice and attentive here, and the food it good."

My mother has been arguing with everyone because her call bell/light isn't working in her room. 

"I've had some minor strokes, they say.  They can't fix my light so they gave me a bell to ring.  Can you imagine?  I tried it but nobody came.  They don't know how to fix my call button.  Isn't that something?"

I understood her concern, but my mother was getting very negative and mean about everything.  

I noticed the fellow had a full sleeve that was very colorful, so I asked him when he got it.  

"When I was married, I was always faithful to my wife.  She was the love of my life, and as long as I stayed in those boundaries, I could do anything I wanted.  So when I retired. . . " and here he got very confused.  He said he retired in 2022 and then seven years later. . . it wasn't making sense.  

"I had always been interested in tattoos, but I worked for IBM and they wouldn't have allowed that.  When I retired from there, I decided to get a job with a prosthetic company, and almost everyone there had tats, so I decided to get this.  I always thought I had it made when my wife was alive.  I thought I was King of the World, but she died and now this. . . and I know that I am not."

Yup.  I looked at him and wondered something I didn't ask, then he mentioned his age.  He was barely older than I.  

My mother didn't really say anything during the dinner conversation.  She has never been a good conversationalist.  She complains that other people don't let her talk, but when she does, she says maybe two sentences at most.  The lady and the gentleman were talking about how well their children treated them.  Thye came to see them several times a week.  I waited.  My mother said nothing.  I could only seethe a little.  

When dinner was done, I excused myself to go home.  

"Ya'll have made me hungry," I lied.  And so I kissed my mother and said goodbye.  

I had planned on getting fish tacos for dinner, but when I got home, I hadn't the energy.  I'd scrape together something from what I had lying around.  I made a Negroni.  Not quite.  I forgot to add the gin.  Good, I thought.  I need to quit drinking these anyway.  I put together a salad with bread lettuce, avocado, Campari tomatoes, and garbanzo beans, poured a big glass of wine, sat down and turned on the t.v. 

I put on the film, "The Wolf at the Door."  I hadn't seen it since 1986 when I took my young friend to the theater.  I was whisked right back to the time and place.  I could feel it and taste it and smell it.  The movie ethos was a great reflection of my dead ex-friend Brando's.  Or vice-versa.  Such characters can't exist any longer.  But they did.  Men as rogues, adventurers, in love with women and food and drink and drugs.  Sex was close to being religion.  I winced once again remembering taking the girl to see the film.  It is told partly through the narrative voice of the 14 year old daughter of Gaugin's Paris landlord.  She is fascinated.  She undresses for him.  She wants him to paint her.  Gaugin tells her of his wife in Tahiti.  

"How old was she?"

He pauses.  "She was thirteen." 

When this scene came on, I grabbed my phone to record it.  Sorry for the shitty quality, but it doesn't matter.  Here is the philosophy, Brando's philosophy in life.  He, too, was a rogue who abandoned his children.  

It was still early when the film was over, but I decided to go to bed.  I felt sleepy and took nothing, but I woke at two in a panic.  I jumped out of bed. What to do?  I walked around trying to calm myself, and went back to bed.  At three-thirty, the same thing.  I was crying out and thrashing violently.  My heart was racing.  I decided to take a Xanax and try again.  But it was of no use, and early this morning I rose for good.  

I have a billion and a half things to do today.  I hope I can manage one.  

Feeling Bad on a Beautiful Day

Yesterday was fine and beautiful. . . and I felt awful.  That seems to be typical for me.  When the weather changes, on that very first day of beauty, I always feel down.  Sick in body and soul.  It might be an actual metabolic reaction to the changing weather.  I don't know.  It could be psychological.  I never have felt I could live up to the beauty of a gorgeous day.  Not the first one, at least.  

I think, however, that it might have been that Bahn mi sandwich I had at the Asian market.  My gut was bad.  The spaghetti carbonara didn't help, either.  So I stayed inside on the most beautiful day of the summer so far this year.  

Until I ran out of matte printing paper.  I think I've already told you that I have been printing the A.I. images of my work on little 4x6 fine art papers.  They are beautiful.  In part, it is due to the colors that are more painterly than photographic.  The outlines are softer.  I am surprised each time one pops out of the printer.  Again, it takes a lot of "work" to get what I want.  The work is in the prompts and the challenge is getting around the strictures ChatGPT wants to place on your image.  And sometimes you get a third hand or a bent foot or a terribly twisted face.  

But this one. . . oh. . . yes.  You might recognize her.  

It was four o'clock and I was feeling punky, but I hadn't yet gone to see my mother, so I took a quick shower, dressed, and headed out the door.  I was greeted by air you couldn't feel and soft light the quality of what you imagine it might be like in heaven.  

Everyone was everywhere.  People were outside.  It was one of those days and it made me sad to have missed it.  You could smell enjoyment like a subtle perfume.  People seemed for the moment happy.  

I got the usual friendly greeting at the photo store.  I grabbed a box of paper and was out the door in minutes.  There is a new photo processing place in town that I haven't been to yet that processes 4x5 film, and that is where I headed.  

When I walked in, a young man was at the counter ahead of me.  He was talking excitedly about something to the lady behind the counter, and when he finished, he turned to me and looked at my camera.  

"Oh, wow. . . what kind of camera is that?"

I had my little Leica CL film camera.  He wanted to know all about it, how long I'd had it, and then he wanted me to help him pick out a new color film.  I walked back to the glass door case with him.  I wasn't sure what films the store was carrying.  I looked at the usual lot of film, made some suggestions, and answered his barrage of questions.  I saw that the woman behind the counter was free, so I excused myself to ask her what the turn around time was on processing 4x5 film.  Three days, she guessed.  It was four-thirty.  I had to run.  

Maybe it was the sickness, I don't know, but I couldn't figure out a good way to get back across town to see my mother.  I took wrong turn after wrong turn and must have driven twenty miles out of my way in some serpentine fashion.  I got to the rehab center just before five.  

My mother was in her room watching tv.  It was loud.  

"I'm guessing you are not wearing your hearing aids."

Like everyone with hearing aids, she doesn't want to wear them.  I told her the day was beautiful and that we should sit outside.  She got up and grabbed her walker.  As much as I say she has made a tremendous comeback from the grave, she does not move well.  She is very, very slow.  

As we passed through the dining hall, the staff was setting up for dinner.  

"What time is dinner?" my mother asked.  

"Five."

It was just before five now.  We walked through the door onto the second floor deck and sat on the faux wooden bench.  It was pleasant, but my mother was concerned about dinner.  

"They usually serve at six," my mother said.  

"It is Saturday.  Maybe the staff is anxious to get home." 

My mother got up to look inside.  She was quite concerned about dinner.  

"I'm going in," she said.  

Weird, I thought.  She was just leaving me outside thinking she would eat and return I guessed, but I got up and opened the door for her and followed her into the dining hall.  She sat at a table with a Korean woman who has been there as long as my mother.  There was only one other person in the dining room sitting at a table alone.  I watched as the servers carried covered dinner trays to the rooms of those not coming out.  My mother opened up her fruit cup and began to eat.  One of the staff brought her some soup.  My mother couldn't hear what the Korean woman was saying and was shouting out non-sequiturs in response.  My energy level was tanking and I was fading, so I told my mother I wasn't feeling well and was going home.  She smiled that deaf and dumb smile and asked me if I was going to sit on the porch.  I told her no, that I was going home.  I probably hadn't been there fifteen minutes, and walking to the elevator, I felt tremendous guilt.  But, I wondered, what would happen if my mother goes home and I became ill and had to go to a hospital?  That was something that had to be figured into the whole equation.  In my present state, I often feel I am on the verge of a complete collapse.  I don't want to deal with anything any longer.  And at that very moment, I just wanted to be home.  

I felt like shit, and knew it wasn't a good idea, but maybe I've become an alcoholic.  I wanted a Negroni, and so I made one and took it to the deck.  A slight breeze came and went blowing like an oscillating fan around me.  I looked at my phone.  Nothing all day.  I felt like a man transported into some "Twilight Zone" episode where strangers seek out my company but I can't find anyone I know.  I was waiting on something that was never coming.  And all about town, the celebration continued.  

My stomach was still ill, so I made only a small Greek-ish salad for dinner.  I ate it with a torn piece of a crusty baguette and a very cold glass of Sav Blanc.  It was good.  It was very, very good.  

As I ate, I scrolled through the suggestions of what Amazon's Fire TV thought I might like to watch.  There was a film about Klimt that I put in my saved to watch later box.  And from there I found more.  One was a film I have not been able to find ever, one I watched so very, very long ago, a film about Gaugin called "Wolf at the Door."  I took a very young and beautiful girl to see it.  I'm afraid it might have been the wrong film to take her to as it seemed too suggestive.  But nothing ended and she and I kept in touch after she went away to college.  She would write me letters often.  She is married now to the son of the brother of a fellow I knew from the old steroid gym days, a fellow from a family who owned the biggest transportation company in town.  The uncle is dead now, so she told me when I last saw her at the Fresh Market a few months ago.  There is still a spark of something between us every time I see her that thrills me.  By god I wish I had taken photos of her back then.  She was always simply fascinating, a homecoming queen who played soccer on the boys team and had a passion for fishing.  Seeing the film title brought that all back.  Yea, I thought, this is what I'll watch tonight.  

But I didn't.  I turned off the tv after dinner and never turned it back on.  I futzed around making prompts and pictures still feeling lousy, and early on I decided to go to an early bed.  

Today will be lovely, too, and I will try to go out into it, but the weight of things I need to do hangs about  me like a man trying to swim with too much chain.  It just pulls me under.  Maybe I'm dying.  I seem to have as many bad days as average days now.  It happens.  People die.  Not my mother and her ilk, of course, but people like me who cannot stand to live a nothing life.  I've been thinking recently that I will just give in, that that might be the best thing.  I will watch sports on television like everyone else and not think about anything at all.  There is always some sport on t.v. now.  And if there isn't some game or match, I'll watch the sports talk shows where pundits opine about upcoming matches and games and wonder what if in adamant tones.  Vehemently.  Maybe I'll learn how to play fantasy football, whatever that is.  It seems to be popular.  I'll drink beer and eat fried chicken, but I won't take up golf.  Maybe, however,  I'll watch it.  

It's what people do.  

I'm tired of thinking and feeling all the rest of it.  

But, o.k. . . just one more song. . . like something beating the shit out of you. . . in the key of Sam Shepard.  

Photos I'll Never Make

Before I write in the mornings, I peruse the news websites.  This morning I came across this about the new photographers exhibit at MoMA (link).  I didn't see myself anywhere in there.  Selavy.  But I'll admit, I haven't given up completely on the idea of my pictures pleasing someone.  And therein probably lies my most fatal flaw.  Selah.  

I did go out with my camera again yesterday.  I wanted to get lunch in a big Asian market near the photo store.  I took my smallest Leica film camera and parked in the camera store parking lot because there is only a small lot behind the market and never a space.  Just as I pulled in, though, I saw one of the two brothers who owns the camera store pull in, so of course I walked with him into his shop.  

"What are you up to today?" he asked.  

"I'm just coming in to get some 4x5 film."

"What?  We don't have any 4x5 film."

"Sure you do," I said.  

"We haven't carried that for years."

"Sure you have."

"I don't think they even make 4x5 film anymore."

"Sure they do."

It turned out they had one box of black and white 4x5 film.  The brother went to the computer as the sales guy was ringing me up.  

"Look at this.  We sold four boxes this year.  Five last."

He went down the line, each year's total in single digits.

"I guess you sold them all to me," I laughed.  

A bag of 4x5 film I wasn't sure I would ever use in hand, I walked back to my car to stow the package.  Then I walked back through the lot and crossed over to the sidewalk that led next door, camera in hand.  I set the aperture wide open and lowered the shutter speed so I could shoot from the hip without notice knowing that none of the pictures would come out.  There was no way I could hit focus in the dim interior with the lens wide open.  I decided to get a bánh mì pho French dip sandwich with pho jus.  The market was busy and I had a long wait, so I took a few photos of the place halfheartedly.  I was sitting in front of three of the markets.  Women took the orders and women made the food, all Asian and all looking very photographable.   I wondered how to make that happen.  Certainly it would be impossible, but I could see the portraits in my mind's eye, just where they would stay, I was sure.  A woman in her early to mid thirties walked around in a slim black dress.  She was obviously one of the "boss ladies."  When I smiled at her, she gave me that look someone of high station gives a peasant just so they understand the distance.  That made me giggle.  In this part of town, there are a hundred Asian restaurants, some with gambling rooms, and, I've been told, brothels that no white men are allowed in.  The city has adopted the idea of labelling different parts of town with identifiable monikers like NYC and other big cities do.  This area is officially "Mills 50," but everyone calls it "Little Vietnam."  Once a much smaller area, I think it was dominated by Vietnamese, but now. . . wtf do I know. . . I think it has a much broader Asian population.  

When the sandwich finally came, it was bigger than I expected, the size of a foot long sub cut in half.  I thought I would be taking half home with me.  

Uh-uh. 

Christ, that sandwich was good and the pho jus was delicious.  I could have eaten two of them.  I would have to come back again, I knew, thinking about asking the working women for portraits.  Goddamn, I need to build that website.  

From there, I went to a nearby art supply shop and bought a couple things.  It was mid-afternoon.  I decided to hop up to see my mother.  It took forever to get there, though, for I had to pass innumerable school zones.  Traffic was backed up everywhere.  

Visits with my mother are becoming more tedious.  We've taken to sitting in silence but for the occasional comment, or watching t.v. in the great room.  There is nothing to do there but sit and stare or watch t.v.  The people are all disabled to a great degree, so activities are out.  Everyone is in a wheelchair.  Half of them are suffering mental disabilities.  What are they going to do, play hide the potato?  So we sit and stare.  This is pretty much what my mother will do at home, too, but she will be with her stuff, and that will make a difference.  

For me, too.  

When I came back home, it was too early for a cocktail, so I worked on some things around the house and read.  But the afternoon was nice, and at five-thirty, I was with a Negroni on the deck, creature of comfort and habit that I am.  After the Asian market, I wasn't in the mood for sushi, so I called the Italian place and got a takeout spaghetti carbonara.  I opened a bottle of wine.  After eating a sandwich in the afternoon, I realized that creamy pasta was not a good idea for dinner, but whatever.  Friday night.  Huh.  

I woke this morning to a cooler house and wondered.  I walked outside and felt the cooler air.  It is our usual faux-fall weather that comes to fool us into thinking the tropical heat is gone.  Nope.  It comes back and we won't see weather like this again until November.  But this week. . . oo-la-la.  

I'll use a camera today.  I don't know which one.  Nor do I know what I will photograph.  A Belarusian photographer once told me, "When you can't take pictures, don't try to take pictures."  I thought that was a good idea, but now I know it isn't.  Like every slump, you just have to soldier on until it passes.  

Who knows?  Maybe something interesting will come my way.  

But I'm not wagering on it.  

Hey. . . remember CDs?  Remember when collections like this would come out?  You'd buy it and like maybe one or two of the songs a lot and a couple other kind of and you'd put it on in the car and keep skipping over the ones you didn't like at all.  No need for that anymore.  Still, I liked the cover art.  

Everything Happens to Me

I swear I've tried a couple times now to take photographs.  One day, I simply got a camera and walked around "the grounds" looking for anything--a shape, a form, a slant of light.  Nothing came of it.  Yesterday, as you may have read, I had what I can only call a mental breakdown.  Disaster Thinking.  I couldn't turn it off.  After rising at four, I DID go back to bed after reading and writing, but it did no good.  My mind went straight back to the horrors I could not shake.  I got up again and didn't know what to do.  I didn't want to go to the gym.  The predictability of my life was an inevitable part of the horror show.  I decided to try to walk it all away.  Sunlight and fresh air, maybe.  I would take a camera.  It would be like old times.  

Only it wasn't.  My steps were painful and slow.  My bad knee, of course.  But my left hip has become a problem.  Back when I got hit on my Vespa, that hip was black with bruising and the flesh beneath the skin has been swollen and fleshy since.  Human tissue is not meant for such trauma, I'm guessing, and cells turned to much have a difficult time reshaping.  And now I'm guessing, too, that the beating the hip took is now coming to its awful fruition.  I'm sure arthritis has developed in the joint now calcified.  My lower back, the lumbar vertebrae, have been bad since I was in my twenties when I was dumb enough to put four hundred and fifty pounds on my back to do squats.  Even back then, the ortho told me to quit it.  

When I was sixteen, my old Chevy got rear ended.  I've had a bad neck since, but this week, I have been suffering greatly from something I must have done in the gym.  I can neither turn nor completely straighten my head.  

Still, with maladie mentale and beaucoup physical ailments, searching for some natural cure,I set out on a three and a half mile walk down familiar sidewalks.  

The idea was to get back to some normality in body and mind, but the going was terribly slow.  "It's o.k." I told myself.  "This is for pleasure.  It is not a race."  

I would stop here and there and take a picture that meant nothing and would never see the xenon light of computer day.  I knew they were shit, but it was a simple exercise, I said, like a musician playing scales. 

At the end of my street, a single block from my house, I took a photo of the rear of a shapely car and realized the internal flash of my little Fuji X100VI was on.  I stopped to scroll through the huge menu trying to remember how to turn it off.  As I stood there scrolling endlessly, I heard a voice behind me.  I turned to see a girl talking on her phone, then turned back to my camera.  The voice stayed behind me for awhile, then after a few moments came up beside me.  

"Are you taking photographs?" she asked.  I looked at her with a silly grin.  Was she going to yell at me?

"Yea. . . trying. . . but I can't remember how to turn the flash off."

"Do you want some help?" she asked.  

I paused and looked at her.  "Are you a photographer?"

"Yes," she said.  She walked over to look at my screen, her leashless pit bull looking dog staring up at me with that thick, wide mastiff head.  We scrolled through the menu together, but it wasn't the right one.  

"Go back to the main menu," she said.  I was feeling foolish and no matter what button I pushed, I couldn't.  

Embarrassed now, I said, "I have an idea," and I turned the camera off and back on.  All this time, apparently, somebody was listening to us on the other end of the phone line.  O.K.  Anachronistic.  There is no line.  But. . . on the other end of what?

"Listen, I have to go," she told someone.  "Just remember Martha Stewart.  I'm a clean freak.  Make sure the kitchen is clean when I come.  O.K.  Bye."

"Got it!" I said.  The dog was standing inches away looking at me.  I took a chance and put my hand palm down the way I know you should toward it.  He bumped my hand with his head, so I gave him a pat.  

"Is this part pit bull?" I asked. 

She told me no, he was something, maybe a Staffordshire terrier, maybe mixed with something else.  I wasn't really paying that much attention.  I was simply glad he was friendly.  

"He was somebody else's rescue dog, but he took to me so I ended up with him."

"He sure is solid," I said, and he was.  Petting him was like petting a rock.  

"Do you want to walk together," she asked me.  I was taken slightly aback by this, wondering, but I said sure. 

I held out my hand.  "My name is C.S." I said.  

She took my hand and said, "Hi.  My name is Ava." 

I straightened up as best I could and tried not to limp so obviously hoping I could keep up, but she was on a stroll, and with the dog staying obediently near, leashless, we sauntered.

As I've said here a thousand times, I'm a good listener and am often genuinely interested in people.  As we walked, she eagerly answered to my queries.  She was a student at Country Club College.  Business and Finance major.  She grew up in the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.  After high school, she applied to most of the Ivy League schools, but she got a scholarship to a university in Paris, so she went to study there.  While she was there, she got a brain infection, she said, and she came home.  It was bacterial, some terrible sinus thing, and it took a while to get over.  When she did, it was the Covid era and she decided to move to California.  

"Did you go to school there?"

"No.  I got a job."

"Did you lose any of your senses from the infection?

"I couldn't taste food for a couple years, but one day it just came back.  I put on a lot of weight then.  My father said, Ava, you're getting pretty big, and I said, Dad, I haven't been able to taste food for a long time.  Food was tasting really good to me, and I was eating way too much.  It all went to my butt and thighs."

She slapped them demonstratively in illustration.  They weren't big now, so I was rather enjoying the show.  

"So how did you end up at Country Club?"

"I got accepted there after high school and I liked it here so I decided to come."

She told me much more about herself as people will if you are curious, and as I have found to be almost universally true, she wondered nothing about me.  People want to tell their stories, and if you are interested, you can find out some of their most intimate secrets.  

We'd strolled slowly for about half a mile when we came to the college.  

"Which way are you going?" I asked.  

"I live just over here," she said.  It was on the street where I used to live.  She was turning left, I right, and so we said our so longs and parted ways.  

A few blocks later, I realized I had the camera in my hand.  I hadn't taken any photographs, but thinking about it, I was fairly certain she wanted me to photograph her.  And then I thought again that I should have talked about photography, asked her what she photographed, and. . . told her to come by the house sometime, that I wanted to use my large format camera, etc.  

Of course, I didn't.  I wanted to seem "normal."

I was feeling good, though, that she had asked me to wander with her.  I like getting out.  It was like a mini-adventure.  I'd forgotten about the pain in my knee, hip, back, and neck while we chatted, but now, alone, it came back to me suddenly.  I still had three miles to go.  Now, however, not everything seemed so disastrous.  

I was fairly certain I would never run into Ava again.  She was a chimera, a figment, a will-o-the-wisp.  Hell, maybe I'd imagined the entire episode, she a phantom of my own making.  

That didn't cheer me up.  I was falling back into the old disaster thinking again.  

When I got back to the house, I decided to take a hot Epsom salts bath.  Now with the tankless water heater, I could have endless hot water, and it was delicious.  I lay there thinking about my cameras.  I really did want to take some large format photos again.  Why?  Because you don't take many.  It is laborious, so you pick something, spend a lot of time setting up the tripod and camera and putting on a lens, then getting under the dark cloth and looking at the dim image upside down and reversed on the ground glass, moving a magnifier around to see what is in focus, then pulling out a 4x5 negative holder and putting it in the slot, metering the light and setting the aperture and shutter speed, cocking the shutter, removing the dark slide, then. . . finally. . . snapping the picture.  You only want to do that a few times in a day.  Maybe later I would pull it all out of the bag and set it up.  

Sure.  

But what I DID do after showering and doing the usual ablutions turned out to be. . . fantastic.  

I haven't printed any pictures in a very long time, not since the big Epson went kaput.  That was one of the big disappointments of my life.  I loved that printer.  I tried everything to save it, but the printer head was clogged forever.  I tried everything to clear it, but it was done.  

I still have my twenty year old Epson Stylus R2400 printer though, a large desktop printer that makes up to 13" prints.  I wondered if it would even work.  I'd been looking at buying a new printer but since I'm taking no photos worth a shit right now, I can't justify the cost.  But I wanted to see what those little ChatGPT creations based on my old photos would look like on thicker fine art papers.  I was pretty sure they would look nice.  So I pulled out some old boxes of 4x6 paper and loaded them into the tray.  Based on past experience, I was pretty sure that the paper wouldn't load, that the printer would reject it. . . but I was wrong.  I pulled up one of the images Chat had made and hit print.  And voila!  It was a beauty to behold to use a tired old expression that truly fits the bill.  I was thrilled.  

And so the afternoon went, me printing out dozens of images.  I couldn't believe how beautiful they were.  Some of my favorites were strange.  

 I wanted to display them so I used magnetized frames to put a few on the fridge and on the blackboard in the kitchen.  People would think me strange, perhaps, but I thought them absolutely gorgeous.  

As the afternoon wore on, it was time to visit my mother.  I no longer go twice a day.  I just can't.  It is physical.  It is mental.  Too much in my life is going wrong.  But I had a story to tell my mother.  

After visiting her the day before, I got home at the cocktail hour.  The evening was nice, the temperature in the low 80s, the air just a bit breezy, so I made a Negroni with the idea of sitting on my deck.  But when I took my drink to the table, the glass top was gone.  WTF?  The tree cutters must have broken it and thrown it away, I thought.  Surely it wasn't thieves.  It would take two people and a truck.  No, it had to be the tree cutters.  I was miffed.  I shouldn't accuse them.  I had no proof.  But what else could it be?  

I looked up the cost of a replacement top, 44" 1/2" thick tempered glass with bevelled edges--$350 at Home Depot.  

And so I told my mother.  She was doing well, and we went out on the veranda to sit in the fresh air for awhile, then we went back inside to sit on the couch in the great room and watch the t.v. news.  Just before dinner was to be served, I told her goodbye.  

When I got home, it was the cocktail hour, so I made a Negroni and went out to sit at the topless table thinking that maybe that Chimera Ava would walk by.  I walked around the yard a bit looking at all the things I needed to do, and. . . holy shit!  I found the glass table top.  The tree guys had placed it against the house behind the bit holly hedge and had forgotten to put it back.  

Man. . . I was glad I hadn't called Mr. Tree with any accusations.  

Maybe things would be o.k. I thought.  I was making a box full of prints that fairly thrilled me.  I was even printing out some of the old Lonesomeville images, too, and they were looking fine.  And that night, I needn't bother cooking.  I had plenty of leftover chicken and rice and broccoli and Brussels sprouts.  I put them in the microwave and poured a glass of wine.  All the news was about the assassination of that fellow Charlie Kirk.  Republican lawmakers were slanderously blaming democrats for the killing.  There is truly something wrong with the right wing MAGA mind.  They are much like a kennel full of retarded pit bulls.  It is terrible. 

But here is what I have to say about Charlie Kirk.  I've seen a good amount of him on YouTube.  Maybe what I have seen is not truly representative of the man, but here is what I saw--a cocky fuckwad with a microphone arguing with semi-educated college sophomores who got to ask questions.  Charlie's logic was terribly flawed at times, but he wasn't sitting in a room of professors who could call bullshit on his claims.  He was on a college lawn performing as the Hari Krishnas had the day before or the Christian madman the day before that.  

I don't think Kirk should have been executed, but I do think he needed to argue with someone who also had a microphone.  

O.K.  I just tried to publish this, but once again, my internet is out.  Piss shit fuck goddamn.  Really?  Truly, everything just goes wrong.  I'll put this up when I can.  And so, until then. . . . 

In Touch with the Forbidden

Up since four with a case of. . . I don't know.  Despair?  Desperation?  Disillusionment?  I seem to be stuck in the "Ds".  I just think my life is going nowhere and it is disturbing.  Another "D".  I tried staying in bed but my mind wouldn't clear, so I got up, put on the coffee and read for a long time in Mann's book, "Art Work."  I'm not sure that helped me.  She makes a good point.  Art is work, and as is often the case, the one who works hardest and longest succeeds.  She is right, I think, that it is not always the one with the most talent.  Lazy talent or distracted talent or wasted talent?  Yea. . . we know where that goes.  

I am stealing a good line from the book, though: "To be creative you must be in touch with the forbidden."  I am most curious about the forbidden.  It is, probably, my greatest obsession.  

But I have put that away always for love.  

Mostly.  

Which was the mistake?  

This morning--can it be called morning?--lying in bed, it all seemed to be a mistake.  More of the anxiety, though, had to do with wanting to make the most of my remaining life and knowing I am going to be spending my next years caring for my mother.  And so. . . . 

Selfish.  

But, as always, I put away my obsessions in order to be dutiful.  

Jeckyll, meet Hyde.  

Mann talks about the pain of rejection being important in her creativity.  She, obviously, powered through it.  At times, she says, she thought about becoming an Emily Dickinson and keeping all her work to herself.  She writes of feeling herself a failure.  

Yea, yea, yea.  The wisdom of those who succeed.  But, as the song goes, "Can you have any famous last words if you're someone that nobody knows?"

You'd have to ask Vivian Meier that one.  

I'm rambling.  It is after six now.  The digital news pages will have been refreshed.  I'm pretty sure I have no interest, though.  Perhaps I'll go back to bed and try to sleep.  

Yea. . . there's a capital idea.  

"But what of us who have all of the flaws and obsessions and desires of the artist. . . but none of the talent?"

A Meaningful Life

 

Started reading Sally Mann's "Art Work" last night.  I sent the forward to some friends I thought might be interested.  One said I must be envious.  I wrote back that envy was one of my favorite sins, but I kid.  Sloth and gluttony seem to top the list.  But of course I envy it all.  

There is the prologue for you.  If you are interested. . . . 

I could have been more dedicated, I guess.  Still, I had a fine life working at the factory.  

I went to the rehab facility yesterday for my mother's evaluation.  She will be coming home a week from Friday.  I am glad for her.  She will be much happier there.  I have much to do, though, to prepare.  Arrangements must be made.  I can't keep being sole caretaker 24/7.  Everyone in the evaluation room says so.  My mother thinks she is fine to live at home, but she is totally dependent now on someone to do almost everything.  She can eat and drink and watch t.v. fine, so she thinks she is set.  When the fellow conducting the evaluation asked if she needed any assistance at home, she just pointed to me and said, "He takes care of me."  All eyes turned.  They know.  They go through similar situations every day.  

Should I abandon my mother for a week and go to NYC?  I mean while she is still in the facility?  That is the question I am running around my brain just now.  I don't know the answer, but I don't have a lot of time to decide.  

I must say, the two short pieces I put together, the giant woman and the two Eves, got little attention.  I am a bit disappointed.  I thought them clever and fine, but everything goes to market.  It's O.K.  I'm going to give up on making them.  They are difficult to make and often very frustrating given the workarounds I must figure out.  I DO have another one, though, about a headless woman, but I am not going to post it.  It's a little crude, so if people didn't take to the other two, I'd be run out of town for this last one.  

I am not sure what I will do instead.  I'm working on a story idea right now, but you know, I'm a writer of anecdotes and vignettes, and finding my voice in short fiction is awfully difficult.  Still, I am working on it.  I'd like to get out at least one short story before I die, just to prove I could do it. 

I find my mother's will to live is incredible.  I don't think I have that same drive.  I keep asking myself what makes life worth living.  And like everywhere else, even there, the line goes dead.  Making those little videos is hard.  Making a meaningful life. . . . 

Long ago, summers were so much easier. 

Or. . . maybe that is just another fiction, too.  

Allegory

This is the beginning of my next series, but it might be a little while.  It takes forever to get what I want while working around the strictures of the A.I. platforms.  One example.  ChatGPT would not create an image of Eve taking a bite from the fruit.  "That crosses a line," it said.  You'll see in a minute that I got around it, but not on that platform.  The little video I will show you in a minute took a long and frustrating time to build.  Oh for access to an unrestricted A.I. tool.  At present, though, there is nothing nearly as good as ChatGPT.  

Except, Google just came out with one that I haven't seen yet.  I'm certain the restrictions will be just as heavy-handed.  But I will seek it out at some point today to see.  If you are looking merely to make commercial products, though. . . I saw some results last night.  You can make professional commercial images from things you've captured with your iPhone.  The job of the commercial photographer will soon be lost to A.I.  

Hate it if you will, but it is only going to get better.  The caveat, I think, is that it will eventually go the way of pay t.v.  At first it will seem like Valhalla, but then the greed heads will take over and things will break up into many, many platforms with a price.  They will figure out ways to keep the little people out.  

Here's just a minor example of one of the platforms creating a video that never existed.  If I'd known A.I. was coming, I would have taken more sequences, would have planned out stories.  I can now, of course, but I no longer have a studio nor people who want to do such things.  But a boy can dream.  

Oh, heck. . . let's try a brief anecdote.  I ran to the liquor store the other night to get some treats.  When I got into line to pay, there were two young, attractive girls before me.  They were attempting to buy some cheap wines, a bottle of Prosecco and other things I didn't note.  The man at the register asked them for their i.d.s.  One girl showed him some form of international i.d. though it was clear she wasn't an international.  The other girl tried to show an i.d. on her phone.  The guy stood looking at them as they fidgeted about.  He was probably in his thirties and surely thought he had some mojo.  He shook his head and said, "Well. . . I'll sell it to you, but next time you come in here, you'll need better i.d.  The other people who work here. . . ."  

He bagged the bottles for the girls and they were on their way.  

When I stepped up to the counter, I laughed and said, "I was going to buy it for them."  He just looked at me with a scowl.  

When I walked out of the liquor store, the two girls were getting into their car, and the woman I was with laughed and said, "They obviously have a drivers license.  WTF?"

Yup.  Neither he nor I had thought of that I guess.  It's good to be young and pretty.  It is like a mist in front of men's eyes.  

O.K.  Now for my "masterpiece."  Ha!  It took me awhile to make this thing.  Scoff if you will, but I think it fairly well thought out.  There are a lot of thematic and symbolic things going on in it.  It tells a complex tale, or so I've imagined.  You will notice that after blonde Eve bites the fruit, the look of the thing changes.  I'd like to say it is metaphorical, that she has been transformed into a new world.  I not only would like to tell you that--I will.  But . . . that happened because I had to change platforms to get an image of Eve biting into the fruit.  

Whatever.  I think it's pretty good.  

Oh. . . the video is age restricted.  You'll need to go to YouTube to watch it.  You can either click the bottom of the video image or use this (link).  

The Secular Reformation

Long ago and far away. . . well. . . the Moral Temperance Society put an end to that.  Once the pedo craze began. . . .  The internet has been scoured of Sally Mann's most iconic images of her children, at least from a casual search.  But I just ordered the new Sally Mann book, "Art Work," that will be released tomorrow, and it will be delivered to me by Amazon that same day.  It is the "caboose" to "Hold Still," she says.  You can read a fairly bland review in the Times here (link).  

Religion has taught one lesson if no other.  Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, and Christians fight and kill one another relentlessly. . . in the name of God, of course.  Well, maybe not the Buddhist.  They have another plan.  The Buddhist, it is said, kill without hate.  So there is that.  But one thing they all believe is that we should feel guilt and shame about the naked body.  Sex isn't so bad.  There are ways to have sex in all religions.  There are strictures, of course, but the species must survive.  Nudity, however, is another matter.  One should not look upon the naked form without feeling guilt and shame.  There are many reasons for this, too many to go into here.  I'll just link you to the Wiki page if you are half-interested (link).  

Prior to Christianity, nudity and the human form was something beautiful, not shameful.  Public nudity was not banned.  Indeed, as I think I may have mentioned recently (I don't remember because I write so many things to so many people), Diogenes used to walk around naked with a lantern "Looking for an honest man."  He also would masturbate in the public market place saying, "If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly."

After the rise of "The Church," now recognized as the Catholic Church, one could only paint the nude as allegorical.  Depictions of Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the Garden abounded.  

Oops. . . more on that to come 😉.  I'm getting ahead of myself here.  

Poor old Marin Luther broke away from the decadence of the church but couldn't break away from his own feelings of guilt over his lustful nature, and he would whip himself bloody with a small instrument termed "a discipline," a small whip with which he would self-flagellate to atone for his impure thoughts.  Later, Calvin and his followers became even more oppressive.  

Of course, modernism broke away from these moral constraints, but, you know. . . we no longer live in modern times.  This time it is a Secular Reformation.  

Born of self-loathing and guilt, I think.  Repression has a way of making people cruel.  

I've certainly lived in better times, I can truly say.  

One can't even rely on the soothsayers any more.  Science, science, science.  But Trump and his team will take care of that. 

So. . . I've tried to distract myself from the trouble of my days and keep from whining to you again.  Yesterday I went to see my mother twice, but otherwise the day was rather carefree.  I have no actions I must take today, and my mother is doing better all the time.  Tomorrow we have her evaluation with the rehab group to see what they recommend.  She should be going home, soon.  I guess I am resigned to my role in that.  Sometimes one just has to accept their fate.  

I couldn't sleep last night.  I woke at two in a panic and couldn't settle down.  My heart was racing and I was breathing hard and fast.  I realized it was some dream that had excited me.  Why was I dreaming that I was stuck in an Olive Garden?  I had to get up and walk around to calm myself.  I decided to take a small dose of Xanax to help me sleep.  And after a bit in bed, just as the Xanax was kicking in, I began to giggle.  It occurred to me that the nightmare must be an offspring of my working a series of images set in the Garden of Eden all day.  

I was stuck in the Olive Garden of Eden!  

I thought then that perhaps I should let that go and quit fucking around with religion and guilt and shame, but you know. . . I seem to have something of an obsession.  I can't help myself, I guess.  I'll have things that you will probably soon to see.