Transformations

I don't know who took this photograph, don't know who is in it.  I was looking for a picture to post today and ran across this one image randomly saved in my downloads file.  I am pretty sure it is either a famous photographer or a famous model.  It is just a lot better than the image I was about to post.

It is my fault.  I haven't been working at it.  I have film to scan that I haven't scanned and digital images to work that I haven't worked.  I am just wearing out the things I have on my laptop right now without regard for the integrity of the site.  I have been both sick and lazy and I have been much on summer vacation, eating and drinking and hanging out at the beach (where are the pictures?) and watching movies and napping on rainy afternoons.  My friend and I have both decided that we are becoming slugs and must get back to being productive soon.  It is difficult, though, when there is so much sensual fun.

O.K.  Calling her "my friend" is bugging me, too.  I don't care to be presumptuous, though, and say she is something she is not.  I should give her a name and avoid all of that.  I like giving nicknames to girls, but often they don't sound that flattering.  Stinky is one.  Oh, I love to smell their hair or skin and say, "pshew. . . Stinky!" and laugh like a devil.  But that won't do.  Other nicknames are too intimate and showy.  Perhaps just a simple name.  I'll think on that.  I will come up with something.

For now, though. . . my friend and I had quite a day just being.  In the late afternoon/early evening, we went to a littlw hipster place that is quite beat, always just a little too warm and muggy in the summer or cool in the winter, and the place smells like a hillbilly kitchen, but it is always full of loners, people with many tattoos and piercings, bearded boys and thrift shop girls, all sitting with a cup of coffee or a beer staring at a computer screen or sitting in small groups sharing cigarettes and sparse conversations.  My friend likes the place much, she says, and so we took a spot by the window and ordered drinks.  My friend is the hipster age having grown up in that, and she, too, has tattoos which I keep forgetting about for she is the kind of girl I like, from a really good family who grew up well and who has just fabulous taste in clothes, who always has the right tools in the kitchen and who can decorate a house in a wonderfully creative fashion.  That is to say, she is quite a conundrum, an oddity, really, just about everything I am not.  I, of course, always sit in judgement while she is part of the moment, talking and laughing with everyone around, truly interested in things though in truth she is a horrible misanthrope when it comes right down to it, an absolute reversal of what I think I might be.

Sitting by the window watching the crowd on the sidewalk and behind us in the large cafe, I said that these were cripples of every kind, spiritually, mentally, physically, not everyone having all the traits but all having at least one.  They are vegans and vegetarians and spiritual outliers who read books on mysticism and supernaturalism, and they come together here so as not to be completely and totally alone.  Do they not have internet at their houses, I ask?  But my friend makes me stop and look and watch in a different way, and suddenly and horribly, I am wrong.  It is crazy how wrong I was.  And it was good to be out of the house and in the mix, my senses more alive like a sudden trip to Singapore or Shanghai, me now wanting to bring a camera and make a photo series of all these people, pictures and stories, a huge collection. . . .

I probably won't, but I should.

We came home and made a simple dinner out of what my friend said were ten superfoods, and we settled in to watch another of the films I am forcing her to watch though she says she wants to--"The Man Who Would Be King."  It is funny how old these movies are now.  They look and sound it.  They are like archeology, like figures left on the wall of a cliff as evidence that someone was there.  They are not real at all, not even simulacrums, just evidence that something existed in the past and that is all.

It is a beach day and I must be going soon before the day becomes a memory.