Farm Report

I stayed up later than usual, rose later, too, and have put off writing as long as I can.  Today, I can only provide a "farm report."  If that.  My mind has disengaged (but remember, there is an oddly beautiful photo, too).

Yesterday was my mother's birthday.  And I missed it.  I didn't forget it, but I was going to leave the factory early so that I could see her before she went out with her girls.  I had wanted to take her to dinner, of course, but the girls had already made plans.  Who am I to stand in the way of that, right?  So I thought I'd leave the plant at two, take her flowers and cake and a present, and make her day a little bit shinier.  But the factory ate me alive and I could not get away.  Problem after problem piled on my plate, and suddenly I looked at the clock and it was 3:30.  The girls were picking her up at four.  So I called and told her.  She took it well, but I was devastated.  It was one of the landmark birthdays, too.  I am a wretched son.  Fucking Factory.

And so maybe I'm thinking that I don't deserve this, but John Minnick's sent me an email and a FedEx number yesterday.  His camera should be here by the end of the week.  Yea!  What will I do with it?  I will surely hate it, will surely wish I'd never ordered such a thing.  What will it do that other cameras won't?  I am going in the wrong direction.  All decisions lead to hell.

I shot with a model last night.  I struggled.  I was consumed by the events of the day, distracted.  Conversation revealed many things, and not in their natural order.  She was a theater major at the local state school but left the program when she got a job on a network television show.  She could not do both.  Later, she signed up for writing classes at the Country Club College and got a BFA in creative writing.  Hmm.  I asked if she studied with some of the writers I know who teach there.  Sure, she did.  She has a blog, she told me, about her dating life.  Maybe all this made me shy.  We shot for awhile, me fairly mute.  I was timid about asking her to do what I usually ask without thought.  Wasted too many Polaroids.  But she was not shy.  Turns out she put herself through school dancing in strip clubs.  Her maternal grandmother was a brothel madame in El Salvador, she said.  She was trying to channel her in our pictures.  I shot fewer photos than I normally do, too worn out from the day, perhaps.  She got her things together and stuck around.  We talked more and it was getting late, so I said, "I'm going to work on these while you talk.  It takes me quite a while after the model leaves, but I'll enjoy the company."  And quite a while later, when I had finished up with part of my "secret process," she was still drinking wine and telling stories.  She was very certain and matter of fact about the telling of things.  I'm curious to see her writing.

Finally home later than I planned, hungry and tired, I poured a bowl of some health food store cereal, the kind that might be good for you but I doubt it, the kind that tastes like it should be good for you, maybe, the kind with something in it that makes it taste un-American in the usual sense of the word, you know, not like the stuff they advertise on network television, the good stuff that lefties are trying to keep away from children.  You know.  Like smoking clove cigarettes.  Like eating only tofu.

I ended up frying some eggs.

The real problem is that I quit drinking.  For awhile, any way.  I've quit drinking and it is boooooooring.  But being big as a whiskey cask is no fun, either.  If I were drinking, I'd not have needed the cereal nor the eggs.  Nope.  I could have gotten plenty of nutrition from a bottle.  All you need, really.  More.

I'm pretty sure that not drinking is bad for me.  I'm certain that drinking is as well.  You get to a point in life where nothing is good for you, nothing at all.  I'm relatively certain, though, that if I had not quit drinking, I would have seen my mother yesterday.  I'm pretty certain I would have been more active and creative last night.  I'm pretty certain that I would have gone to bed at the appropriate time.  For now, however, life is like a Wallace Stevens poem:

"Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

In the words of one immortal, "And so it goes."