This Is Not. . .

Originally Published Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Christmas day in bed, then dinner with mother, then home to read the only Christmas present I received.  Hardly moved.  Drank a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and then the whiskey.  Five o'clock and ready for bed.

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Fell asleep in a chair for hours.  Dark outside.  Christmas over, so it seemed.

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Got a call from Q.  It stands for Quarrel, apparently.  We did.  He told me he didn't know why I still was writing a blog.  He is probably correct.  I don't either.  Shutting down the other was probably a mistake.  I can't make this site work the way I want it to, can't make entry titles visible, can't embed songs.  I feel like I'm playing a guitar with four strings.  Every reader I have here now are people I told about the site, but not everybody I told about the site is still here.  I got used to hundreds and hundreds of hits a day, I think.  It oppressed me, I thought, but this feels very solipsistic, sort of like my holidays. And even as my photography moves a bit, I feel uncertain.  I indulge myself too much perhaps.  But there is no one else to do it.  

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Woke up to big wind in the dark.  Turned on the light and walked into the bathroom.  The cat has taken to peeing on the throw rugs there.  We have quarreled about this once and she quit, but this morning I picked her up and rubbed her in her own pee, then threw her outside.  There was no going back to bed again.  Are other people happy I wonder?  Satisfied?  Content?  Or are we all forever just struggling with the pretext?  

People are asking me about my photography.  Where do I show it?  Do I sell it?  I have no answers for them.  It is a childish game of make believe.  Who can understand that?  If the pictures were on book covers or in magazines, sure. . . then it's commerce.  But, they wonder, do you just take pictures?  They are right, I know, and I am embarrassed.  I have no measure of success but for some internal feeling.  But I love the pictures, maybe too much, and am paranoid that they are not good, that they have no value "out there."  

Maybe I love them so much because of the stories I hear from the people who help me make them.  Jesus, I can't even tell them for the most part, at least not when I post the pictures.  I want to badly.  I want to tell you the stories I hear before, during, and after the picture making.  I know so many deep things about people's lives, such secret things that they tell me.  It is like that.  I meet them for the first time when they come to the studio, and moments later everything begins to fall away until they are bare in body and spirit and I love them more than anything right there and then.  It is a communion in art rather than religion, I guess, I a confessor in a sense, they in another.  It is very emotional and very tiring and perhaps this is why I am wearing down now even here in hiding.  I am just a hillbilly in a test market town.  It is not L.A.  It is not New York.  I have a cracker box studio in an old storage warehouse.  I am a naif.  Look what I can do.  

The girl in the photo was a high school wrestler on the boy's team.  Can you imagine?  I know what drove her to do it, but of course I cannot tell.  I asked her if she liked this image and she said, "Yes.  It is a feminist's dream, power and beauty."  Oh, hell, how can I quit?  What would I do?  

This is not L.A.  This is not New York.  I am just a hillbilly with a cracker box studio in a test market town.