What I Was Thinking, That Breakdown

Olympia clung to our bodies—Probably cut—Anything made this dream—It has curtailed the customers of fossil organisms—Ran into my old friend Jones—So badly off, forgotten, coughing in 1950 movie—Vaudeville voices hustle sick dawn breath on bed service—Idiot Argument spattered backwards—I nearly suffocated trying on the defendant’s breath—That’s Olympia—Nitrous flesh swept out by your voice and end of receiving set—Brain eating birds patrol the low frequency brain waves—Post card waiting forgotten family members

Sad hand down backward time track—Olympia clung to our bodies from Division to 5th Ave on camphor sweet smells of cooking paregoric—Burned down the republic—The druggist in the back of darbys—Olympia mirrors of things you forgot about—He threw in the towel, morning light on cold coffee—

Junk kept nagging me: ‘Lushed in the Mideast, I knew you’d come scraping bone—Once a junky always spongy and rotten—I knew your life—Junk sick four days there.’

Stale breakfast table—Little cat claws—Pain and death smell of his sickness in the room with me, not talking—Three souvenir shots of Olympia—Old friend came and stayed all day—Face eaten by ‘I need more’—I have noticed this in the New World

And little e moved in at that tin box during the essentials—Stuck in this place—Iridescent puddles, greasy hipsters, the police at the corner store raising an eyebrow at your slurred speech and second six pack—Bubbles of memories still saying ‘we live up there!’ a hundred years from now—A rotting teak wood balcony propped up by all of those dark morning bus rides—pain and death decay—took possession of me—All I want is out of here—Hurry up please—Flashes in front of my eyes your voice and end of the line.

That whining Olympia clung to our bodies—I went into Priest Point Park on final rites, four years down—Nitrous flesh under this canopy swept out by your voice: ‘Driving Nails In My Coffin’—Brain eating birds patrol under the spreading chestnut tree—Dead post card waiting a place forgotten—The junk smells drowned voices and end of the line—That’s Olympia—Sad movie drifting in islands of rubbish, black tar haircuts and fish people waiting a place forgotten—Old photographer trick tuned them out.

‘I am dying?’

Flashes in front of my eyes naked and sullen—Rotten dawn wind in sleep—Death rot on Olympia dusk where the pine bristles flap.

This is my kid. :)

I like this photo of me. We were shooting the first football game at the high school for the yearbook, the coach, and I want to get to all of the sports at least once because it's good free publicity...

This one is for.... my homie.

I was at DARBY'S!! Gods in heaven. Why am I right now in Oberlin?

Little Pieces of My Flesh

He was meeting William for the first time and I was nervous, though there was really no reason to be. William wasn't going to be my boss after next week, when I moved to an office down the hall. William has this peculiar way of looking at people from underneath his glasses, like he's behind an impenetrable screen, making an analyzation that you will never know, but that will follow you forever. It makes me uncomfortable. He mumbles his words a lot, and that makes me uncomfortable too. I end up answering questions that he didn't even ask, and then feeling awkward mid-sentence when I realize he was trying to find out who made the collage hanging on the wall, and not where I went to college.

"Very pleased to meet you," he said giving Ryan that now-I-know-what-you're-about look, hand outstretched. Ryan hates to shake hands because he's a germophobe. He looked at that big, open hand for a second, and I knew what he was thinking, but what can you do?

"Same," Ryan kept the eye contact and shook the hand. I wondered about William's summation of him. Druggie? Punk? Partier? Ryan always wears a hat because he's balding, and I think he secretly is self-conscious about it. He looked like an irresponsible 20 something, with his frayed-edge shorts and snowboard company hat and flip-flops and thick band ankle tattoo.

"So are you an Oberlin Alum?" William was making small talk and I could tell he wanted to get back to his work. Ryan probably did, too. They were duty-bound to meet each other because Larry, my other boss, had made a big deal about greeting Ryan when he came in to see me, and since William's arrival one week ago he has busily been trying to establish himself as being at least one better than Larry. Ryan couldn't be rude and abrupt because, for the time being, this was my boss.

"Are you an alum of OHS?" William repeated the question, probably used to people not understanding his garbled dialect. I was pretty sure that Ryan hadn't answered because he didn't know what the word alum meant or stood for, and there was something horrible about that realization. Something really sad. He looked over at me and I interjected.

"You ended up graduating from Georgia, right? They moved all over the place when he was in high school." I didn't know if William had caught the look to me, if this would change the slot he was sticking Ryan into in his mind.

"Yeah, yeah. Georgia. I was born here, though." After another minute of friendly and half-conscious banter, the lull that they were both striving for appeared.

"Well, nice meeting you, I'd better get back to that mound of work I've got waiting for me..."

All of a sudden it became clear to me why Ryan and I don't have a definable or constant peer-group. We are worlds apart from anyone I know. I don't say that as a valued statement; in fact, it's depressing more often than anything else. Someone like William is in the game. He's acheiving. Setting goals and making them. Wanting money and getting it. He hob-knobs well, he bullshits, he makes people feel the way they want to feel; he knows how to read them to figure out how they want to feel. I should envy William, but I don't. This is not to say that I detest him or people like him (the ones with posters in their office with great, sprawling pictures of eagles on them, and some motivational phrase underneath), but there is precisely no way that I could ever walk among them. Ryan is the same way, but I don't think that Ryan thinks about it with all of the long-term implications like I have been doing lately. Where do we fit?

Photography, I'm finding out, is a business that requires hob-knobbing. That is to say, if you want to make it as a successful studio owner, which is really the only way to support yourself via the craft. We've done seniors and loved it because they've been pretty much just Oberlin seniors and their moms, who I already have a relationship with. We've done OC students which has been wonderful because they've relished our casual environment and screw-ball way of getting people to loosen up in front of the camera. To quit our day jobs and really launch a full-time operation, we'd have to draw new borders and try to solicit clients from all over the county. How the hell would I work with an Amherst mom who would judge Ryan and my work by the low prices we charge? I've cherished this work so far because of how personalized and meaningful we have made it for our clients. If we went large scale, there simply wouldn't be enough time to have that relationship with each client. And I probably wouldn't want it with each client anymore.

The lady from the pet spa called a couple of weeks ago about doing a family portrait shoot similar to what we did with them for Christmas. I remember the couple of phone calls we got back after that shoot, the rudeness, the lady from some suburb who actually made me cry. It was just two people out of 65, but it was enough to make me question my ability, even my desire to continue taking pictures for money. I haven't called the lady from this spa back yet. I don't think I will. Doing a job that you know will be joyless just for the money changes things. There is a line emerging that I'm not willing to cross; one that would ask me to proceed regardless of how I felt personally, one that waves bills in my face, one that keeps shouting exposure, exposure. If I crossed that line I think I'd lose something in regard to seeing photography as an artform. More than that, though, I feel that I'd lose something in regard to seeing life as an artform. I made my decision about a year ago; Ann Fuller in her life always let money be the end-all be-all. And what more can you possibly need to say?

Five Years Down

There is something so horrible about going back to a daily routine after you feel like you've pulled back the fabric a bit and had a look on the other side. I remember feeling this way even after my visits home, to Oberlin, when I lived in Olympia. I would ride downtown and stand by the bay and think about all of the tiny organisms down there, the entire chain of things, how our daily interaction with that microcosmic world has become so bifurcated, but how all of our existence is hinged upon those little organisms surviving. There is something just so dreadfully sad about being alive, sometimes. I could have been born that sealion who's swimming in the bay right now. I could have been born the son of a female shark. Ferocious, not soft and weak, not so torn asunder by all of this junk we stuff our lives with. I could be in bed right now, not thinking about another day of getting up, going to work. How does anyone go back to it? Of late I seem so flaccid about just simply getting through things. I don't know if it's because I have something wrong with my brain, or if I just need to get better at convincing myself to get on with it. There is something so infinitely terrible about a copy machine. How could we as humans possibly have evolved to a life that requires the daily use of copy machines?! And this is what greets me when I walk into the office. And there you are, back where you never thought you'd be when you started on your trek into the wild, back to the undeniability of day to day existence. I don't really want to talk to anyone about the trip, but I know I'll have to.

"There is an entire world up there that we don't even think exists," I see myself saying while they sip their coffee and listen for the phone in their office. "We don't need all of this stuff we've created. Shopping carts. Copy machines. Some of us have gotten so bloated and comfortable on all of this excess that there's no hope to even consider getting up there to see it, to remember something bigger than putting on clothes, going to work."

But I have lost all capacity for language and I know that I'll just smile and say it was nice and explain that my internal clock hasn't caught up yet, and that's why I seem out of it. It gets easier, right? But that's just the thing; I don't really wantit to get easier. I want to quit the thing entirely. Isn't there some waterfall that I could live behind? I could teach english in Thailand. I could live the dream life of every post collegiate lost in the scary sea of what-will-you-do-with-yourself-now. And but of course it has precisely nothing to do with location. You can't run from yourself, and all of that. I can't just stay drunk. That nagging disaffection just waits for you, especially eager to pounce when you're hung over. I left work for lunch today on my bike and noticed that every one of the administrators was driving a $50,000+ automobile. What have we created, with all of this technology and advancement and modern life? My head is split in two and I want to run right back up the mountain, I want to never look at those Beamers and Lexuses and expensive chinese food lunches and all of the posturing, ever again.

The problem with being human is the dreadful loneliness.