I'd Better Think of Something

New Mexico.  I thought I was really something out there with my Leica M7.  I was taking pictures like crazy.  Not such good ones as I thought, though.  It is a hard pill to swallow.  This fellow was selling orchids at the gorge.  He pointed across the road and into the distance where there were three bighorn sheep.  I never thought I'd see them in the wild, but apparently nature has changed its mind about such things.  They've gotten used to people and stay around I was told.  I wish I had taken better pictures of the fellow.  I just wasn't used to shooting outside the studio, I guess.  Such a sad truth. 

There are many in life, though.  Just when you begin to think you are something, you are shown that you are not.  It doesn't matter in what arena--love, art, commerce.  It is important never to believe the hype.  You believe in your own wonderfulness at your own peril.  You may be seduced, of course, which is what the devil does.  The devil is your ego.  It wants to tell you that you deserve the wonderful things in your life.  The angel is the one that tells you you are stupid and deserving of nothing.  It is a wonderful twist.  I know better than to listen to ego. 

No I don't.

Here we go again. 

Speak of the devil, that figure in Christian mythology that tempts people to do bad things--we have one right here where I live.  It is called the police department.  They have decided that there is not enough actual crime that needs to be dealt with.  Nope, they have set up a sting to lure people into having sex with underaged girls.  Or that is what they propose, anyway.  They do this with regularity. The head of the film program at the state university here just got caught.  He was in a chat room, I guess, flirting with a girl who was seventeen.  Well, not really.  But that is what he thought.  He resigned from his university position and is facing ten years in prison.  The po-po lured him into sin.  They whispered into his ear at night and spun crazy and wonderful dreams, just like Milton's Satan in "Paradise Lost."  Jesus never did that, never tempted people in any way.  He was straight up boring, but you could trust him.  The police here had decide who they wanted to emulate, Satan or Jesus. 

They just want to make the world a better place.  I'm betting it is a lot more fun to be a little girl on the internet than to sneak around violent streets where people are actually committing crime.  But I am not a policeman and never will be, so I should shut up until I've walked a mile, etc. 

I wondered, though, when I was told the news about the fellow at the university if he had never watched television?  Really?  It is like betting all your money playing three card monty on the streets of New York. 

But I have my own traumas to deal with today.  It won't be fun.  There is that and there is the fact that I can't seem to make a good picture any longer.  I'm not feeling so well or good.  I just want to sit for a long, long while and think.  As Mohamed Ali said in his training camp just before he took the worst beating of his career just at the end of it, "I'll think of something.  I've always thought of something.  I'd better think of something." 

Yup.