Category Archives: confessional crap

a pretty good day

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My day? How was my day? I’m glad you asked. My day didn’t go quite as planned.

My plan was simple. Most of my plans are simple. I’m not even sure you can call a vaguely elastic notion of ‘a nice lunch somewhere’ and ‘a walk someplace interesting’ a plan. But that was the extent of it. A nice lunch. A walk. What could possibly go wrong?

But first I had a minor problem to deal with. My debit card was about to expire. I’d called the bank before the Thanksgiving holiday to find out if a new card had been sent (I recently moved and was concerned the card might have been sent to the old address). I was assured the card had just been mailed to the correct address and I’d have it soon. But it still hadn’t arrived yesterday, so I called the bank again and spoke to a very polite young man named Michael.

Michael told me I needn’t be concerned, the card had probably been lost in the mail. But to be safe he could put a block on the debit card and send me a replacement debit card. He asked if it would be okay if he did that. I said “Why don’t you send a replacement, and I’ll keep using this one and keep an eye out for suspicious charges.” Michael didn’t think that was a wise course of action. It took a few more minutes of conversation before I finally realized Michael was just being polite; he was absolutely going to enforce a policy of blocking the existing card and issuing a replacement to protect me (and the bank) from fraud. And he was going to block the card NOW.

I checked my pockets; I had a total of US$19 in cash. Enough for lunch and a walk, but certainly not enough for the next few days. I asked Michael “What am I going to do for cash?” Simple — go to a branch of the bank, he said, and they’ll issue a temporary replacement card I could use until my permanent replacement card arrived.

So I went to the bank. A very polite young man named Terry said he was terribly sorry the post office had lost my renewed debit card, and he deeply regretted any inconvenience it caused me, but he’d be delighted to give me a temporary replacement card. He just needed to see a state-issued photo ID card. I gave him mine. It had expired. “Sorry,” polite Terry said. “You need to have a current state-issued photo ID card.” I showed him my Social Security card. No. I showed him my Veterans Administration card, issued by the federal government, complete with a brightly-colored photo of my smiling face. No. I showed him my voter registration card. No. I showed him various other forms of photo identification — everything from an ancient faculty ID card from Fordham University, to my library card, to my Utata business card, all with photos of me at various ages. No. I pointed out that it was highly unlikely I’d concoct an elaborate false identity spanning more than a decade just to obtain access to a temporary replacement debit card for an account with just a few hundred dollars in it, especially since I’d had an activated and working permanent debit card just an hour earlier.

Terry was very polite…but no. I needed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get a new state-issued photo ID. On my return, he’d be over the moon to give me a temporary replacement debit card.

So I went to the DMV. Yesterday was the 29th day of November. Going to the DMV at the end of the month, when everybody who dawdled and/or forgot to renew their various licenses, is like a combination of attending a Palestinian funeral in Gaza (a mad, chaotic crush of people, all rending their clothes and wailing, wishing they too were dead) and an old-style Soviet bread line (an infinite number of somber, sad-faced, spiritless drones dressed in rags, waiting in line with bovine fatalism, without any real hope of getting anything remotely like what they’re standing in line to receive). To make matters worse, I arrived right at lunch time, when all the employed people who were delusional enough to think they could get their end-of-the-month DMV chores done during their lunch hour arrived. And when most of the DMV personnel went out to McDonalds for a Big Mac.

I got in line. I waited. I made it to the clerk — a polite middle-aged man named Raul. “I need to renew my state-issued photo ID,” I said. Raul would be absolutely delighted to renew my state-issued photo ID. Did I have a certified copy of my birth certificate? I told him the bank didn’t require a certified copy of my birth certificate to get a temporary replacement debit card…so no. “How about your passport?” No, I hadn’t brought my passport either (which wouldn’t have done any good anyway because it’s also expired). Raul said if I returned with a valid passport or a certified copy of my birth certificate, he would happily give me a new state-issued photo ID so I could get my temporary replacement debit card until my permanent replacement debit card arrived since my existing debit card had been blocked because the post office had apparently lost the renewal debit card.

Here’s something you may not know. In order to get a certified copy of your birth certificate, you need to go to the county courthouse and present a state-issued photo ID card or a valid passport. In order to get a valid passport, you have to present either a state-issued photo ID card or a certified copy of your birth certificate.

Happily, I actually had a certified copy of my birth certificate. So I returned to the house, found the birth certificate, returned to the DMV and Raul gave me a new state-issued photo ID, returned to the bank and Terry gave me a temporary replacement debit card. It took six hours. Then I had a very pleasant but very late lunch, and took a very short walk as the sun was beginning to give up.

During the walk I saw the best Men’s Toilet Ever:

menAnd I saw this quickly-walking woman who had no interest in having a cold beer:

cold beerBack at the house, the mail had been delivered. You can imagine how I felt as I approached the mailbox. But of course, the debit card hadn’t arrived while I was out getting the temporary replacement debit card. This is real life, not fiction, and real life rarely gives you a neat and tidy resolution.

In real life, mostly what you get is another day pretty much like the day before. Every so often real life drops in a day that’s twisted as a pretzel. But I kind of like pretzels, and even though my day didn’t go as planned, I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. It was still a pretty good day.

all gothic and syrupy

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I’ve occasionally mentioned Utata in this blog. I’ve talked about how the group has helped to shape the sort of photographs I shoot, and I’ve mentioned some of the projects that grow out of Utata (like the Thursday Walks, and Iron Photographer, and our bi-annual big projects).

But I haven’t said very much about the people I get to work with, and that’s a shame because those people are completely fucking brilliant and altogether charming. I was in a state of Off-the-Intertubes recently, and when I returned I discovered these two comments in the Super-Secret Utata Staff Lounge:

“I’m in the middle of making some bramble whisky. I may strain it through an old sock instead of the more conventional muslin cloth.”

“I’m making bramble whisky too, but I must be doing something wrong as my recipe doesn’t include old socks.”

First, I should probably note that I am occasionally referred to in Utata as ‘Old Sock’ (don’t ask; it’s not a long story, but it’s a story that makes almost no sense at all). Much more important is the bramble whisky. Now, I’m familiar with brambles and blackberries, and I’ve been rather intimate with various forms of whisky — but bramble whisky? Never heard of it. And I admitted as much, which sparked this conversation:

“I highly recommend bramble booze (or sloe, elderberry, rosehip, random non-deadly-nightshade hedgerow fruit). You can take the absolute dog-roughest bathtub poitín and turn it into a magical elixir for the price of a pound of sugar and a walk in the countryside.”

“Oh how I miss sloe gin. I hate regular gin, but sloe gin tastes like something from Tolkien.”

“Following last year’s damson glut, I have a ridiculously large amount of damson gin in the cupboard if anyone is desperate…”

“You can flavour gin with quinces – the little decorative ones as well as the bigger eating ones. I have no idea if they’re any more easy to find in the US. It goes a lovely pink colour and tastes of … well … to me it tastes a bit like the perfume that my grandmother used to wear but I’m not sure that helps anybody else.”

“I made some quince brandy last year. Best described as ‘interesting’.”

“I think you need to beat those quinces up a bit. I chopped and slightly cooked mine before boozing them. Nearly killed an electric chopper with them too … they were just fractionally harder than diamonds.”

From bramble whisky to sloe gin to damson gin to quince brandy. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to discover I have some moonshiners in the South Carolina branch of the family, but to my knowledge none of my kin has created anything that sounds quite so romantic or Jane Austen-ish as quince brandy.

David Wilkinson’s quince brandy (photo by David his ownself)

Of course, I developed a strange, immediate desire to make my own bramble whisky, or something like it. So I asked for a recipe.

“Use a recipe depending on your fruit and liquor, specific ratios of fruit, booze sugar are needed, as Sam indicated this works best with hard fruits even if they’re supposedly soft fruits like cherries. If you want to go with folklore and hazy memories then here’s my description. Sit in a comfortable chair and listen to the radio. I always used a needle to prick them not a fork, and it’s been years, but the way I remember doing it with my Mamgu is to fill your empty bottle one third with the washed and pricked fruit, then pour fine granulated sugar on top till it comes about an inch above the fruit. Then we’d pour over the booze until the bottle was about four fifths full. The screw in the cork or the lid, and shake it violently.Put it in a cold dark pantry filled with jars of home-made chutney and marmalade. Shake it daily for a week or two, then once a week until shortly before Christmas. By then it should be all gothic and syrupy. Decant it and drink it from the tiny little glasses that you can’t buy new anywhere but little old ladies have millions so you’ll probably find some in Goodwill.”

There was some debate about the best way to prepare the fruit. One school of thought advocated a certain level of thuggery (“You do need to bash them up a bit”). Another seemed more appropriate to scaring off vampires (“Pin-pricking is too tedious – I take a sharp knife and cut a small cross into each damson”). But this response has settled me firmly in the pin-pricking school:

“Pricking them all over with a pin, while sitting in a comfy chair and listening to the radio (use BBC iplayer for this, they have a wacky dramatisation of Dracula this week) is the most important part. Your fingertips get stained an olive-ish purple and end up smelling like mossy hedgerows.”

And there you have it. Everything you’d ever want to know about preparing your own bramble whisky — from fruit-pricking instructions to the general ambience in which it should be prepared to the proper stemware in which it should be served.

And there you also have a brief introduction to the sort of people who staff Utata. Smart, funny, and infinitely helpful. That I get to work with these people makes me feel all gothic and syrupy.

nine-eleven / thirty-three

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I had two friends die in the attacks of 9/11. Not close friends, but friends. One was a member of the book club I was in. We met once a month for a couple of years. He was a nice guy, smart and funny, owned a pair of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels that he pampered ridiculously. I only saw him once outside of the book club — in a bar on the Upper West Side. He was with friends and I was with friends, so we just chatted briefly and that was it. He worked in the South Tower. Later I learned he’d called his sister from the Sky Lobby on the 78th floor to tell her they were evacuating his office as a precaution after the North Tower was hit. That’s about where the second plane hit. We figure he died immediately. Nearly a year later he was officially identified as a victim. Basically that means they found some bit of flesh which they matched to his DNA.

My other friend was somebody I knew from graduate school in Washington, DC. We’d worked together briefly in the Social Science Research Lab. He’d taken a job as some sort of analyst for a research firm in New York City. He worked a few blocks away from the World Trade Center. We assume he left his office and went down to the scene to see what was happening, but that’s just a guess. All we know is he went to work that morning and sometime later his body was identified. He was probably killed by falling debris.

I’d moved from Manhattan a few months before that September. I’ve always felt like I should have been there, which is totally irrational and completely stupid. But there it is. Every September 11th since then I’ve felt a sense of loss — but I’ve also had this uncomfortable feeling that I should feel that loss more. That I should feel the loss deeper. I’ve felt that every September 11th until this year. This year is different.

Every morning, after coffee and a glance out the window, I turn on the computer to check the news. Every morning. I never used to do that. That changed on 9/11/2001. I didn’t know about the World Trade Center until a friend called to tell me about it. I turned on the television about five minutes before the second aircraft struck. So now, every single morning, I check the news.

Yesterday morning, tucked away in my email I saw this subject line: jamelah.net [New Post] thirty-three.

My friend Jamelah had her birthday yesterday. She turned 33. Every year on her birthday she writes a sort of summary of the preceding year — things that happened, things she’s learned, things that went well and things that didn’t, things she did or maybe didn’t do. And she posts a self-portrait.

So yesterday morning after I checked the news. I read Jamelah’s birthday post. And it reminded me that even when horrible things are happening over here, there are wonderful things happening over there. And that sense of loss I usually feel on 9/11 — I didn’t feel it yesterday. Wherever I went yesterday, I saw flags flying at half-mast, and of course that reminded me of the tragedy. But it also reminded me that it was Jamelah’s birthday, and that’s a sweet thought.

I usually chat online with Jamelah for an hour or so (with the emphasis on ‘or so’) every couple of weeks. I’m sure sharing a birthday with a national tragedy must be a massive pain in the ass for her, but yesterday I was glad for it. I’ve got two friends who died eleven years ago yesterday — but I’ve also got a friend who is alive today and given a choice between mourning and celebrating, I’ve got to go with celebrating.

So happy birthday Jamelah. I’ll chat with you in a week or so.

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.