A Respectful Dude

Originally Posted Tuesday, June 4, 2013

O.K.  This is an awkward pose.  I love this sort of thing more than you do.  It is truly the kind of image I would make all the time if I could get away with it, these looney, stiff and totally "amateurish" stances.  They speak to some wellspring in my brain.  I prefer them to "natural" poses which I distrust completely.  And this, my friends, is Olivia Sprauer, a.k.a. Ms. Victoria James, the now (in)famous high school teacher who was fired from her job for posing in pictures such as these.  She came to shoot with me a couple weeks ago.  I've held off speaking her name until the media circus began to quell.  Who needs that, right?  And I do it, too, because she is a very nice person.  I'll have stories to tell about shooting with her sometime hence.  Nothing salacious, but interesting nonetheless.  I still want to give things some time to breathe, so to speak, for her sake.  I don't know if she needs it, but I'm a respectful dude.  Otherwise, I'd have put her name in the title of one of my postings long ago. 

And truly--titles make a difference.  I get about a hundred hits a week from people searching for "Sam Shepard."  Eighty percent of those are from France for some reason, and about fifteen percent are from other European countries.  Apparently Mr. Shepard is a big deal there.  If you have a blog and want visitors, post his name in the title once or twice a week. 

My post titled "Confessions of a Very Big Pussy" is getting a bunch of hits from Google searches.  It is funny to me that when you do such a search and look at the images. . . well, you can do it for yourself and see.  But there are more dicks than you would imagine. 

Which reminds me of a conversation I had at the factory with one of my gay friends there.  It surprises me how people who feel they have been marginalized by society think they are somehow shocking or "out there."  We have broken through some proper barriers, he and I, and as the conversations become more candid, I begin to feel a trust and say things that are, in truth, a little lurid if not shocking.  But Jesus Christ. . . c'mon.  I am thinking that if anyone is going to accept my weirdness, it would have to be someone who has felt marginalized for the things he feels and thinks and. . . does. 

Au contraire, mon frere. 

"Oh, my. . . there are lines and you have just crossed a few of them." 

????

"There are no lines, my friend," I said after a brief moment.  "Humans are capable of anything at all.  Anything.  You just want the lines to move a little bit to include you, but that is bullshit.  There are no lines."

If this were truly a free country. . . .  But I have the ability to turn any conversation weird.  I have friends whose tolerance in some areas are higher than mine, but they are truly out there.  You do not want to know them.  As for me, I live in a "Leave It to Beaver" neighborhood by choice.  I like it that way.  I want to be as far away as possible from most things.  But I like to travel, and there are few places I don't want to go now and then. 

Oh, my, though, this has become far too confessional.  Perhaps it is because tonight I've followed the Arnold Palmers with twelve year Glenn Fiddich and Dove Double Chocolate Bar.  That is enough to turn a nun demented. 

I can only tell you this.  The "strange" life gets boring very quickly.  A little goes a long way.  I don't trust people who don't have enough of it, nor people who have too much.  The admixture in a good recipe is just a pinch of weirdness in a whole bunch of the mundane.  It is a powerful spice, and one you should not deny even your dearest people.