Just Bedraggled

The Liberator portrait # 4.  I think.  I've been using it.  It is like learning to play the piano.  First you are just trying to find the keys but eventually your hands take over and you needn't think so much.  There are a lot of knobs and gears to turn to make a picture with this ten pound hunk of glass, wood, and metal, and I am slow and awkward with it, but I am getting faster.  And soon, I may not be awkward, either.  Exposure control is clunky, and even with a meter their is a lot of guesswork. But here is one from yesterday, handheld at 1/4 sec. so there is a bit of camera shake evident.  Either not enough or too much.  That is the way of everything that is good.  Extremes.  You can see the shallow depth of field and the effects of the tilt/shift lens here.  It might be quite something soon enough.

All this dry, technical talk, though, is just to keep me from talking about the other.  I mean, I crashed last night.  Down the rabbit hole.  It is everything.  I've let too much that needs to be done pile up.  Practical things that you needn't think about when you are a child, the things that parents take care of like house repairs, driveway maintenance and lawn care, dishes, laundry, cars. . . . Shit, the Volvo has been sitting in the driveway for almost a year now without being driven.  I was going to give it to a friend's son, but somehow that never happened and time slipped by faster than I could imagine it would.  There is that and things like that, many of them, piling up around my ears.  I need to spend thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to catch up now.  But what do I do instead?  You know.  The evidence is all here.

I don't sleep.  I fall asleep on couches and in chairs, but i wake at four each morning unwillingly.  I am being eaten from the inside, deep down, maybe at the cellular level.  And last night--and who knows why (maybe the season snuck up on me unawares)--I fell.  It was like a scene from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."  Outside and in.  All at once.

And it was a single incident that triggered it, something unfortunate, the result of many things, a culmination, something relatively minor on the one hand and devastating on the other, a moment of personal reckoning and (dare I say) shame.  And perhaps with enough distance, I'll tell you about it one day. But the moment dominates me now and from it I wish some distraction.

I meant to write that as the opener today, wanting to write an essay on "Distraction," why we want it and how easy it is in the Age of Distraction, and what the consequences are.  But that will wait for another time.

Christmas, as it does in recent years, has snuck up on me once again.  I have sent no Christmas cards and may not be able to.  I have yet to buy presents for my mother or any of the many little things I need to buy for friends.  It is overwhelming now.  It is simply too much.  I had grand ideas about all that in November, everything handmade.  I used to.  I used to find the time.  It made me feel good.

But now I have images piled up to the ceiling to deal with.  They are like the mops and pails in "Fantasia" growing exponentially like a virus or a cancer.

I had two shoots yesterday, one today, and one tomorrow.  Some deal I've made, eh Moloch?