Lonesome

No bullfight tale today.  No tale at all.  I had one of the worst nights I can remember.  I have an electric, shooting pain that starts somewhere in my lower back, I'm certain, but explodes in my hip, and last night, no matter how I lay, it executed me.  Same with the bad knee.  I can't even explain.  A pain in my jaw.  a couple bouts of sudden vertigo.  Throw on top of all that the undercooked small red beans I made with pork last night.  I was afraid I was having a heart attack.  

I got up at four-thirty, but it didn't help.  I went back to bed at six. 

What compels me to write this morning?  Nothing interests me.  I looked through the photos I have on this little laptop for forty-five minutes with a hollowness in my chest and stomach.  Not quite true.  The only things that do interest me will now only bring me trouble.  All the things I really like.  There is nothing but trouble in this world anymore, and one's tempted to extreme privacy.  But I spend day and night with my mother now who cannot carry on a conversation, and for the first time in my life I think I have developed a loneliness, ironically minus any solitude.  In solitude, I was never tempted to loneliness, not in any real sense.  But yea. . . I think I will have to admit to being not alone but lonely now.  

Isn't it strange.  

I dated no one in the five and a half years I had the studio.  I was very happy.  

I know people who will take satisfaction from my current condition.  I lived too well too long, I think.  

"He always held himself a little too high for what he really was."

I cribbed that line from Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily."  Emily Grierson, I should say, should be a warning to us all.  

Having said all that, I picked up the lone copy of my "Lonesomeville" book.  I had set it aside for years.  It had disappointed me.  It is a book of the special Polaroid photos I took, nothing more.  Looking through it now, I thought that it was pretty interesting, and I thought maybe to go back and, with a few tweaks, make a number of copies.  How many, I don't know.  I'd have to charge to cover my cost, but some people would want one.  After that, I may try to make a book of the post-Polaroid images.  They have a different appeal, but an appeal of their own.  Maybe even greater in some respects.  

But I can't even make a webpage for my other photos.  

I went through my '70s photos again.  If I was not ahead of my time, I was of my time.  They are wonderful, I think, better than most from the era.  But they do not exist.  My mother threw away all my negatives many, many years ago.  

Good old mom.  

There is a new book out about the 1937 Cote d'Azur crowd.  Picasso, Man Ray, Lee Miller, et. al. (link).  That summer, they practiced a special decadence that fascinates me, though I could never wish to live through anything like it.  Still, I'd look over the fence and take a long gander at what was going on.  

Lee Miller documented much of what happened in photos.  

Ray was documenting Miller.  So was Picasso.  Everyone was "enjoying" everyone those brief months in an orgy of sex and art and poetry.  Miller's son will go mad, of course, as he has done everything he can to sanitize his mother's image.  Miller the War Photographer.  

I could not live that way myself.  I am too much a romantic.  I always wish for a world of two.  And yet. . . my prurient interests are piqued.  

"You are full of shit.  Get off your high horse, fellow."

Yea, maybe a little.  I sure do like that Man Ray photo of Miller.  

I'll post here a little country music, a song Q sent me out of the blue.  I like it. 

I still feel like shit.  It is going to be a miserable day .