Everything Happens to Me

I swear I've tried a couple times now to take photographs.  One day, I simply got a camera and walked around "the grounds" looking for anything--a shape, a form, a slant of light.  Nothing came of it.  Yesterday, as you may have read, I had what I can only call a mental breakdown.  Disaster Thinking.  I couldn't turn it off.  After rising at four, I DID go back to bed after reading and writing, but it did no good.  My mind went straight back to the horrors I could not shake.  I got up again and didn't know what to do.  I didn't want to go to the gym.  The predictability of my life was an inevitable part of the horror show.  I decided to try to walk it all away.  Sunlight and fresh air, maybe.  I would take a camera.  It would be like old times.  

Only it wasn't.  My steps were painful and slow.  My bad knee, of course.  But my left hip has become a problem.  Back when I got hit on my Vespa, that hip was black with bruising and the flesh beneath the skin has been swollen and fleshy since.  Human tissue is not meant for such trauma, I'm guessing, and cells turned to much have a difficult time reshaping.  And now I'm guessing, too, that the beating the hip took is now coming to its awful fruition.  I'm sure arthritis has developed in the joint now calcified.  My lower back, the lumbar vertebrae, have been bad since I was in my twenties when I was dumb enough to put four hundred and fifty pounds on my back to do squats.  Even back then, the ortho told me to quit it.  

When I was sixteen, my old Chevy got rear ended.  I've had a bad neck since, but this week, I have been suffering greatly from something I must have done in the gym.  I can neither turn nor completely straighten my head.  

Still, with maladie mentale and beaucoup physical ailments, searching for some natural cure,I set out on a three and a half mile walk down familiar sidewalks. 

The idea was to get back to some normality in body and mind, but the going was terribly slow.  "It's o.k." I told myself.  "This is for pleasure.  It is not a race."  

I would stop here and there and take a picture that meant nothing and would never see the xenon light of computer day.  I knew they were shit, but it was a simple exercise, I said, like a musician playing scales.  

At the end of my street, a simple block from my house, I took a photo of the rear of a shapely car and realized the internal flash of my little Fuji X100VI was on.  I stopped to scroll through the huge menu trying to remember how to turn it off.  As I stood there scrolling endlessly, I heard a voice behind me.  I turned to see a girl talking on her phone, then turned back to my camera.  The voice stayed behind me for awhile, then after a few moments came up beside me.  

"Are you taking photographs?" she asked.  I looked at her with a silly grin.  Was she going to yell at me?

"Yea. . . trying. . . but I can't remember how to turn the flash off."

"Do you want some help?" she asked.  

I paused and looked at her.  "Are you a photographer?"

"Yes," she said.  She walked over to look at my screen, her leashless pit bull looking dog staring up at me with that thick, wide mastiff head.  We scrolled through the menu together, but it wasn't the right one.  

"Go back to the main menu," she said.  I was feeling foolish and no matter what button I pushed, I couldn't.  

Embarrassed now, I said, "I have an idea," and I turned the camera off and back on.  All this time, apparently, somebody was listening to us on the other end of the phone line.  O.K.  Anachronistic.  There is no line.  But. . . on the other end of what?

"Listen, I have to go," she told someone.  "Just remember Martha Stewart.  I'm a clean freak.  Make sure the kitchen is clean when I come.  O.K.  Bye."

"Got it!" I said.  The dog was standing inches away looking at me.  I took a chance and put my hand palm down the way I know you should toward it.  He bumped my hand with his head, so I gave him a pat.  

"Is this part pit bull?" I asked. 

She told me no, he was something, maybe a Staffordshire terrier, maybe mixed with something else.  I wasn't really paying that much attention.  I was simply glad he was friendly.  

"He was somebody else's rescue dog, but he took to me so I ended up with him."

"He sure is solid," I said, and he was.  Petting him was like petting a rock.  

"Do you want to walk together," she asked me.  I was taken slightly aback by this, wondering, but I said sure. 

I held out my hand.  "My name is C.S." I said.  

She took my hand and said, "Hi.  My name is Ava." 

I straightened up as best I could and tried not to limp so obviously hoping I could keep up, but she was on a stroll, and with the dog staying obediently near, leashless, we sauntered.

As I've said here a thousand times, I'm a good listener and am often genuinely interested in people.  As we walked, she eagerly answered to my queries.  She was a student at Country Club College.  Business and Finance major.  She grew up in the Tri-State area of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.  After high school, she applied to most of the Ivy League schools, but she got a scholarship to a university in Paris, so she went to study there.  While she was there, she got a brain infection, she said, and she came home.  It was bacterial, some terrible sinus thing, and it took a while to get over.  When she did, it was the Covid era and she decided to move to California.  

"Did you go to school there?"

"No.  I got a job."

"Did you lose any of your senses from the infection?

"I couldn't taste food for a couple years, but one day it just came back.  I put on a lot of weight then.  My father said, Ava, you're getting pretty big, and I said, Dad, I haven't been able to taste food for a long time.  Food was tasting really good to me, and I was eating way too much.  It all went to my butt and thighs."

She slapped them demonstratively in illustration.  They weren't big now, so I was rather enjoying the show.  

"So how did you end up at Country Club?"

"I got accepted there after high school and I liked it here so I decided to come."

She told me much more about herself as people will if you are curious, and as I have found to be almost universally true, she wondered nothing about me.  People want to tell their stories, and if you are interested, you can find out some of their most intimate secrets.  

We'd strolled slowly for about half a mile when we came to the college.  

"Which way are you going?" I asked.  

"I live just over here," she said.  It was on the street where I used to live.  She was turning left, I right, and so we said our so longs and parted ways.  

A few blocks later, I realized I had the camera in my hand.  I hadn't taken any photographs, but thinking about it, I was fairly certain she wanted me to photograph her.  And then I thought again that I should have talked about photography, asked her what she photographed, and. . . told her to come by the house sometime, that I wanted to use my large format camera, etc.  

Of course, I didn't.  I wanted to seem "normal."

I was feeling good, though, that she had asked me to wander with her.  I like getting out.  It was like a mini-adventure.  I'd forgotten about the pain in my knee, hip, back, and neck while we chatted, but now, alone, it came back to me suddenly.  I still had three miles to go.  Now, however, not everything seemed so disastrous.

I was fairly certain I would never run into Ava again.  She was a chimera, a figment, a will-o-the-wisp.  Hell, maybe I'd imagined the entire episode, she a phantom of my own making.  

That didn't cheer me up.  I was falling back into the old disaster thinking again.  

When I got back to the house, I decided to take a hot Epsom salts bath.  Now with the tankless water heater, I could have endless hot water, and it was delicious.  I lay there thinking about my cameras.  I really did want to take some large format photos again.  Why?  Because you don't take many.  It is laborious, so you pick something, spend a lot of time setting up the tripod and camera and putting on a lens, then getting under the dark cloth and looking at the dim image upside down and reversed on the ground glass, moving a magnifier around to see what is in focus, then pulling out a 4x5 negative holder and putting it in the slot, metering the light and setting the aperture and shutter speed, cocking the shutter, removing the dark slide, then. . . finally. . . snapping the picture.  You only want to do that a few times in a day.  Maybe later I would pull it all out of the bag and set it up.  

Sure.  

But what I DID do after showering and doing the usual ablutions turned out to be. . . fantastic.  

I haven't printed any pictures in a very long time, not since the big Epson went kaput.  That was one of the big disappointments of my life.  I loved that printer.  I tried everything to save it, but the printer head was clogged forever.  I tried everything to clear it, but it was done.  

I still have my twenty year old Epson Stylus R2400 printer though, a large desktop printer that makes up to 13" prints.  I wondered if it would even work.  I'd been looking at buying a new printer but since I'm taking no photos worth a shit right now, I can't justify the cost.  But I wanted to see what those little ChatGPT creations based on my old photos would look like on thicker fine art papers.  I was pretty sure they would look nice.  So I pulled out some old boxes of 4x6 paper and loaded them into the tray.  Based on past experience, I was pretty sure that the paper wouldn't load, that the printer would reject it. . . but I was wrong.  I pulled up one of the images Chat had made and hit print.  And voila!  It was a beauty to behold to use a tired old expression that truly fits the bill.  I was thrilled. 

And so the afternoon went, me printing out dozens of images.  I couldn't believe how beautiful they were.  Some of my favorites were strange.  

 I wanted to display them so I used magnetized frames to put a few on the fridge and on the blackboard in the kitchen.  People would think me strange, perhaps, but I thought them absolutely gorgeous.  

As the afternoon wore on, it was time to visit my mother.  I no longer go twice a day.  I just can't.  It is physical.  It is mental.  Too much in my life is going wrong.  But I had a story to tell my mother.  

After visiting her the day before, I got home at the cocktail hour.  The evening was nice, the temperature in the low 80s, the air just a bit breezy, so I made a Negroni with the idea of sitting on my deck.  But when I took my drink to the table, the glass top was gone.  WTF?  The tree cutters must have broken it and thrown it away, I thought.  Surely it wasn't thieves.  It would take two people and a truck.  No, it had to be the tree cutters.  I was miffed.  I shouldn't accuse them.  I had no proof.  But what else could it be?  

I looked up the cost of a replacement top, 44" 1/2" thick tempered glass with bevelled edges--$350 at Home Depot.  

And so I told my mother.  She was doing well, and we went out on the veranda to sit in the fresh air for awhile, then we went back inside to sit on the couch in the great room and watch the t.v. news.  Just before dinner was to be served, I told her goodbye.  

When I got home, it was the cocktail hour, so I made a Negroni and went out to sit at the topless table thinking that maybe that Chimera Ava would walk by.  I walked around the yard a bit looking at all the things I needed to do, and. . . holy shit!  I found the glass table top.  The tree guys had placed it against the house behind the bit holly hedge and had forgotten to put it back.  

Man. . . I was glad I hadn't called Mr. Tree with any accusations.  

Maybe things would be o.k. I thought.  I was making a box full of prints that fairly thrilled me.  I was even printing out some of the old Lonesomeville images, too, and they were looking fine.  And that night, I needn't bother cooking.  I had plenty of leftover chicken and rice and broccoli and Brussels sprouts.  I put them in the microwave and poured a glass of wine.  All the news was about the assassination of that fellow Charlie Kirk.  Republican lawmakers were slanderously blaming democrats for the killing.  There is truly something wrong with the right wing MAGA mind.  They are much like a kennel full of retarded pit bulls.  It is terrible. 

But here is what I have to say about Charlie Kirk.  I've seen a good amount of him on YouTube.  Maybe what I have seen is not truly representative of the man, but here is what I saw--a cocky fuckwad with a microphone arguing with semi-educated college sophomores who got to ask questions.  Charlie's logic was terribly flawed at times, but he wasn't sitting in a room of professors who could call bullshit on his claims.  He was on a college lawn performing as the Hari Krishnas had the day before or the Christian madman the day before that.  

I don't think Kirk should have been executed, but I do think he needed to argue with someone who also had a microphone.  

O.K.  I just tried to publish this, but once again, my internet is out.  Piss shit fuck goddamn.  Really?  Truly, everything just goes wrong.  I'll put this up when I can.  And so, until then. . . .