SFMOMA

(The beach at Crissy Field)

I went into SF yesterday, by myself and spent the day by myself. I had no plan, but I had a few things I wanted to do, hoping to take pictures as part of that. I only have images from the little Osmo Action camera and my phone, all the others were 35mm film. I brought two cameras and three lenses, one loaded with black-and-white all the day and the other color. 

I stopped at a guitar store and played a Martin D-28. It sure was nice, as well it should be for the price - $3100. Only rock stars should own these guitars, really. It is a big step up from the air guitar that I learned on. 

Then I went and dropped of a bunch of rolls of film at Photoworks. I am the only photographer left in the world that spends that much money on pics that anybody else would just delete from their iPhone. Just meaningless, thoughtless snapshots, most of them. I keep trying to capture the mystery of the visible, as Winogrand seemed to do so effortlessly, but it escapes me. It is maddening, that.

After getting trapped in horrible weekend traffic everywhere that I tried to go I eventually decided to give up and go to the SFMOMA. Getting there took me more than an hour, but once there they had wine and salmon lunches. I had one salmon and two cabernets. The little Osmo camera is fun at a museum. The ultra wide angle distorts everything. I forget if it's pincushion or barrel distortion. I guess it must be barrel, though if you follow the line where the floor meets the wall in the image below that looks more like pincushion. 

I don't know, is what I'm trying to say. It's mostly barrel distortion. You can see it really clearly in the image above, if you peer out towards Alcatraz and look at the horizon. 

The day was nice. I am out of practice at being alone. Halfway through the day I was wanting some companionship. the SFMOMA is the only place in San Francisco where women dress lime women. It is a sort of oasis of femininity in a landscape that is otherwise openly hostile to the idea. The women at the museum all wear boots, and know how to walk. It always functions as the onset of seduction, which is maddening. Women know how to be looked at, and that knowing communicates a tremendous amount of coded information. 

After a couple glasses of wine I was texting anybody that I could think of that I used to go to museums with. Zoie, mostly. My long lost art buddy. She has gone the way of the heiresses. She probably has a cooking show by now. 

I am kidding a bit. She finds me funny so I assume certain liberties. 

(SFMOMA guard and I inspecting the gilded jazz testicle)

I went back to the cafe a couple times throughout the day where the wine was. My photography suffered from this, I am sure of it, though it will take years for me to confirm since I was shooting film. But what the fuck... I'm not on assignment. I am the only person who really seems to care about what I am doing, which frees the mind considerably. 

Well, I'm the only one interested until the cops get involved. They have an interest in lots of things I do, if I give them any hint that maybe they should. 

I found a local exhibition that featured three local SF artists. The one below was my favorite. Her art involved itself with the portrayal of black people, and their sexuality, in American culture. But I was able to look past all of that to enjoy the formal compositions and powerful abbreviations of figure, which was beautiful. The entire room in which her work was displayed was painted a red that is similar to the red you see below, which added a lot to the exhibition. 

(Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle)

There was also an exhibition of German art since 1960, which was great - Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz being two of my favorites. I noted to CS that Baselitz reminds me of a post-modern Otto Dix. I was texting CS throughout the entirety of the day. He also used to be one of my museum buddies who has now gone the way of the heiresses. His cooking show will be called Cafe Frittata. If I were CS, now that his pockets are filled with gold and has nothing but free time, then I'd create my own YouTube show. Something like Fishing With John. That show was exactly 30 years ahead of its time. 

Okay, the day has started here. I must do something with it or it will disappear into the skies from whence it came. 

You can look into a bottle of red wine and see the day's shadows moving there. 

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Return from Tahoe

(Raquel)

We made it up to the snowy mountains and then back again. Going down steep hills should be easier, if it wasn't for all the ice.

The boy broke out with pink-eye and then vomited at the threshold of the men's bathroom at the restaurant where we were having dinner, leaving an acidic and stinky puddle that most men just walked back and forth through as I tried to comfort the youth and get his face and mouth washed. One gentleman kindly asked if he could help. He let the restaurant staff know to draw straws soon, because someone was about to clean up the vile, child wretchedness... None of this tainted our weekend enough to obscure the fun we had. See Raquel's face above. 

A face can always be many things to any person who sees it, but that one is happy for me. I told her she looks like a

Well, I should not relay here the private flattery that I shower her with. The words do not seem as flattering when not being whispered only to her, when no one else can hear. But that is what I like to tell her, and what she seems to believe. It's good to have whispered secrets with one that doesn't need to strictly believe them any more. 

I have started this post poorly. The boy getting sick happened last night. We came home today. Everyone should know by now that I am attracted to the woman I love, sometimes even in orthodox ways. We call it the "Missionary Piston," when we're feeling artless and thrusty.  

We had considered skiing today also, but after two full days of the snowy stuff and then the public vomiting, we opted to drive home. Family vacations are strenuous. So many things can go wrong, there is so much time and effort and expense put into making it all work. Mom and I both agreed that we sort of lucked out. The boy getting sick sooner would have meant more severe limitations on what we could and could not do.

Tahoe is expensive, don't go often unless you really just love throwing cash money into an avalanche that never happens. That's what we have been doing. If we ever go to Yellowstone I am going to fly a drone into the asshole of Old Faithful, because I am nothing if not newsworthy. Our trips skiing and snowboarding could have easily paid for a family trip to Japan by now, but what the fuck... the boy can snowboard, and so can dad.

So, that's what parents do: spend all their money trying to create good memories. 

(Rhys)

(Undercover Agent - R-Q6)

The boy, of course, loves all the snowboarding gear. The goggles were a gift from Colorado ski friends, for his birthday. The helmet-mounted camera was a gift from mom and dad for Christmas.

Is he "spoiled"...?
Perhaps a bit.
Fuck you. 
You try to have a kid. 

I grew up begging my mom to buy me very specific things, - model numbers included - she would buy me the cheapest knock-offs of those things. They were not the same. It was the Sony Walkman that broke my tender heart one Christmas morning. I remember the moment of my disappointment and shame. Looking back on it I can remember the moment of tearing open the wrapping paper, as if I had been involved in a crippling accident, I could see back to the moment of impact but could not ever change the moment, no matter how much thought I applied. 

I never remember being hungry or cold. Don't shed a tear for me, yet.

I have decided that I want to make more money. I have never bothered focusing on that, at all, though I did spend my first adult decade having mostly tax-free money pour into my pockets from both sides - drugs and music.

Like Jimmy said, I made enough money to buy Miami, but I pissed it away more and more slowly over time as my kidneys aged and I couldn't always get the flow started. I trickled it away so fast. 

CS says that he will soon take a 40% cut in income. I know that this will greatly anger me when I see him next, and I will not spare him my wrath. He will show discomfited concern about lavishly spending money on me the way that he should and I will not like that at all. He has recently lost his romantic partner. You would think that something like that should help my cause, but it won't. He has been a very poor father figure but I've never seen him eat cat food for dinner. I know he can afford to purchase me some pleasure, and pay to watch.

He worries about money as if he had lived my life rather than his own. 

I don't worry about money, I worry about living too long. How would I explain my poverty and my longevity. I only built stories for one or the other.

What a mess.

"You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." - Samuel Beckett

Um, Sammy...
Yes, there is.

I call this DWI-Art. When you are driving after drinking in the snow at dusk and you have a new point-and-shoot and the people who are screaming or whining at you in the car are also boring you witless with their fears and you wish that they would all just shut up for once and let you do your art because it might live on past their little selfish moment of terror. 

(head-on)

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... without the love

I am a horrible manager of time. We are reminded by nearly everything, how it is the truest of luxuries - to be able to do what you like with the time you have. But I never wanted to get into management. I never wanted to have to manage anything. I have mostly just wanted to be left alone. It is the result, perhaps, of having read too much Bukowski at an early age, and to have agreed wholeheartedly with so many of his sentiments. There must have been other contributing factors, but the reading of Bukowski is one that has continued to adequately describe and explain the precise nature of my fucked-upedness. 

I remember reading Mockingbird Wish Me Luck in CS's science class. With my then girlfriend, Amy. Not the Amy that I married. The one I was dating, before I met the one that I married. Amies. All those years ago. I was about 17 then. I had met CS the year before, the year I dropped out of high school. That must have been 1985. Am I allowed to reveal details like that yet? On the verge of his departure from the factory... am I to reveal the location of Wayne Manor? Or, Arkham Asylum? 

It is up to him to divulge the secrets of his life. 

I was just trying to scribble a little note about my day here. I wish that it would have been longer and that I would have found a way of doing more with it. I have been practicing the guitar more, but not with much discipline, just learning to strum along with new songs. And I shot a roll of Portra 400 film today. The pic above is Ektar 100, and I can't tell if my face is like that, or if I never reversed it to be correct after scanning it. But it looks a little bit fucked up to me the more I stare at it, though it would probably do that anyway. Staring at pictures of yourself is one way to trigger a flashback.

I have done so much acid in my lifetime that I am surprised that anything makes any sense to me any more. For some, it makes them take certain aspects of life more seriously. I was the other sort of fellow. That is how I was with every drug, though especially the ones that had any abuse potential. That was the intangible quality in nearly any drug that made it interesting. How it could be used to interact directly with that thing within me that becomes obsessed, and will do anything to entertain the feelings of obsession that are not attached to any specific idea or object, and the feeling that I will pursue at any cost. It is like the very best parts of falling in love, without the love.

I think if anybody stares at my face long enough it must start to look fucked up. That can't be only the fault of all of that acid. 

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Light reflections in water

Jesus. I bought another camera. My reasons would make sense to very few, so I won't outline them here. They are too flimsy to withstand even the most modest scrutiny. They have something to do with the focus being off in this picture. Only a true and dedicated capitalist might understand my erratic financial whims. But what the fuck? They say that you can't take it with you, but even that's a lie. You could convert all of your wealth to dollars and use it in a funeral pyre - problem solved. What they mean to say, I think, is that you can't spend it after you're dead, which is also bullshit. That's what the terms of a revokable trust fund are for. 

My truest passion in life is regarding cliches literally, after that I am drawn to treating facts figuratively. It is because I have the heart of a lyin' poet.

It might take me a little while to make an underwater photo that I'll like. It will need to be superior to the ones I've already posted, or my purchase might make me feel foolish. Or, more foolish. 

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Try, try, try

The struggle for me, it seems, is the recognition lately that I only get to be one person, to live one life. For the last couple years I thought my gripe was aging. Aging just exposes the singularity of it in a seemingly unavoidable sequence of realizations. Much of that awareness arrives around a certain age. Though I'm confident there will be more. 

Of course, I'll be okay now that I have defined the problem. Or, so goes the perpetual suggestion of the armchair analysts. People believe that being able to articulate your pain also relieves it. It can, but it's not an assured consequence. It's mostly only when the suffering can be given new form by transmuting it towards the creative impulse. Easily said. Are you suffering now?

You are so brave and quite I forget you are suffering. - Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

Well, moving on... The trick is to try and avoid meaning. 

Not to try it and avoid it, just try to avoid it.

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(Untitled)

It's difficult to feel very good about the world right now. Newsfeeds do not help. Ignoring it all might, but I haven't tried. Yet there are amazing breakthroughs in many of the branches of science, and often. Organisms that can consume plastics, or flight-ready microbots that may be able to replace bees, or datasets that reveal as yet unseen patterns in agriculture that seem promising rather than damning, etc. The mind holds hope that somehow we can turn the worst aspects of what is happening into a reason to harbor some hope. 

Then, you see the videos of animals trying to escape the brush fires in Australia and you know: we are already entering the hellishness of what we know will come.  

For better or worse, we are in the future now. 

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On the photographs of the childhood of others

(Boy Q6)

... because I know how much CS loves other people's childhood photos. 

The boy had his first slumber party last night. He'll be 8 on Tuesday, an age which can also be determined from the shape of the backside of the candle on the cake. He loved the slumber party, though mom and I are tired today. Very. We've both taken a couple naps each.

Watching children's social skills and hierarchies develop is interesting. I'm not sure where mine were stunted, but few question that they were. It is quite noticeable. If you can see past my emotional instabilities, my oddly developed  or undeveloped social skills are the next thing most people notice.  It's why I became so good at playing the guitar. 

I had written ... playing with myself, but then thought aloud, "Why be vulgar?" even though I laughed at the joke. The inability to always know the differences between vulgarity and humor are part of what I am describing, or trying to.

I never evolved beyond being a class clown. Sorry, not a class clown, the class clown. It's not as if I encouraged or allowed competition. This behavior persists even today. It amazes me that I still have a job. Or rather, it doesn't surprise me that I haven't advanced. I prove early and well that I can do things easier than anybody else, and then I prove that I can find the least amount of work that can be done without being fired. Well, that's not true, I guess, but part of it feels true.

I'm like the kid who perfected writing the letter A in a variety of styles, and often swanned the classroom to advertise the fact, but then never sullied myself by bothering to learn any of the other letters.

I mean, I did learn them all eventually. Though by the time I made it to the letter Z my focus was still on mythologizing those old glory days of letter A. The capital cursive Q still causes me problems.

I learn begrudgingly, by being ashamed of not knowing things. But you'd never know that in how I carried what I thought I knew. Like a billboard for my own effortlessness. My own biggest fan and my own worst enemy. 

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I resolved to call her up, a thousand times a day

There is no political solution

To our troubled evolution

Have no faith in constitution

There is no bloody revolution

We are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Our so-called leaders speak

With words they try to jail you

They subjugate the meek

But it's the rhetoric of failure

We are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Where does the answer lie?

Living from day to day

If it's something we can't buy

There must be another way

We are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

Are spirits in the material world

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Oysters along the San Andreas

(Nick's Cove - Marshall, CA)

Yesterday, unexpectedly, I had my day of modest adventure. In the morning there was a parental announcement about workers being here at the house all day, something about carpet, so I decided to go on a day of driving around, maybe up the coast. I invited the boy and he happily decided to go along. I explained that all that I would be doing was driving around and taking pictures of things, whatever I saw that interested me, or us. So, that's what we did.

When we set out I gave the boy a healthy dose of opinion about photography. I explained that if we were going to create a travelogue that we would do ourselves a favor by creating either an establishing or expository shot, to show that our journey had a beginning.

We came up with these, taken at almost the same spot, with two different cameras and subjects:

The wide angle selfie was taken with the new Osmo Action camera. I have decided, almost prematurely, that the camera was a waste of money and that I should have bought the Olympus that I wanted. It takes images on par with the iPhone that I already own, without all the extra features of a phone, and it doesn't fit into my pocket nearly as easily. It is sold as much more of an action video camera than a stills camera, but still... If you look at the image above, shot in good light, you'll see the problem. The resolution is crap, even at ~20mb "RAW" files (they are DNG files, whose main attribute is only its presumed future compatibility, being an open source format).

After those, we decided that maybe an even better establishing shot was in order, though I do not believe we accomplished it with the below one.

What you are seeing there is the entirety of the Sonoma valley, or at least the portion that cradles the city of Sonoma and its surrounding hamlets. It was taken from the top of the hill at Viansa. The wetlands to the right are the beginning of the marsh that leads out to San Pablo Bay, one of the three bays that make up the SF bay area, past the ghost town of Wingo, through a large swath of land owned by the Navy, and then across Sonoma Creek, which can barely be seen towards the top of the image here and which also runs behind our house.   

We talked about how elevation increases the distance that you can see but how that extra distance is mostly just the little tiny strip at the horizon. There's a ratio, but I forget it, and it is mostly meaningless since the extra distance that can be seen exists outside of what the human eye can effectively make sense of. But from up here we could see the whole valley, just without all the pesky details. 

On we went, to China Camp State Park, where much more of the bay can be seen and where two of the three bays meet. 

A detail from the above landscape.

We talked about what makes images interesting. I touched on how, for me, beauty and decay are almost always related. I explained that I don't often do landscape photography of any kind, that I find humans photographically interesting, but that an occasional look around to orient yourself to and familiarize yourself with your surroundings is a good exercise. 

I tried to show him how what we choose to focus on, and how we move our bodies affects the outcome of an image, sometimes greatly.

And that sometimes the composition is as important as the subject of the image.

And that sometimes focusing on something that is midway between your actual subject and the details of the compositional background can make an image more interesting to the eye.

Why was I telling him all of this? I'm not sure, but he embraced the idea that sometimes to get a good image you must run and climb trees. That part seemed to be understood implicitly. 

On we went towards the mighty Pacific, with me artlessly discussing the idea of us trying to capture light in a meaningful way.

We arrived at the beach without shorts to swim. Neither of us had really considered what a day like this one might possibly become, but the ultra wide angle field of view of the new camera was proving its novelty usefulness.

It didn't take long for the boy to give up photography for the joys of sun and beach.

We spent the rest of the day driving with our pants bungie'd to the roof racks of the car, soaking and covered in beach sand. The boy didn't mind too much, he had a blanket with him, so he had a chance to dry out his underwear before we finally stopped for lunch. Less lucky, I did not want to have to explain to a cop why I was driving naked with a child in the back seat, so damp was how I went. 

By this time we weren't really stopping to photograph things any more, though there was plenty to look at. The land and water that separate the North American plate from the Pacific plate just on the other side of the water in several of these images, separated by the San Andreas fault, is a fascinating place visually, at least for me.

You can see the fault line in the image below, if you know where to look. It is what separates Marin from the Point Reyes National Seashore. One day those two pieces of land will be separate continents and there is nothing that anybody can do about it. If we had a flag with us then I would have planted it out on Bolinas, declaring it a sovereign territory of His Purple Mountain's Majesty. 

We drove a large approximate circle around the center of that map - from Sonoma, south to Muir Beach, up the US-1 to Tomales, then across the farmlands of Petaluma back to Sonoma. 

Who might guess that the crevice that leads to the end of our world runs just underneath that fishing boat.

Somehow the day ended with me not getting a single image that I like without at least some reservation, if not outright complaint, or outrage and dismissal. I was being careless and shooting without much concern, nor am I editing them with any chromatic continuity in mind. Not that it matters very much, then or now. Looking through the images I did what I like to do: document a day.

The boy seemed to embrace the idea of us just driving around and eating expensive oysters, taking pictures, and playing in the surf. We have no idea what is on the rolls of film that we shot, what fisheye mysteries may yet still emerge.

Next time: shorts and towels to further compliment the oysters and beer.

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Dutch Nasal

We bought a new camera, mom and I, for Christmas. The previous waterproof camera that I bought a few years ago had finally lost its ability to focus. The new one is basically a GoPro, but made by the drone company in which I may have some future purchasing interest. So far I have only been using it to shoot jpegs. All of the images in low light are shit, which doesn't give me a tremendous amount of hope for underwater photography, but ah well... the boy seems to like the idea of using it while cycling and snow-boarding. He is often full of action. 

It is very small, so I have been bringing it with me everywhere we go. There is that, I suppose. Maybe it will prove to be a fun street camera, since it has a wide angle of view and is very discreet. The sensor is similar to what you would get in any smartphone. 

I was playing around with the very limited manual modes. 

Overexposing, and trying to exploit the distorted perspective that arises from the 16:9 aspect ratio and  its 145 degree field of view.

Perhaps I should have gone with my first choice, a more dedicated underwater camera. I guess we'll see. Shooting video is fun. 

You never quite know what you'll get.

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I promise to go wandering

The Christmas guest is gone. Now, a week remains that can be spent or squandered, or a bit of both. I'm thinking about taking a road trip, maybe by myself, maybe with the boy, maybe with mom, too. We have yet to establish family quorum for the subject. That will be this morning's dilemma. I only use that word since I know that unpleasant options will need to be discussed, even if they are discarded, before we can arrive at the desirable versions. Then, we're all on the easy street of final decision and action.

I tell myself that I will be envious of CS when he has nothing but free time to do as he wishes. I feel this envy in advance of the actuality. 

I dream of taking month-long drives to places I've never seen before. If you've never driven through the bayou swamps heading west out of New Orleans on the I-10 then you haven't seen America, yet. I've only seen it once, but have seen nothing much further west from Lafayette, or north of there, by car. It's about two days from New Orleans to Marfa. Giving you a stop in Austin, if you want it. Or San Antonio, if you have any reasons or questions there. 

I spent a fair amount of my years flying over America looking at maps and the landscape below, dreaming one day of driving through these places, some of them I did, if there was another gig a city's drive away, or a chance to hang out with a group of newly made friends that had a sound system set up at their place in Baton Rouge or Fort Collins or Alpharetta or Park City or just outside of Charlotte. The midway point between Portland and Salem, a guest room, stay as long as you want. All over, and all of it now over. I have visual memories of neighborhoods outside of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Memphis and Seattle, but had no camera with me. The 11th District in New Orleans that has estate after estate, then house after house; the mausoleums of the graveyards that separate them; of course the impoverished neighborhoods there that surround the city, also. That haunting and beautiful gothic everything. 

I took too many things for granted. Life seemed rich. I had little interest in taking any time to stop and photograph any of it. Now, I dream of starting out in a car with no answer as to when I would return, though being a parent precludes those visions from achieving much lift. 

It is not just the idea of driving from here to Marfa, or further on to and through the deep south, it is the feeling that I could indulge any urge to wander that might happen along the way there, or on the way back. It is this life which robs me of those sorts of fantasy indulgences. 

I always thought Dylan said, I promise to go wandering in response to the line On to your own parade, cast your dancin' spell my way from Mr. Tambourine Man.

The line is: I promise to go under it, but I hear it the other way every single time. 

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The Rise of the Light Saber

This article does a good job at tackling the franchise and what it is has become, but I will be taking the boy and one of his buddies to go see the new one today in spite of it. 

We had a successful Christmas, all around. The boy got a new computer - Chromebook - and a Fitbit. I don't know why kids wants Fitbits, but they're all the rage. I'm told.

I shouldn't have made such a crass joke about mom's ass crack yesterday. It was her pussy that I was trying to touch all day. So, a few points deducted for crudeness of description, a temporary and regrettable loss of exactitude.  

Well, I was going to write some more, but the boy came to show me a new Avengers' Lego monstrosity he had just completed and I felt compelled to go over its finer destructive capabilities with him, since his mind has just barely begun to grasp the imaginative joys of complete and total annihilation of your real and perceived enemies. 

 

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December 25th, 2019

I hid behind the tree with a camera, not quite the spy that I used to be. 

The boy's teeth are falling out right on schedule. He got a computer for Christmas. He's seven. Mom and I figured it's time. And why not?

All is well here, mom and I are being tender with one another, which makes Christmas nice. Some sugar. My hand's been up her ass crack all day long, when no one's looking. 

I couldn't bring myself to focusing the below shot on his teeth. It's like a countryside Greek temple in there, one that has partially sunk into the bog while the other half has been discovered and restored by the Romans. 

Something like that.

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A Christmas Eve

Focus is overrated. I'm certain there is an easy way to accomplish the same effect with a perfectly focused image, and of a higher quality, but most of my favorite images lately have just been missed and manual focus. It impresses content upon the mind rather than insisting on it, somehow more persuasive, a visual truth that anyone can rely on. Perhaps I am going blind in two ways now, rather than the one I had grown used to. Any loss of sense is noticeably simple. 

We returned from Tahoe as a family. Maybe we are going to take another trip after Christmas. Grandma being here is not as bad as I believed it would be, though it has been less than a day, so I speak hopeful truths and wind otherwise. We'll see how I feel in another few hours. I try not to drink as much when grandma is here. She likely believes that's an effect, and she couldn't be more right, though we differ on the specific nature of the cause. Some truths speak from a well of similarities. 

But we are all having a nice family Christmas and this is my family now, with or without my attitudes and opinions, of which there are many, though none that ever seem to suit the mood quite perfectly. 

Why is it that everybody else's version of the mood is assumed to be the more correct version? 

Well, we know why, don't we?

The boy has been having a blast since he got out of school. It is fantastic to watch and play along with. I'm out of work, too. I know the statistics tell us that having children will be a disappointment and won't make us as happy as we had hoped, but that's probably just because it's illegal now to make them work. But being around this boy at this age is pretty fucking great, for now. Who knows how long anything will last. I'll always have time to be disappointed. I've been practicing, so that I don't lose any ground on anyone else. I rehearse my miseries in my sleep, where they are free to roam and find themselves before turning on me. 

Merry Chrisis, My Chryslers. 

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Merry Crisis!

Oh yeah, we're on vacation - Lake Tahoe. Crystal Cove, on the Nevada side, where prostitution is required and gambling encouraged. Drinking is the expectation yet drugs are punished very severely. Strange place, a certain kind of American seems to always love it here. It is a Shangri-La for the libertarian set. All the prostitutes in Nevada seem unusually suspicious. But do not worry about me, I only go to prostitutes to read the articles. 

My underwater camera can't seem to focus any more. It was just a little cheap one and I got plenty of images that I love out of it. The one I want to replace it is a little bit on the expensive side, but what the fuck, I'm worth it. There's another one that's half the price that would probably serve me just as well. And now there are Go-Pro like options that are even cheaper and could serve a variety of purposes. I feel guilty buying myself anything this time of year, between Christmas and the boy's birthday in early January and the two vacations we'll take between now and then, maybe it's a bad time to spend on myself. But where will I ever end up with that sort of talk. 

What do I know. There may be no better time ever again. That is always the case. We never know. 

I also want a little drone. Why can't I have it all? 

I've been drinking since before we left for Tahoe. It is tiring stuff. My body gets tired of it, my mind gets tired of it, even the thing inside of me that wants to drink grows tired of itself. 

When mom gets back with coffee, I think I'm going to talk her into an extra day here. The prediction is 3-5" of snow today. What sort of vacationers would leave in a situation like that? Mom is eager to pick up grandma at the airport tomorrow but I am much less interested in the requirements of that, since they're not my requirements. I'm only mentioning here so that you'll understand that I am trying to subvert them. I try to be cordial when she's here, but you know, that's about the best that can be expected of me. 

Okay, nothing else to report from the front lines of the holidays.

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Promises, promises

I was just kidding in yesterday's post. Objectifying women isn't my favorite thing to do. It's far too cerebral to be my favorite. I just wanted to check and see how it felt to write things that are not allowed. Every so often it is good to check - trust but verify. I believe that's the policy, maybe it's don't ask, don't tell. You've come a long way, baby. America runs on Dunkin'. 

Who knows. 

All we can be sure of is that there is a generation of young people who seem to believe that the contemporarily correct way of talking is far more important than all other ways, except possibly the future way. Imagine the horror of finding out in mid life that you argued for making people feel more included through language and uninvited eye contact but you didn't get it quite perfect and now there is an even younger generation of angry children telling you how you got everything wrong and have ruined it for them, and maybe for all time. It is no fun to find out that the years will somehow make your ethics primitive. 

Mmkay, millennial.

I remember when being a liberal meant you fought for people's rights, not their feelings or preferred pronouns. I stole that line. This doesn't mean fuck their feelings and fuck their genderless pronouns, it only means that those aren't things I was ever interested in fighting for. The fight is for the rights. And yes, that includes the right to identify. 

Freedom, Viva, Etc. 

We are told that the world is not binary, but if I try to speak then I am reminded why a binary's opinions are born hateful. With me, there is only good and evil, meaning them and me, in that order. It is best to get out of a closet somewhere and get out early. All that it takes is to confess honestly to a private thought or feeling that would set you apart from the people who don't have those type thoughts and feelings, the enemies. It's easy, just close your eyes and speak about what you think and feel there in the darkness. The thing that makes you who you truly are. In that dark, private, sacred space, I find that my mind likes objectifying women, but I'll keep trying. I promise. 

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'Tis the Season

Invincible Christmas is on its way. There is never any forgetting that fact with a seven year old in the house, soon to be eight. The kids at school are already grumbling their suspicions concerning the veracity of Santa. I don't help anything. I tell them, "If there's no Santa Claus then maybe Satan's not real, either." I'm trying to help them. 

This War on Christmas doesn't have a fucking chance. If the liberals can't impeach Trump then they have no chance against ol' Kris Kringle, the Emperor of Ice Dreams.

Well, I am "on-call" this weekend, so I will stay around the house.I pulled out the box of unscanned negatives and the scanner. We'll see if that project gets aloft once again. I hope so. It seems a waste to shoot that much film and then never get a chance to see any of it. Maybe I'll give the boy and mom nice pictures of themselves that I've taken. Imagine their Christmas morning joy. The gaiety of it all. 

There's a word you don't hear spoken much any more - cheer, whose root word is gay. I believe it can be spelled gayety, also. I'm going to try to find a way of working this into casual Christmas conversation. Oh, the gaiety of it all. 

Isn't it great to see the gaiety in the children's eyes on Christmas morning?

Whatever. I still have the wearied mind of a pubescent adolescent. All the best men do. Can we claim there are still good men, or ever were, though ones that maybe make jokes about the word "gay" and masturbate furiously every chance they get when they see any part of a woman's body?

I like objectifying women. It's fun and reinforces my faith in them. It's pretty much all I think about, when I do. I mean, I know how not to objectify them: let them get old. Then, out of respect, they'll naturally avoid most of the things they don't like about the way I think. 

It's all part of the beautiful commercial of life. 

Viva Last Blues 

Nothing more to say about that, just a good album. Cato and I went camping at Big Sur to hear a weekend's worth of this guy - Will Oldham - playing. I'm sure I wrote about it here. 

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