The Hero's Tale

Originally Posted Sunday, June 2, 2013

Black and white film.  Everything looks like the 60s.  That is because I have only taken photographs of this one girl so far, and she looks like something French from the 60s, n'est pas?  So I think, anyway.  I'm loving the images even though it takes a very long time to process and scan them.  I fear, though, that I've become afraid of taking photographs of strangers in the street.  I will need to get my chutzpa back.  After that is retrieved, perhaps I'll work on my mojo. 

I have been sick for the past two and a half weeks.  I feel better this morning.  I am relieved.  I had begun to think it was something if not terminal at least permanent.  I read an article in the N.Y. Times this morning about AIDs patients who once thought they would soon die but, through the intervention of new drugs, are alive and in their fifties.  The drugs, the article reports, brought them back to health. . . with a caveat.  Every new drug comes with its own side effects.  Many of the patients have developed ancillary illnesses for which they are medicated.  Those interviewed for the article talk about being old.  Most live alone.  They suffer from fatigue and depression.  The article compares these symptoms to the conditions of old age. 

Isolation.  Fatigue.  Depression.  Hmm. 

One of the interviewees says he begins to get fatigued around six o'clock.  Another, a gay man living in New York, says he can no longer go to the bars he used to.  He just isn't wanted there any more. 

I shouldn't read the Times any more.  It is not cheering me up. 

But the film cameras are.  To tell you the truth, though, I suspect it is the girl in front of the cameras that has me so enamored of the cameras and the film.  I may need another exorcism. 

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But that is not what I wanted to say at all.  I have lived well and though I haven't done everything I would like to have done and have not taken the chances that I sometimes think I should have, my life is fuller and richer than I am allowed to let on.  "Why are you always the hero of your stories?"  Remember?  That is what the woman asked me a few weeks ago.  The answer is really very simple--because I always tried to act heroically.  Here's the formula.  Work out a strong moral code, then act it out as often as possible.  It will probably be based on the actions of the people you thought of as heros.  For good or ill, you will ape their best behaviors.  And often times their worst, too.   Then learn to tell stories about what you have done.  Voila!  

Sitting at dinner with people from The Bosses Convention, I listened to blase story after blase story.  They were all comfortable with it.  The creeping sameness of their tales gave them comfort, I think, a common bond and knowledge that these were the right things to do and that they had done them well.   Hero's Tales.  Same formula.  Different values.  

*     *     *     *     *

Shit.  That is not what I meant to say, either.  I seem to have a festering sore in my brain.  Too many ideas at once.  It is summer.  I wish to be everywhere.  I want to be in California (most of it) and Prague/Budapest/Istanbul.  I want to go to Amsterdam/London/Paris.  I want to eat homemade ice cream on a New England shore and play flag football (a la the Kennedy's circa the early '60s).  I want to go to Nashville and drive through the mid-western states.  I want to climb in the Tetons.  I want to spend a week at The Breakers and another at the Fontainebleau in Miami.  I want to see the beaches of Brazil and Thailand.  I want romantic adventure.  

I guess that is what I was thinking.  I guess that is what was behind everything else.  Life's potential constricted by money and time.  Circumventing that--there is The Hero's Tale.  I will do what I can.