Trouble, Man

I post this because. . . I mean. . . I try.  I've been walking around with a camera, but this is the kind of shit I end up with.  I fear it will be the same in the studio next week.  I've just lost my eye, I guess.  But people, it seems, want real pictures and not A.I. generated things.  So I'm here to disappoint.  I've done that a lot this year.  Mostly.  It has been a soul-breaking year for me, and, I think, a body-breaking year as well.  

Something has to kill you.  It might as well be family.  

But that's enough of that.  I may have missed the Christmas parade yesterday, as I have missed everything else and will miss Vespers, too, but I did manage late in the day to get a long limp in that brought me back down the Boulevard.  It was surprisingly quiet.  I guess the early parade visit had worn people out.  I stopped in the bookstore and spied two things I wanted to come back to buy.  And I did.  I got the Pushcart Prize 50th Anniversary edition.  It is big.  It is thick.  It is full of stuff.  I'm fairly excited.  I read the introduction and part of the first short story last night.  Oh, that story seems like a winner alright.  I wish I had the e-version so that I could copy and paste what I want right here right now.  

I just tried Googling it.  Nope.  Selavy.  

I also bought "Banal Nightmare" by Halle Butler.  Can you judge a book by its cover?  It seems so.  I do.  I won't bother with slick, commercial covers.  Publishers know their audiences.  This one had a non-auspicious cover and the stuff inside has had some pretty good reviews.  It is about the petty, peevish arguments and grudges of college profs working at the same school.  I read most novels about academic foibles.  They are fun.  

So. . . the holiday reading season has some promise.  See?  Things are looking up.  I might die happy with a book in my lap.  

"Oh. . . he loved his books, didn't he.  He was a happy man with a book."

There was other goodness, too.  I made a good beef, carrot, bean, onion, and cabbage soup.  I'm a soup man, you know.  And there is enough left over for tonight, too.  I needn't cook dinner.  It makes me really chipper.  

On the negative side, my mother never stops moaning now.  Every breath.  What can I say,"Quit it!"?  Well, I'm afraid I did say that.  You can judge me and feel superior, but unless you have lived with constant groaning, fuck off.  I didn't train to be a medical worker.  THAT was never my life's passion.  There are some who do it for a living, I know.  They go to it every day.  But I am merely an amateur drafted into duty.  I will do my duty, officer, but it was not my choice.  

Let's get back to the sunny side of the street, though.  That may be difficult, however.  We are in for three days of rain.  

Last night, I watched a YouTube video on the photographer Hellen van Meene.  She is Dutch, and like many Dutch artists, she is enchanted by light.  She is also somewhat enchanted by female childhood and adolescence, so she has been embroiled in some controversy.  Indeed, her website is no longer available, and the internet seems to show only her most mundane works.  It is curious to me that we are o.k. with photographs of starvation and massacre, of the most hideous health conditions and death, but we freak out at images of childhood and adolescence.  I am not interested in starvation, war-torn photos, or death and dying, but given the opportunity, I could explore the struggles of youth as well as anyone.  The child is the father of the man, the mother of the woman.  

Dutch photographer Hellen van Meene’s new book invites you to enter her world. Tout va disparaître (French for "Everything will disappear", presents dreamlike portrait studies of really young people in their own individual surrounding environments. Photographed in the USA, Russia and the Netherlands, these young people in carefully planned poses, with muted light seem to be hovering between melancholy and an atmosphere of departure. 

Perhaps that is why it must be hidden except in Kodak moments. 

I have a feeling, though, that van Meene is a bit of a kook.  Just guessing. 

I wish I had a window, a room full of Northern light, and people I could photograph.  I am bitterly envious.  Isn't that one of the deadly sins?  

O.K. Mother is up and banging the table, sliding anything she can find across it.  Perhaps she can feel the vibrations and it makes her feel as if she is hearing, but more than likely it is just another hillbilly trait.  What was it Faulkner said of Abner Snopes?  

Once more he followed the stiff back, the stiff and ruthless limp, up the slope and on to the starlit road where, turning, he could see his father against the stars but without face or depth–a shape black, flat, and bloodless as though cut from tin in the iron folds of the frockcoat which had not been made for him, the voice harsh like tin and without heat like tin. . . . They crossed the portico. Now he could hear his father’s stiff foot as it came down on the boards with clocklike finality, a sound out of all proportion to the displacement of the body it bore and which was not dwarfed either by the white door before it, as though it had attained to a sort of vicious and ravening minimum not to be dwarfed by any- thing–the flat, wide, black hat, the formal coat of broadcloth which had once been black but which had now that friction-glazed greenish cast of the bodies of old house flies, the lifted sleeve which was too large, the lifted hand like a curled claw.

And so it goes.  I must "attend" now.  It is time for breakfast.  I am hoping for a long walk with camera today before I come back to "attend" some more.  There will be t.v.  There will be moaning.  I will make endless cups of green jasmine tea.  There will be pills.  There will be bed.  There will be fitful sleep.  

"Sometimes all there is is trouble, man."

* * * 

Addendum:  Cooking breakfast for mom, I put on some jazz.  This came on.  Yea. Had to post this right away.  

"A love that last's past Saturday night."  

Oh yeaaa yeaaa yeaaa.