Chatbot

I love soft and blurry pictures.  Not overly blurry, but as with Goldilocks, just right.  

I've had a real couple days.  Yesterday was a sort of repeat of the day before except that I never left the house.  Well, I did once, to get some medicine, but that was only for a few moments.  Breakfast was organic chicken strips and 'tater tots.  WTF?  I got a text from the gym.  Where was I?  "Not today," I wrote back.  I may have needed the rest.  I hadn't a bit of desire to do anything other than what I was doing which was, by and large, working with images on the computer.  When I do that, trying out new methods and new "looks," I get lost.  One image can take forty-five minutes or so.  Why do it, you might ask?  There are lots of filter kits that let you just "click" a look.  That's what a lot of photographers do.  All I can answer is, "I don't like it."  

And so, with music driving me, I sat and burned holes in my eyes looking at a computer screen for hour upon hour.  When I looked at the clock, it was late afternoon.  I called my mother and said I wouldn't be over.  I was a bum, I said.  Some days are just like that.  O.K. she said.  Relax. 

I took a break to "make" dinner.  A little bit of cheese, a few olives and crackers and a glass of wine on the deck with the cat.  Then I took the left over salmon from the night before and made a salmon salad.  It was better this way.   I opened a can of black bean soup and watched another fight on YouTube, Rocky Marciano vs. Archie Moore.  It is hard to believe that Marciano hadn't a single loss in his career.  If he didn't eventually knock everyone out, he would never have won a fight.  

When I was a kid, they used to have the Friday Night Fights on television, and I would watch them with my father.  He'd ask me who was going to win before each fight. We had a tv that was in a blonde wooden box that stood on a matching three legged stand.  The images were black and white and often full of "snow."  

Another piece of the puzzle, I guess, eh, doc?

Before bed, I wanted to look at the pictures I had cooked up that day.  Shoot.  Most of them really didn't work out that well.  I had not established "a look" but simply had a bunch of mostly unappealing things.  That's the nature of experimenting, though.  I put my whiskey on the table, put on the music, and tried again.  I sent a couple of beautiful old photos to Red.  It was one o'clock.  I wasn't sleepy, but she was right, it was late for me.  Reluctantly, I went to bed.  

I will have to start over today.  Start what over?  I don't know, exactly.  I need to get out of the house.  I need to move, even on a gimpy knee.  I need water and fresh air.  I need something to happen.  But I'm guessing that Mickey Rourke and I will never have that long desired boxing match, so I may eat a hot dog for breakfast.  

That's all I have after a day of sitting, a poor narrative of eating and drinking.  I'm feeling like little more than a chatbot, a disembodied voice, a bad algorithm.  Some days are just like that.  

But tomorrow is a rail stop party, the factory kids riding the train station to station, from Factory City to Gotham and back, a different bar at every stop.  I can't do them all.  I'll do a few.  It will be a Farewell Tour as some of the group is leaving, moving on to live in other parts of the country.  I become more of a stranger.  

Stranger.