Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Childhood, mine






There is nothing new under the sun.

You could not have been more right, ol' Solomon, especially at night. 

I have sat here staring at a blank page for about an hour, trying to draw inspiration from this or this

Nothing.

I've even tried going back to sleep. 

There is nothing new under my eyelids, either.


I went through old pictures yesterday (above). Thousands upon thousands of them. I use burst shooting perhaps too much, like a drunk sport's photographer. Though... every now and then I get very lucky with this style of shooting. 

It would take years to clean up my photo libraries, just to delete the many thousands that are out of focus, or have too little of the subject in the frame. I have three full photo libraries now, all bulging at the edges of my hard drives, spread across a few computers.

I had hoped that having a child would make me more organized.

It is a strange and wonderful sensation though, to drift back through time this way. This site and my renewed interest in photography both coincide neatly. I have greater access to the last five years of my life than any other time. I've planted little daily time capsules.

I wonder if one day Rhys will gain an interest in reading through these many pages. The thought scares me a bit. Each post requires some explanation perhaps. Maybe I should start going through and making comments, explaining that, "Daddy didn't really mean that..." Or, "This is just make believe, nobody would really do that to themselves." 

"Please don't ever try this."

Seems a bit self-involved, in a (hopefully) charming way.

Maybe the above paragraph is all that is needed. Instruct him to start here, on post 1,552, if at all. On, or around, word one million. Just dive in and find out what your father is like, sort of. 

Don't tell mother, of course. 

There was a point when I had all of these posts collected in a series of MS Word files. The word count was both enormous and meaningless.

I think about my own death too much, I guess. I'm not sure how much is too much, but the thought recurs often. How does one know if they're being excessive or merely honest about such things?

There should be a known standard that can be used to gauge. Since having a son I want to live longer, yet I don't know how long. I just want more life.


There was a time when I was afraid my own father would find this blog. I wondered if he would read it, if he could bear the many heresies. I wondered also if I would read his journals, if I had found them somewhere. Perhaps when I was younger. It is hard to say. What if they weren't very good. That might be crushing.

Knowing he was reading mine might prevent me from writing honestly. I don't need another voice in my head, particularly another Irish-Catholic one. It's already a murmur of backlit ghosts in here, ever fighting off the papacy.



.