Staying In

I'm convinced, as I am certain all of you are, that the key to staying young and vital is to own your own time and have enough money to pursue your passions. Oh, and to have healthy passions, of course.  All that adds up to not having to work for anyone and to have a source of wealth that allows you to do what you want.  When I came back from vacation, everything was good.  I had lost weight, looked younger, and had more vitality.  I had been sleeping until sunrise or later every day.  When I woke, I was happy.

Three days back at work.  Back to the old routine.  I woke this morning at four o'clock with the horrors again.  Why?  There can only be a few reasons.

I am, however, still a bit more at peace than before I went away (that will probably end on Monday).  Yesterday I lolled around the house until noon.  Dropped off some shirts at the cleaner's because I am always wrinkled as I take my shirts from the dryer and hang them up.  Once the cleaner presses them, they are good for awhile.  Then I dropped by to see the camera guy who is fixing up Frankencamera.  He has gotten some cool stuff for it, but still he cannot get a couple things to work.  He is stymied, and I can't help.  But the camera focuses from about three feet to twelve and so I got to walk around with the big box and look through the viewfinder--and what I saw thrilled me.  I can't wait to begin making pictures with this thing.  There were two fellows at his shop who were not together but who my friend was anxious to have meet one another.  They are both documentary photographers working on large projects, one in Venuzuela and one in Cuba.  I was introduced, too, but they  did not make much of me, I think.  I do not tend to take myself as seriously as they seemed to take themselves.  And it seemed to me that they took one another seriously as well.

But when we broke out the Frankencamera, they began to pay attention.  And then they were impressed.  At once, they spoke to me in a different manner, as one of a clan.  I am not of that type, however, and don't care one way or another.  But about that camera. . . oh, I am passionate.

I asked my camera guy if he wanted me to seek some help from the only fellow in the world who has solved the problem of how to make this Aero-Ektar lens work on this Graflex RB SLR body.  He is prideful, but he shrugged and said something like, "I mrmm k f'ya wa. . . huff huff huff."  I took that to mean Sure, if you want.

I started to write to two of the big photographers who each have one of the three or so contraptions in existence to ask for an introduction to the camera's engineer, but then I found a way to contact him directly.  I told him I was prostrating myself in this begging knowing that is was like asking the man who invented gold how he did it.  But the fellow responded tout suite, and though he did not tell me how to get infinity focus or how to get the mirror to function with this oversized lens, he gave one clue which made some sense to me.  Now we'll see if it helps the fellow with the tools.  What he really wanted me to do, though, after telling me of the hundreds of hours and all of the machining and money he spent trying to solve these problems was for me to buy one of his cameras.  And I don't blame him.  And maybe I should have started there to begin with, but I am sunk in the money mire now and have no way out, it seems, still facing the hospital and doctors' bills, the dental bill, the cost of buying a Polaroid camera I did not end up needing and all the 669 film that I could find, and finally the cost of a vacation planned the night before I went, and the who-knows-what expense of the breaking apart the rental car.

And that is only part of why I am waking up in the dark again.

But I hold out hope.  Not for paying the bills, but for my friend getting the camera to work.

I need an adult in my life.  Or better, a patron/matron.  Refer back to paragraph one.

After that, I went to the gym where I worked out and then went to the pool to soak up a bit of sun.  And there I met my friend who owns a hip bar in the big downtown area I never go to.  He began regaling me with tales and said I must come that night, that I would be treated as a Pasha, that there would be women and wine and it would all be mine.  Of course you think I'm kidding.  I told him that if I were still awake at the requisite hour, I would come, knowing that I would not be awake when he says I should be there.  Nothing good happens after midnight, I think, unless you are in bed.

In the late afternoon, I was thinking of the ceviche I had eaten the night before.  The day was too hot, and the thought of sitting at the cool bar and drinking an icy beer and eating ceviche and guacamole was overwhelming.  And that is what I did.

But it was, as I say, late afternoon, late enough that I could have been eating a blue plate special dinner with AARP, so when I got home, it was definitely the cocktail hour.  And I thought to have a little whiskey to kill anything that might have still been living in the raw/lime juice chemically cooked fish.

The first one was a little short, I believed, so I poured another, or as I told myself, the rest of it.

After that, there was not really much I wanted to do, so I decided to do something I never do before dark.  I sat down before the television.  Then darkness found me watching episodes of "Mad Men" on Netfilx.

In between episodes, I was checking my email, for I was in the middle of corresponding with the camera genius, and Slava Pirsky was sending me some images that he is working on for his next big project.  Oh, they are lovely and I can't wait for you to see them.  But he had asked me for my opinion, and maybe there is little profit in that.  What can you do?  I guess there is simply gushing, and that would probably the correct thing, but clever people like me try to make startling observations that show both our intelligence and our interest in the thing itself.  And I made these observations knowing that I hate when people who do like my work make critical observations about it.  They are sometimes correct, but there is always at first the resentment.  I hoped not to breed that with my own, but I know. . . I know.

And somewhere in the night while checking my email, I had one from a woman who got me started in all of this--sort of.  She was the first model I worked with who was not someone I already knew.  She was wonderful and encouraging when I first started, and I liked working with her though I have never been able to get her to come back.  But we stay in touch and last night she wrote to tell me that she still reads my blog.  She liked yesterday's post she said, and knew I wasn't talking about her.  She was drinking tequila, she said, and wanted to know if I was still drinking scotch.  I wrote her back to tell her scintillating tales of my evening home alone with "Mad Men."  Funny, she wrote.  She had been watching it that very day herself.  Later still, she texted me from a martini bar.  I could see her in a little dress, legs crossed, holding herself steady on a bar stool as prideful men offered to buy her drinks.  I wrote her back to tell her I was "bedward" thinking to dream of all the women who didn't get to meet me that night.  How much they must have grieved.

Now the sun is up and I am ready to go down.  I will go back to bed for awhile and sleep.  Tonight is dinner with mother and preparing for more beatings at the factory.  I have fallen back into it, this solitary, hermetic routine.  As always, I had momentary hopes of changing things, but I am only left with hopes that Frankencamera can come to fruition, and that, perhaps, my Ur-model will come back to shoot with me again, though I know that I will not hear from her for some time if she met someone she halfway liked last night.  I do not think that she is about to become a hermit, too.