Category Archives: confessional crap

it’s okay, be a sap

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Okay, it’s Valentine’s Day. A lot of folks really hate this day. Hate it. Hate it with a disturbing amount of passion. Maybe they hate it for good reasons, because it’s clearly the most emotionally-laden faux holiday ever driven by commerce. It’s a lot of pressure to drop on this one day out of the whole long year. Tens of billions of dollars are spent to compel men to be romantic on this one day, to compel women to be romanced.

It’s a sad thing, isn’t it, that we have to set aside a day for romance. For that reason, it’s a good thing that we do it—even if we’re doing it for all the wrong reasons. Even if it’s driven by the makers of chocolates and by florists and by jewelers and by the manufacturers of greeting cards. Even if the engine of Valentine’s Day is almost completely commercial, it’s a good thing we do it.

Because romance is important. Romance lifts us out of the mundane. It elevates us. It sweeps aside the boundaries of our ordinary workaday lives. Romance, really, is the willingness to let yourself be carried away by something larger than you are.

That doesn’t necessarily mean romantic love. You can be happily single and without a partner and still be caught up in romance. You can find it in novels and movies, to be sure, but it’s also out there in the real world. It’s the delight you take in a foggy day, and it’s that moment of undiluted pleasure you get when you see a Canada Goose scull its wings before landing, and it’s that smile you get from a stranger you see through a shop window, and the smile you give back. And yes yes yes, that’s all incredibly sappy. But it’s true all the same. A large chunk of romance grows out of the willingness to be sappy.

So yes, it’s a stupid, commercial holiday destined to disappoint more folks than it pleases. But it’s not the day that matters, or the chocolates or the jewelry or the flowers or the dinner at a nice restaurant—although those are all very nice. Valentine’s Day is good because romance is good, and anything that reminds of that is worthwhile.

So just give into it. Be a sap. Be an unapologetic sap. And then go out and do it again tomorrow.

go tell it on the mountain

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I like to walk. If I have a destination—a specific place I actually intend to go—that’s okay. But I prefer to walk destination-free. Today I put aside the eighty thousand things I have to deal with and think about, and I walked.

It would be more accurate to say I went meandering—accurate on more than one level. The term meander comes from winding Turkish River called the Büyük Menderes, known for its twisting course. Homer mentions it in the Iliad. And today I walked aimlessly and slowly along a river. It’s the end of January and 64 degrees Fahrenheit, which is just bizarre. The ice was melting rapidly in the river.

I encountered a few people. Spoke to some of them. Didn’t speak to others. I’m not sure how I decided which ones to speak to and which ones to ignore. Some ignored me back, or ignored me preemptively. Others spoke and were happy and cheerful to be out in such weather. And one sang to himself, softly.

As I shot this photograph, a man of about my age came strolling by, singing to himself in a very small voice. It was an old Civil War era hymn—what used to be called a ‘Negro’ spiritual, a song of hope and the promise of redemption written and sung by a people you’d think would have little of either. “Go tell it on the mountain,” he sang. “Over the hills and everywhere.”

And it all cheered me up. An unseasonably lovely day. Walking along a river, walking in a way that takes its name from a river half a world away, a river celebrated in song and poetry for ten thousand years. Hearing a man singing another song, this one only a century old, but like the Iliad also about hope. Watching rust do its slow work, which for some reason I find oddly comforting. All of those things, they cheered me up.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere. A lesson or a moral. I have little truck with lessons or morals or spirituals, though I’m mightily taken with meandering. But whatever there lesson or moral there is, I’ll tell it on the mountain, and over the hills and everywhere.

hey bingo, it’s all good

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I don’t know how it works for you (assuming ‘you’ are somebody who attempts Iron Photographer projects), but for me the IP process follows a few common patterns. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to do—and even if the final photograph has almost nothing to do with my original idea, the process is smooth and harmonious and I get that whole ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot‘ feeling.

Sometimes I have absolutely no idea at all what to do (even though I help come up with the elements, along with the Blessed Jamelah—may her hair grow long), and I spend the two weeks of the project squatting toadlike and glaring at anything that might possibly relate to the three IP elements.

And sometimes I just say ‘fuck it’ and start jamming stuff together. Which is what I did here. The elements of Iron Photographer 143 are 1) something with a handle, 2) the colour orange (we add the irrelevant letter ‘u’ as a sop to our Canadian and British members), and 3) vignetting. I was shaving and I noticed the blue razor in the mirror and thought “Oh, something with a handle. Hey, bingo—Iron Photographer!” So I brought the razor with me from the bathroom. As I dressed I remembered I owned a seldom-worn orange t-shirt. Hey, bingo—two elements down.

But that would be a pretty dull photo, so I grab an old mirror off the dresser. Orange t-shirt as background, razor on the mirror and hey that’s still pretty damned dull. Wait, there’s an old Coca Cola bottle I’d set aside for the last IP project but didn’t use. Put it on the mirror and lawdy, it’s still dull.

Add some drama. Have the light reflect in the mirror, meter off the reflection. Nope, still dull. Get a sheet of black plastic, wrinkle it up for texture, put the t-shirt back down, fold it over a bit, add the mirror and the razor and the coke bottle, make sure the light is reflecting in the mirror and hey bingo—still needs something. Fuck fuck fuck.

Okay, maybe the bit of red plastic mesh I used in a much older IP project. Find that, knot it up. The red clashes horribly with the orange. I like that. Finally shoot a photo and—well, it’s better, but dull. Still dull. Still missing something.

Shift everything around. Shoot another dull photo. Shift it all around again. Shoot a couple more frames. The phone rings; I ignore it. Shift all the stuff around maybe three or four more times and shoot a couple more frames. Shifting it all around doesn’t help because it’s missing something. Shifting doesn’t add anything.

Study the mess I’ve made on the table for a bit, thinking about any of the bits that might please me. Decide what I like best is the curve of the mirror, and the curve of a fold in the t-shirt, and a curve in the knotted mesh and clearly what it needs is another curve. Grab a hanger from the closet. Slide it into the frame. No…slide it a bit farther into the frame. A bit farther. Too far. And there. Shoot two more frames. Process the one I like most, add a whole lot of vignetting (the third IP element) and…

Hey bingo, IP 143. Done.

Return the phone call I ignored earlier. First thing said: “What’ve you been up to?” And I realize I’ve just spent 90 minutes arranging and rearranging a jumble of random objects that are entirely unrelated to each other in any way. A razor, an old Coke bottle, a bit of mesh left over from some cherry tomatoes (that I didn’t eat, but bought purely because I wanted the mesh), a mirror, a t-shirt, a sheet of black plastic, and a coat hanger? So I confess to that over the telephone. After a long pause, “So, I’m thinking about going to Spain next summer.”

The phone calls ends after a brief chat. I look at the photo. It makes no sense. Nothing even remotely like sense. I consider deleting the photo. Then I figure, “What the hell. It’s Iron Photographer. The people who get it, will get it. The people who don’t will still discuss their travel plans with me. It’s all good.”

sorry, i lost track of time

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I’ve always been bad about time. Not in an hour-by-hour sort of way; I usually have a moderately good grasp on the actual time of day (although I don’t own a watch). And not in a day-to-day sort of way; I usually know what day of the week it is. I’m sometimes a bit sketchy when it comes to the month, but that’s rarely a problem.

No, what I’m bad about is the passage of time. I have a massively flawed sense of how much time has elapsed between one event and another.

For example, I was recently asked when I moved away from Manhattan. My immediate perception was that it was probably three or four years ago. When I actually thought about it, I realized I moved away in 2001—a short time before the attacks of 9/11. That’s ten years ago. Ten years.

That’s a pretty harmless example. My temporal impairment becomes a problem when I agree to do something with a soft deadline. If, for example, I tell a friend “I’ll call you next week; we’ll have lunch” my sense of ‘next week’ could last a month. That’s a problem. It can make people think I don’t care about them.

I’ve recognized this as a problem for some time (don’t ask me how long, because I don’t really know—temporal impairment, remember?). But until recently, I never gave any thought to the origin of the problem—to why I have this problem. I probably wouldn’t have given the matter any thought at all, except that now the problem affects my daughter. When I tell her I’m going to call her, I damned well better call her. After having a conversation with her, I think I may have figured out why I have this problem.

I don’t get bored.

I think that’s the source of my temporal impairment. I can’t recall the last time I was bored. I must have been a child. I have a hazy recollection of telling my momma I was bored and having her respond something like this: “Then you’re not using your imagination. Go outside and find something interesting to do. No bored children in this house.”

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been…busy isn’t the right word. Engaged is more accurate. I’m actively engaged in something all the time, from the moment I wake up until the moment I fall asleep. It might be reading, it might be thinking, it might observing, it might be chores—but even if it looks like I’m just walking or sitting in a chair, I’m doing something. All the fucking time.

And that makes time pass really quickly. I get caught up in what I’m doing. I forget to eat sometimes. Sometimes I eat and a little later I can’t recall if I’ve eaten or not, so I eat again because I know I sometimes forget to eat. I make a decision to finish what I’m working on at that particular moment and take a walk afterward, then when I’m finished I realize it’s 8:45 at night. I’m aware of time passing, but not of how much time is passing.

The failure to be bored sounds like a good thing. Overall, I think it probably is. But it’s a pretty lousy excuse when you have to apologize for failing to call somebody you promised to call ‘later in the week.’ It’s a pretty lousy excuse when you’ve told somebody you’d get together with them during the summer, then realize Thanksgiving is only a week away.

In a very real sense, the excuse “Sorry, I lost track of time” is just another way of saying “Sorry, I was more interested in what I was doing than in you.” And that’s a pretty shitty thing to say to another person.