Isolation and Vulnerability

Some weird form of paranoid, teeth-gnashing madness has descended upon me.  Maybe again.  I'm not sure.  This could be an entirely new variety.  More likely, though, it is a mutation of something I've had before, something that stays with you, that you can never be entirely cured of, like a herpes virus that lives deep inside the body's nerve endings.  Perhaps madness is viral.  Or, like the boson, something else completely which science has yet even to recognize.  My mother told me yesterday that there are a lot of reports of people getting parasites from eating sushi lately.  She says it is hard to diagnose and even harder to treat.  The treatment is rough and horrible, she said.  I can feel the balls of little white maggots burrowing into the big muscles of the body to reproduce and multiply, destroying the very meat of me.  I've been running, or trying to run in a parody of running, lately, and today I woke with a swollen and painful right knee.  I half-woke in the night and knew that no one would ever love me again.  Dark angels with talons came down to give me succor.

"Oh. . . quit it."

But yesterday was an unmitigated failure from the get-go.  Or is that git-go?  I went online to book a trip to California.  Should be exciting, right?  It was a misery.  Things are so expensive, especially in San Francisco, and trying to work out all the dates was driving me crazy.  I sat stupidly with a calendar and paper and pen and began trying to arrange the trip, multiple internet sites open for flights and hotels.  I made calls to my California friends to see if the dates would be good for them, but who knows these things?  Sure, sure, come on out, they say without real investment, we may be here.  Sounds great.

In the end, sick of it all, wishing to call a travel agent to take care of everything, I clicked the radio buttons, filled in the forms, and put up my credit card numbers.  Done.

Then the flood of doubt and regret.

I told you yesterday that I no longer know what I want.  But I did know as I made decisions and booked everything on my own.  I wanted someone else to take responsibility.

After that, I had a shoot in the studio with a model I've shot with before.  And everything went wrong.  She was late.  I started drinking too early.  I opened a piece I'd just ordered for my Polaroid camera and dropped it on the floor.  It shattered into pieces like it was made of glass.  The model was feeling. . . no, was not feeling. . . what I was hoping.  She was in a practical mood.  As we began, the strobes would not fire.  I fooled around with menus in my camera for half an hour, but I think it was the cable connection.  We shot, the strobes firing about one out of three times.  It was an evening of shits and fucks and goddamns.

After we gave up, I took her to dinner at an Italian restaurant around the corner.  A jazz band was playing outside.  We sat close by and ordered dinner.  She got a telephone call, left the table, and came back crying.  I walked her back to her car and returned to eat the two dinners alone.  Halfway through my meal, rain began to fall.  I had the waitress box everything up and walked back to the studio to close up.  Getting into the car, I lost my grip on the studio keys.  They fell somewhere between the seats.  I have yet to find them.

By the time I got home, the liquor stores were closed.  I was out of scotch.  A tragic ending to a pathetic day.

And so back to the beginning of the post.  The weird madness began to descend.  The feeling of isolation and vulnerability. . . .

"Quit it."

I know, I know.