Anxiety Nuanced

I just Googled "How many new medical conditions were named in 2024?"

The U.S. government recognized 13 new medical conditions.  Diseases, if you will.  I only wondered because I live with my mother and hear hundreds of drug commercials every day, mostly for conditions I have never heard of before.  I'm guessing drug companies are a major force behind this.  You should see if your doctor is aware of all of them.  You may be missing out.  

It is good, I guess, but it is anxiety producing, too.  What if I have it?  What if I get it?  There are more things you might be afflicted with than ever before.  

Anxiety is something relatively new to me, but I now know what it feels like, how horrible it is.  I think I have lived a life relatively anxiety free.  Not totally.  Public speaking gigs have always giving me the willies, but it was a rather positive thing that made me perform at peak level, the kind that was there and gone.  This new kind lingers and remains unresolved.  It sneaks up on me mostly in the night.  I wake up sweating and in a panic.  Real life concerns.  

I guess that is because nothing seems to be going right.  The train travels in only one direction.  

Oops.  There I go again.  Here's one of the anxieties that isn't so bad.  I am going to meet a commercial photographer this week at one of his studios.  He has two and rents them out.  Tennessee wants me to shoot him for his clothing catalog audition.  The commercial photographer wants to shoot him for another clothing brand.  Cool.  T says he wants to make arrangements that will allow me to use the studios for my own shoots.  I'd like that, of course, but I am the opposite of a commercial photographer.  I studied photo aesthetics with three of the most prominent photographers in America at the time, all collected by the country's major museums.  All of them were about fucking the photo up.  

I like two or three fashion photographers, but they are not your standard lot.  They are Vogue photographers who are hired for their particular styles which are unique.  Moon and Roversi have "permission" in the commercial world.  Another commercial photographer with whom I used to correspond shot most of the Jack Daniels ads, but they were quite unique as well and not slick catalog stuff.  

So. . . I am very nervous about it all.  I haven't shot in a studio since I closed mine in 2015.  Wow!  A decade ago.  When I did a little shoot with my Miami friend at my house, it took me most of a week to remember how to set up the strobes and fire them.  And then I was only half successful.  

Shooting a boy, too, is wildly different.  I can't talk the same way, of course.  Crazy, right?  

"Why are you so binary?"

I am.  I am.  The way I talk to men and women, I realize, is different.  Funny that.  There are different kinds of intimacy.  Even in my professional life, I realize, that was true.  Hmm.  That is something worth more consideration.  The difference in my professional life was very nuanced, I think, but it was surely there.  

I'll get back to you when I have thought about this more.  

I am only doing this whole commercial shoot thing, though, on the off-chance that I will have a studio to work in from time to time.  You realize that you can take the same picture over and over with different people and it is never the same thing twice.  People are simply fascinating.  

I guess you could say the same thing about apples, though, or pears or cheeseboards.  A rose isn't a rose isn't a rose.  

There you go Gertrude.  

But I never would have been invited to her soirees.  

Today is Mother's Day.  Not that one.  I am taking my mother all over town today, to banks, to lunch, and to Costco.  That is the plan, anyway. . . if she can handle it.  Tomorrow they begin putting a new roof on  my house.  A new roof for Christmas.  Then, my work really begins.  There is much to be done at the old homestead.  Pressure washing and painting and mulching the driveway and ripping out the old garden and laying down new granite in the driveways.  

I will find out if I am still the man to do it.  

At night, in my semi-sleep, I alternate between romantic dreams and panic.  I woke up last night with a head full of sweat.  When I went back to sleep, I was trying to steal someone else's sweetheart.  We were cuddling when I woke. 

"So, doc. . . what do you think?"

"I think we're all in rat's alley."

"I think you stole that line."

I slept late.  My mother is banging around.  I need another cup of coffee.  My nerves are jangled.  I read today that there are commercial companies who want to put chemicals in the atmosphere to block sun rays in an attempt to mitigate global warming.  

Better living through chemistry.  What could go wrong?

Oh. . . I read people are growing ever more lonely, too.  Is it true?  I don't really know people any more.  

Here's a wonderful song. . . just don't look at the picture.