I've Been Waiting for You, I've Been Creating for You. . . So Long

It's difficult to pick a photo for this post.  I worked all day on images and have a few I think I'm crazy for.  They will all get shown, but what to show today?  O.K.  I'll just have to choose.

This is perhaps the least dramatic of the images.  But I like it.  This is the "digital look" I've settled on.  There is a lot going on in the picture that is not obvious.  It takes me over an hour to process one.  What I want is a signature, something that when you see it says. . . me.  I know how to do this now the way I knew how to do Polaroid.  I still haven't fallen on a way to do Fuji instant film, but I've read that they are discontinuing it anyway.  Shit.  I've spent thousands of dollars on cameras so that I can shoot different types of instant films in different ways.  The speed at which they disappear, however, is daunting.

Leica came out with a new digital camera which only records black and white.  It is called the Leica M Monochrom.  I didn't misspell it.  No "e" on the end.  Click on the name if you want to see a video about it.  I did.  I want one, too.  But it will sell for $8,000 in July.  Is it worth it?  Absolutely.  It is a totem, a monolith, an touchstone.  It will do things that other cameras won't do.  I've asked Q to help me find one that has fallen "off the truck."  Between the two of us, we're bound to know someone who wants to make a few thousand dollars.  I'm not asking for a freebee.  I'm paying.

For two days, I've done nothing but work on images.  It has been wonderful, really, though I worry about myself.  For two days, I've spoken to no one.  Even at the gym.  Didn't use my voice.  It is scary. I don't mind it.  I feel better, really.  The trouble is that when I do go into public, I've forgetten how to be. . . you know. . . cool.  I've not been cool for so long now. . . .  "So Long."  The song by Beth Orton is playing just now as I write the words.  Oh. . . everything is beautiful.  Click on the title to listen (though I haven't high jacked the song, so you will have to watch some goofy stills) or for a live version click here.  Either way, the video will open in another window.  Let the music play while you come back to this page to read.

Sorry.  Strange Interlude.  What I was saying, though, is that I have not minded in the least being alone but for the awareness of the psychological hazard of it.  Shorter life, depression, alcoholism, etc.  But I've figured out much and turned out. . . oh. . . six beautiful images.  Not much, eh?  You don't know.  It takes so long to do this.  And then I post them and they are dismissed in a matter of seconds.  Still. . . they live on beyond all the incredibly pitiful attention spans.  They do.  I know it.

Thusly. . . in the comfort of my hideous solitude, I get messages reaching to me from the past, both near and distant.  A message from M.  We were close once, long ago and for years.  She was young, and I was. . . a tutor.  Yes, that is the word.  And we were crazy writing to one another ten thousands and millions of words.  I had girlfriends and she had boyfriends, but we. . . wrote and wrote and wrote.  I would go to see her when she was in college.  I would drive down and stay with her.  And when she came home to see her mother or her (ex)boyfriend, she would sometimes stay with me.  But mostly, and every day, we wrote.

After college, she moved to San Francisco (on my very strong recommendation), and I went to see her. Stanford the first year, S.F. the next.  I took her down the Pacific Coast highway on the most beautiful day that ever existed.  She was thinking about the boy she had just broken up with.  We drank champagne all the way.  We stopped at Napenthe and sat out on the cliff in the cold sunshine and ate and drank, then drove further.  She fell asleep in my lap when it got dark driving home.  I slept on her bedroom floor.

She stayed with me in a small bed at a strange old fisherman's hotel with shared bathrooms in San Francisco one year.  She hated it.  I visited her again another year and she took me to bars with her girlfriend with whom I fell head over heels in love.  She was engaged and got married soon after.

Then she moved back to my own hometown and fell for a lawyer.  We did not see one another then though we were in the same town.  And a year later, he followed his ex-wife to Montana to be with his kids.  She followed him.  The pictures she sent were beautiful, but I knew she was doomed.  She held on ignoring the facts until they could be ignored no more.  Now. . . she has moved back.

And I rarely hear from her.  She doesn't write me any more.  She likes Facebook and I saw that she had lots of old high school friends.  She began to love her mother and sisters and her niece in a way she'd never loved them before.  She loved animals.  She wanted to save them.  Her writing changed.  Her photos were simple.  Suddenly, she was thirty, more.

A year has gone by since she has gotten back into town.  She has never called me to make a date.  Once, months ago, she wrote wondering why we had not gotten together.  I did not answer.

Today, she wrote again.  An invasion into my lonesome, private, decadent world.  I sent her the "Mother's Day Card" from yesterday's post.  I did not hear back.

Later on that day I got an email from Red titled, "call me a bitch if it makes you feel better :)"  She didn't leave town, she said, and she's been "cheating" on me with other photographers, though none of it has been as much fun as I was (but she has gotten some very good images, she said).  But now she wants to drag her "pale ass" (her words) back to my studio.  She misses our Friday nights.

As my friend Q would say, "What are we to make of such things?"

Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  I grew up a few years ago.  Nobody ever owes you anything.  They certainly don't think so.  Nope.  I am over expecting anything from others.  I've been through enough break ups to have learned that.

Shit.  So come over.  Tell me some stories.  Whatever.