Poodlin'

Anybody could catch me masturbating, if they just put a little effort into it. 

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Men Working

Sometimes I feel as if I am owed a peaceful death, after all. Why I feel this way makes no sense, but having made it to 50 and having survived being hit by a car the other day it feels as if the universe should just go easy on me now, forever. 

There is only one end to suffering, the rest is merely cessation.  

Are you there Milky Way? It's me, Sean. I need a Snickers...

Well, maybe it's the hurricane that's bearing down on Florida again. They should give them last names also, so that the Supreme Court can grant them citizenship and full rights. That way people can be prosecuted for opening fire on them. Though I suppose Florida's Stand Your Ground laws are pretty clear on this issue. 

Can the sexes be stereotyped? It seems that they can, and easily so. Listen to songs, you'll see. We celebrate it there but denounce it elsewhere. We are inconsistent beings.  

There are two things that I simply love to do - complicate things beyond recognition, then oversimplify my characterization of the angry responses at me having done so.

 

I first mistyped the word as: loversimplify. The l being so perilously close to the o. 

I find myself staring at words more. Everything is going to disappear.

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Shine A Light

In keeping with the themes of my life, more pics of the boy and his mom. I love this image. 

I read a quotation recently about the importance of running away, and something about rebirth and maybe leaving a part of the slate blank, breaking habits, forcing new experience, a starting point for art and actual physical escape being a necessary process for an artist. 

It made me sad, at how I spend my time and resources. I can't remember the quotation enough to serve it justice here. I have probably added nonsense and muddled its message.

I was riding my bike today and something about my basic outlook on life came to me in simple sentence form. I won't write it here, yet. I am not sure how I feel about it. It seemed cowardly, lame. The truth of it was strange and shocking. I was embarrassed of it yet I've known it all along, even taken pride in it and have voiced it in one way or another as a leitmotif most of my life. 

But I'm ready to try something differently, I hope, soon. I'm not sure what but some aspect of my life needs to change. Things have become too stagnant around me, my life too stable. In that I am sagging without comfort. It is the discomfort perhaps of a stability I have never known.  

Perhaps I'll run off to Berlin and join a circus with Cato. He has grown tired of the ills of capitalism and speaks of the natural purity of communes, of all the beautiful people working together there towards the shared goal of sustained freedom. I love listening to this talk, truly. It inches me towards the euphoria of death.  

  

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An otherwsie perfectly normal Wednesday

It's been a week since I was hit by a car, almost to the hour. Recovery is happening with a few setbacks. Sudden or dull pains and muscle spasms are making progress less than inexorable. The experience has not make me feel more rugged or sexy. Riding my bike helped a bit there, though. I have told myself that I will return to riding today. I should be thankful that this experience has not been more traumatic. It could have been. 

Your own face is an unusual subject to photograph. People seem to know when they look good and tend to be appalled when I think they look interesting. Interesting looks good to me. Though I do like to see people when they are happy, also. Some people seem to appear naturally happy in photographs and it's rarely a surprise which ones they are. You tend to know before you ever take a shot. Every now and then someone will surprise you and you can see glimmers of happiness among the snarking grimaces. 

I played the internet, a classical piece transposed to a minor key and then just let a web service create a playlist for me. It has been one of the best musical mornings I've had in while. Just chords and notes moving around the room like pixies and demons. 

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What I did on my weekend vacation

Bringing the pup to the beach is good fun. She loves it, as does the boy. We have bought a nice beach tent where the little dog likes to lie in the shade, safe from the wind and sand. We move as a caravan now rather than the two lovers we once were. We have beach bags and towels and kites and sandals, coolers filled with sandwiches and snacks, lotions and sprays, changes of clothes, leashes and collars and a long corkscrew used to drill deep into the beach sand to secure the pup, and to remind the remaining hippies that we still do things the old fashioned way with dogs down in Florida.

Whatever life there still is in the oceans makes its way to the shores here in California, where the dog sniffs and digs and devours with disgusting enthusiasm. In both pictures I chose here you can't see any of it, but I speak the truth, the beaches here are littered with carcasses of all kinds. 

Okay, I added a third pic. You'll see.

 I guess I could have leveled the horizon.

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The Accidental Perfunctory

We all went to the beach today, dogs too. I took a bunch of perfunctory beach shots but this one where the camera couldn't focus is the one I like. 

My body is more damaged than I wanted to admit. After days of pain moving from one place to another, or just changing in nature, a sneeze triggered a muscle spasm in my back that was as painful as anything else up until this point. Well, almost anything. 

The beach took a lot out of me. I have a sunburned head. I haven't been resting as much as they told me I should. Probably a bit of denial. I've been looking at replacement bikes, promising myself things I can not possibly know in advance of getting one. Brushes with death are never just brushes any more. 

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The Right Stuff

After 45 years of cycling I finally got hit by a car. It was very California - a speeding Tesla at the corner where the cool coffee shop is. The sloped hood of the car made my body's passage to the windshield easier. The windshield sacrificing its integrity for me, forever, but that must have been kinder than the hood or roof would have been. That now broken glass sent me the other direction into the middle of the intersection. I became very bewildered; never lost consciousness. Yet, there were some fuzzy minutes that passed through me. It must have been the roof that cracked my helmet.

The ambulance came and they took me to the trauma center in Napa. Another few minutes and I might have just walked it off. But this was a busy intersection and there were a lot of people who were not used to seeing blood. That became clear. They were screaming and being helpful, some more than others. Road rashes break lots of capillaries, but they are usually just surface injuries that produce good, red blood. They cut my shirt off, which made things simpler.

They found a cyst on my kidney when they did the CT scan. Nothing's broken, except my bike. It is ruined, beyond further consideration. After leaving the ER I went to the hotel/spa on the corner to retrieve it. The valet team marveled at the very miracle of my life. I'll be sore for days. They said that I look fine and that I should see the Tesla. Elon Musk is going to have to try a little bit harder than that.

I want to see the video from the Tesla's front camera. I don't guess that's just something they just email me. 

They should, if they cared more about photography, like me. 

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Official Please

I love the Fuji Velvia film stock. I have grown to hate the Fuji in-camera film stock simulation inside their X-Pro2 camera. I turn it on for reasons I still don't understand, and the digital grain ruins my jpegs. Now, I know that I should be shooting in RAW but what the fuck, even when I'm drinking? The extra space they require can act prohibitively when I am shooting like a fashion photographer with an unlimited budget, for cocaine. Or crack. 

That used to be one of my favorite things to say to people as they leaned forward to snort a line of cocaine in a restaurant bathroom, or even when doing a sizable bump off of a key: Have you ever tried crack? It changes the mood of the moment and often what follows, though always for the worse. I just find it funny, which makes me laugh, which is most often misinterpreted, also.

Nobody offers me coke in restaurant bathrooms any more, but not because of that. I have other intake-related issues. We'll call it a health concern. 

Most all of my cocaine-loving friends have gone the way of Fleetwood Mac. 

Kids are animated. They reveal a lot in their movements - their desire to participate in play, their ability to entertain themselves at times, the unsure feelings of self and others that can hardly be hidden. CS is right about photography. It involves access. It's difficult to always utilize that access, though. I get bored at some of the events we attend, so I resort to photography to pass the time. But you can see that it makes some people uneasy, to walk around shooting pics of kids you don't know with a camera that appears to be of a suspicious quality and beyond a price range that they're quite comfortable with.  

Housewives and those with similar sensibilities have lately started to advance the idea that they have the authority to revoke the public rights of others. They expect you to ask permission to look at the world with any intention of framing it. Taking pics is akin to staring, it is a threat that must be met. The children's safety is at stake. They learned this perhaps by watching police officers telling citizens that they don't have the right to take pictures of them while conducting official police business.  

Oh no, ma'am. We didn't want to give the impression that we were police, exactly. We're hoping it won't become necessary to call the police. But that's up to little Larry here. Isn't it, Larry?

I should get a business license for Official Please, LLC. So that I can retort quickly that I'm "conducting Official Please business" if they ask any questions or demand any explanations. Though commercial photography in public falls under different laws, I guess. Perhaps my fantasy response to imaginary busy-bodies is more trouble than it's worth. 

I struggled finishing the paragraph about it.

Well, nobody has given me any significant grief yet, but that's because I'm a pussy. I'm not getting in street bum's faces and taking pics in the city, aggravating the disenfranchised, or honoring their plight, or something, maybe capturing a conditional truth. I'm out here in the country valley taking innocent pictures of kids at local music and food festivals. The most shameful thing about them is the dry patches of poorly cared for grass. The spots that await a next spark arriving in the wind, sent from far away storms, and accidents, and blown transformer boxes as yet unknown.

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A murder of crows

I took pictures last night but they are still in the camera and I am on the couch and do not wish to be disturbed with a task. My life has become attuned to the workweek needs and freedoms. I drank 3 or 4 glasses of wine last night and now this morning I have a sudden urge to go do something with this weekend. I feel it almost every weekend but it usually passes without incident. 

So, now that I have proven I am also a great still-life photographer, what else is there? 

Imagine being Robert Mapplethorpe's muse. Not for the flowers, the other stuff. Patti Smith did a good job describing some of his darker impulses and expressions in her book, Just Kids. There is so much that is inhibited or repressed within the human psyche. I am reminded of it any time I hear someone espousing support for people just being and expressing their truest selves. It is certainly not what they could mean. Or, only so if they have no inkling what lurks in the crazed and corkscrewed heart of man. Everywhere there is chaos and terror seeking a way out, seeking form.

 

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Far away from the fray

(Alphonse Mucha)

Nothing to report on this exceptionally hot Sonoma Friday. I am on-call. Each passing minute impales me, waiting for the alarm to alert my phone which in turn alerts me. I enter a virtual conference with a roomful of panicked, confused, and sometimes screaming engineers. It is my job to translate that cryptographic panic into discernible sentences for electronic public distribution. Sort of.  

Soon, my weekend starts, and all else will recede into the darkness of some other future time. 

I was browsing the internet and clicked across this Czech artist whose work I've seen here and there. What a great thing to be able to do, to create these images. 

If I had the financial resources then I would have these framed posters hanging somewhere in a basement, a dank chamber with a poorly lit pool table and a chilled beer keg built into a countertop, a righteous sound system, maybe some Bose speakers in the corner, posters of a a German chick serving ice cold beers with her tits busting out of her wench's apron. 

Are we still allowed to talk about actual existing beer brands that way? 

You get the idea. I'd have a secret underground place that would embarrass my family and all visitors that were unlucky enough to wander down the stairs, looking for a private bathroom somewhere far away from the fray.

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Oh baby, just you shut your mouth

I went into the city last night. There was a speaker from Amazon. He talked about security, infrastructure, threat analysis. Afterwards I went out to dinner with my friends who recently became engaged after a long courtship, almost ten years. We had sushi and sake and beer, then wine back at their house, then whiskey, then I slept on a futon. I would have preferred a day to convalesce but it was not to be. I worked then drove home, listened in on a conference call for most of the drive, barely able to maintain interest. It's what alcohol seems to mostly do now - enervate. 

I received an invitation to dj a friend's wedding. Well, I received a wedding invitation, now there is talk of dj'ing. I prefer playlists to djs, but don't tell any of my friends, the primacy of the dj is sacrosanct. I have no desire to even be towards the center of attention any more. Or rather, only when I am speaking, which I do less and less lately. 

It is maybe the curse of fatherhood. You just start to be quiet, all of the time. 

Also, I am skeptical that the human race will last another hundred years. What could there possibly be to talk about now? 

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Tinsel to the eye

The boy goes back to school tomorrow - 2nd grade. I crave the normalcy this will return to my life. We have lived with a somewhat irregular schedule for the entire summer. It has worn me out. I love the boy's company, of course, but not all day and every day while I'm trying to work and take care of the dogs and all else that I do to keep Sean being Sean. Like the occasional mid-day nap.

Naps are my favorite thing now. I am like an old sexless cat. I'll purr if you pet or feed me but I fuck like I have feline leukemia. Don't worry, it can't kill a grown man but it makes be bald in areas at the front and on top of the head, I'm frail, and I cough up hair sometimes when we have guests. Other than that strangers don't like to pet me and it's not only because I'm often farting.

There are other problems. Not even bathing in moisturizer can help me now. 

Well, speaking of naps. I want one of them now, before everybody comes home and the house starts to sound so much like tinsel looks to the eye. 

Nope, a mother of one of Rhys' friends just texted. It's time to go pick him up. No naps will be had today.

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Six Flags Discovery Kingdom

As promised, we went to Six Flags - myself, Rhys, and a father/son pair of friends. We were there when the park opened and stayed until closing. I'd like to say we got our money's worth but they just bilk you further the later you stay. $14 for beer, etc. A couple midday beers are a vital part of taking two 7-8 year old kids. Few things relax the mind and reset the day as do afternoon beers. I was eating cannabis candy edibles like it was Halloween, also. All day. 

Don't let my tone fool you. It was fun, exhausting. 

We rode everything, even a few roller coasters. The boy braved through it, though there were a couple sensitive episodes where we risked a meltdown. I had to put on my reassuring father voice and let him know that we didn't have to ride anything that he didn't want to, but that he was totally fine and I wasn't going to let anything happen to him. As if I had any control over such a thing. 

The kids seemed to like the bumper cars the most, a ride that we returned to several times throughout the day. Just like with real driving they became much more fun after a few beers. I guess I like that sense that anything might happen.

We arrived home late, well after bedtime. The boy almost sleeping but wanting desperately to tell mom all about it. He showed her the shark's tooth necklace I bought for him and explained that it was both real and very rare. 

It seems that half of a child's magic is being full of shit without revealing any hint that they know it. Faith is charm when it's harmless.

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Stop At Nothing

I want to be doxxed. To find out what it feels like to be suddenly hated and hunted by strangers who have intuited my intentions through a hearsay posting. I figure that it should be pretty easy to do. I'm going to Six Flags today with the boy and one of his friends. There should be plenty of young kids there. I'll just take pictures of them, especially the little girls in dresses, with a - gasp! - film camera. If anybody says anything I'll scream, "You don't know me! I'm barely even attracted to young girls!" then proceed to take pictures of good looking little boys. 

It's best to bring a really, long, thick, black lens for this type of photography. Doesn't matter if it's a telephoto or wide angle, it is meant to only be suggestive and intrusive. Let the lens linger on a subject when composing a shot, but takes lots and lots of them. Hide behind things. Try to sweat as much as possible, a'la Peter Lorre in M. If they ask what I think I'm doing I'll explain that I am currently a "disgraced financier." This is language they'll understand. Anything they scream at me I'll follow up with, "Allegedly!"

Perhaps uninvited beach photography is where I'll one day excel. I want to show how vulnerable children are when they're barely clothed and have wandered from their parent's beach towel and umbrella. I think the camera can really reveal those subtle weaknesses. It's practically a public service that I'm offering. If you capture kids in the surf sometimes a wave will reveal a little unformed titty. Can I call a child's as yet undeveloped breast a titty? I'm just not sure what language I should be using here. 

Ok, I don't actually have anything to relay this morning. I'm just riffing off of CS's post. If the many ideas of the past are what has now become so problematic then shouldn't aging be illegal?

The more people run to the police to report someone suspiciously taking pictures in public the more the police will illegally harass photographers. We know this. They already try to tell people that they're not allowed to video them in public. 

Everybody knows that pedophiles walk around in public places pointing expensive cameras at children. They do this so you'll know what they're truly after - the blood of the innocent. Those sickos are so emboldened now. They don't even try to hide their pedophilia in their van any more. They're out there wandering around with their military-style surveillance devices. Owning and using a camera that can't make phone calls will soon be a tacit public admission that you crave child-rape and will stop at nothing to get it.

The boy wanted to make sure that he was tall enough to go on all the rides, so I went online to look and found these regulations:

The world will be fine, as long as none of us use interchangeable lenses.

They'll stop at nothing.

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I promise to go wanderin'

A lazy Saturday morning. Well, lazy with a 26 mile ride to Sear's Point and back thrown in there... but I did just wake from a little nap in bed, listening to Termination Dub. 

The family is gone, shopping. The husky is at the kennel. I have a little window of peace. I seek to only squander it.

I always thought that Mr. Tambourine man sang, I promise to go wanderin' but it's I promise to go under it. It's in response to going under a spell, I think. I like my misunderstanding of the lyric more. It is wrong and makes less sense. 

I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade

Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way

I promise to go squander it

That's all. 

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Schrödinger's Portraits

I just spoke for an hour straight, in what was mostly a single run-on sentence, or what felt like it, with only a few breaks to gulp water. I report that here out of duty, not pride. I was tasked with training somebody on smtp relay forensics and I neglected to make notes or create an outline, I just chatted off the top of my head like an educated crackhead. Maybe next time a plan is what is most needed.

Oh, have I not mentioned here before what it is that I am so good at, and why I get paid so much...?

Ah well, best not to brag. It is my humility that most people praise.

More long exposures from the backyard with the boy. They are fun, to play with time and the continuity of vision. I'm going to start telling people that I am a quantum photographer, specializing in Schrödinger's Portraits. I found my tripod, so maybe the boy and I will take some pictures of the stars soon. I hope.

Not to whine too much here, but my father rarely did anything with me. I have few memories doing recreational stuff with him. Though I have no memories of me trying and being rejected, either. There was just a flatness to our relationship that seemed to stretch both directions.

I remember my mother once guilted him into throwing a baseball with me. I was doubly ashamed of him because he caved to her and he was bad at it. She fucked up my opinion of him more than she should have perhaps - my mother, Stella - but there was some truth in her nearly perpetual barbs towards or about him. It wasn't until I was an adult and I started to ignore him, after my mother died, that he showed much of an interest in having a relationship with me. Other than the years of being an authoritarian who might one day guide me to happiness by warning me of all the bad things that would happen to me if I kept on my current course. 

But, I persisted.

To his credit, he did express regret later in life for not having more of a relationship with me. If I've mentioned any of this here, which I have, then I hope I mentioned that also.

 Well, onwards and upwards. My son might remember me the very same way. 

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The 70s will soon be 50 years ago.

I should have been using that soft focus lens with film more often. I like the look. 

My work day is over, the dogs are lying here on the bed with me, soon I will go to pick up the boy. Then, there will be the evening being a dad. Maybe I'll convince the kid that we need more candid portrait shots of him.

I have light stands and flashes and wireless syncs, but nowhere to use any of it. It would be nice, if we were to move again, to find somewhere that offers 8 bedroom houses for what we pay now. California has already slid into the ocean in so many ways.

Maybe I'll take the boy to get some super Napa sushi. Strips of raw fish laid out in rows of three or four. Sounds so nice - cold sake and beer, because having just one with sashimi tastes and feels lopsided. If we lived just a little bit further out in the country I'd let the boy drive home. Just about a mile from here is where the real farms start, and few there care, and about less and less, least of all do the cops notice or act. Like stepping into the previous century. Though, I've never heard any Mexican-Americans speak of the region quite this way. 

It would be fun to let him drive. To have the seat close enough so that he could press the gas, but not too much. It would be helpful if his brake leg was longer than his gas leg, but who wishes such a thing on a child for this specific purpose? 

The precise distances might be tough to judge. 

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The Son and Mood

The boy and I were playing in the backyard with a camera. I wanted to do a long exposure of the twilight sky and hoped to maybe catch the glimmer of a planet but couldn't find my tripod quickly, so a long exposure of the boy running circles around me instead. I love shots like this, also. If I put more energy into it I could probably bring out more of him. That wavering orange line is the sun.

He took a similarly arranged shot of me with the gorilla-ghost of the idea stalking around in it.

I have few memories of childhood left. I return to them too infrequently. They have become a blurry circle. I tried to tell the boy a little bit about it on one of our bike rides the other day. It might have come out wrong. I told him that he can't really know which parts of his life now he'll remember later, but not to worry about it, that real things become memories which then just become stories that you repeat, and each time you change them a little bit until you just can't be sure about them any more. And that's also how you can feel yourself growing up. 

Or, so I've been told. 

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Oroboro and Koi

So, now I've scanned a bunch of film frames. Soon I'll need to get in an editing mood, and it will need to last. They all require some cleaning up, some more than just a bit. 

I'm doing everything wrong, still. I confirmed this when talking to CS the other day. He was telling me how to best scan the film and then manipulate it later in Lightroom, or something. If I could, I'd take a photography class. I have to hear something three or four times now before it sinks in, or gets past the defense of my deafness. It is rare that I ever modify a snapshot and in any way improve it. When I compare my edits to the original I rarely keep the changes, but it helps me see more. Just shoot like an addict and rely on a percentage of interesting mistakes stretched across a lifetime. 

That's what's always worked for me. 

I'm lying around listening to a Blood Orange album, not his latest. He's the type artist that perpetually has a newer, cooler album being released. How else does an artist maintain that chic of newness, the sheen of visiting from a future years distant. You know you've finally made it when you look around and all of your acquaintances are dressed as if just now arriving from the coming times.

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Gun Control

A quick post before I go to sleep. You may need to turn the brightness on your computer up. This was from the roll of film that I felt was mostly ruined, the one that I mentioned in last night's post. But there is something odd about it that I love. The image of the boy seems almost detached from his surroundings, as if there are two plane dimensions and he is dancing in the nearer one.

I had posted the image below of the boy yesterday but then I took it down, because I'm tired of commenting on everything. It was a chance shot, right out of my F100. Each of these images is scanned after processing. What you are seeing is mostly only flawed photography, optics, and the curiosity of differing film stocks. Glimpses in imperfection.

I have so little faith that the world is going to survive much longer in its current state. Paranoia perhaps, or just concession that something must soon give, the dams must burst. Who knows what that will mean - nuclear horrors, catastrophic climate change, all of that paired with global economic collapse. Who knows. It is all so dispiriting. I struggle laughing and being at ease in a way that I did not used to. Perhaps the final civil war will be between those who believe that we should be panicking and those who don't care. I hope I'm in the latter group, and I hope we win. 

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Gazing, Staring, and Glancing

I am pleased with the progress I made over this three day weekend in which which I was left to myself. I had no plan. I'm relieved that it unfolded with three days of productivity towards something.  Anything. After I scan a few more rolls of film I will be caught up to within the last year - August 2018. It doesn't sound like much. It was a fair amount of work. Approximately 750 image scans, so far.

Years ago CS said that what I would likely enjoy most about photography was documenting my life. It is mostly all that I do, but it is what I enjoy most. I stopped writing here because I stopped enjoying it. But I kept taking pictures. Eventually, my need to be noticed re-emerged. 

Is that what is is? There must be more.

Scanning old photos is like opening little time capsules. I barely have an idea what is on most of these rolls. Each frame a little glimpse is given - part memory, part surprise at what was saved, partly a new creation. 

One of the rolls was almost completely useless. It looks like I shot it 3-4 steps darker than it was meant to be, and even then the images are out of focus, suffering from camera blur, and plagued by other failures. I'm pretty sure it was when I borrowed that Olympus XA-2. The film stock was Fuji Velvia 50. I bought a roll at Photoworks in SF to use with it, I think. There was one image that I liked from that roll, though. I'll use it here soon. 

Like CS, my eye is drawn to the mistakes, the failures or the things not meant to be preserved. Something about film makes some of those moments seem immortal. Their lack of intention speaking their clearest truth. I share fewer of those here, but I like looking at them almost as much as the more obvious successes. They seem somehow both less and more mundane, depending on what eyes you look at them with, whether gazing or staring or only with a passing glance. 

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All it ever said to me

I discovered what I'm going to do with my free weekend: scan 35mm film pics. It chose me as much as I chose it. The stack of processed but unscanned negatives was becoming absurd. After two days of scanning it is now 10% less absurd than it was previously. I found a few pics that I like, so there is always the unexpected pleasure in that.

I have no idea why I ever shoot color film. It is a lot of work and my success/failure ratio can be dispiriting when compared to digital. Any phone can take better color pics now and there are filters to simulate all the old film stocks. I guess it's because there is something Zen embedded in act of photography. The process is sometimes as satisfying as the result. 

I just scanned three color rolls from our trip to Costa Rica last Spring and I found about two images I liked. Ah well, what was I going to do with all that talkative money anyway? 

You know what Clifford Odets had to say about it:

... all it ever said to me is goodbye.

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18576

I should be excited. There are road improvements happening everywhere. The repairs will stretch into Autumn, maybe Winter. Sonoma will soon be a better place.

I have the house to myself, so I broke out a stack of processed negatives and my scanner and went to work. I didn't quite put a dent in it, but I have begun rolling the pebbles up the mighty hill again.

I should be exited.

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