Eve of Destruction

Originally Posted Friday, April 4, 2014

I am failing photography, or photography is failing me.  I haven't made a new picture in forever.  I don't do the things I plan to do, not even the rotten fruit.  Maybe this weekend I will get some gumption.  And maybe I have just been preoccupied with my health.  I was scheduled for knee surgery today, but I cancelled.  Yesterday I thought I would try to run.  Mistake.  I am walking with a bent leg this morning.  It is an attractive aging thing.  WTF?  I have made myself a hideous hermit, a caricature of a man.  Still, even that little water head Lautrec could paint and his cousin Bellocq made fabulous pictures.  What's wrong with me? 

I am consumed by the destruction of the planet, of course.  It is crippling me.  I watch others who are able to shake it off or ignore it completely.  A few will make brief gallows humor about it once in awhile, but in the end. . . what can you do?  The rich will try to buy their ways out and the poor will suffer first.  Being poor has always been bad, but it is about to get much worse.  Life in many places is already beginning to look like scenes out of "Escape from New York."  And the rest of us keep busy talking about serious things like gay marriage and legalized marijuana and the lives of famous people.

So. . . there are two lines open for us to take.  We either choose a spiritual life in preparation for the day, or we live as decadently as possible.  I ask myself, who had the better life, Billy Graham or Frank Sinatra?  O.K.  Maybe that is not the right comparison.  I would say Hugh Hefner, but the man really seems like a choir boy to me.  Drink and drugs were not his forte.  Really, he just gave America healthy titties.  That was basically it.  He provided a rather sanitized version of what had been dirty.  Good, wholesome stuff.  And he is the only one of the three who would crusade for the health of the planet.  Good old Hugh.  He seems to be the middle ground here. 

Maybe I should stack up the Dali Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Tutu on one side and George Bush, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin on the other as our polar choices. 

But man, how patriarchal. 

Sister Therese vs. Kardashian Sisters.  I would put Paris and Nicole Hilton in the middle, I think. 

This silliness is all I can muster against the coming global destruction and my own creative demise this morning.  I've wanted to leave something but it doesn't seem that there will be anything left.  Zeuss and all who came after him can't save us now.  All I can envision are illustrations of Dante's works. 

I hope the weekend gets better. 

I like this picture, by the way.  I keep toying with calling it "Eve of Destruction."