Maybe I'm Not a Photographer After All

Tonight I had to go back to the store after I was almost all the way home to take care of an alarm issue. I found myself on an outbound evening 41. This is not a usual bus for me. I got on at Hyde Street to a packed coach. After a couple of stops I managed to find a seat near the front. Across the aisle from me was an active young woman who was intently reading. The book she was reading was very thick and I noticed that she was coming up on the end of it. She had maybe 50 pages to go. The book was War and Peace. 

I myself have not yet gotten around to tackling that particular classic. But I couldn't help marveling that she was reaching that most perfect time when a truly great book begins it's conclusion. Her face betrayed that very thing. Brows furrowed in a combination of empathy, horror and wonderment all at the same time. The fact is that what she was projecting at that moment was much deeper than anything I could describe. 

The thing is I really didn't have to. I was wearing my new camera around my neck. It was powered on and set for an auto exposure right under my jacket. She was so engrossed in the Tolstoy that she may not have even noticed it. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to even possibly risk breaking that spell she was under. There is still that part of me that sees taking pictures as a form of stealing. And there is part of me that is still far more married to the written word. 

Streaks

I don't feel much like writing tonight. Like most days before inventory my thoughts were dominated by work and the store. I had to force myself to write in my journal tonight and now I'm here forcing myself to post on my blog. To tell you the truth I wouldn't even think of it if I wasn't working on two good streaks of writing in both formats every day. So the question of the night is, is it better to write something trite and weak just to be writing or is it better to write your way out of a day's funk? I'm going to lean toward doing the writing. Interesting or not it is still a chronicle of a particular state of mind. Besides you can never be completely sure of the value or lack thereof until you've put the words to paper (or screen). I guess I could say the same for taking pictures. If you don't click the shutter you have no idea if you have a picture or not.  

Our Talents and Our Perceptions

I watched "The Agony and the Ecstasy" tonight. I hadn't seen it in a great many years. Decades probably. I'm pretty sure I had read it sometime my in my Freshman year of high school. It fit right into what I've been thinking about lately. Over the last couple of days I've put some pictures up on flickr. Some of them I like very much. You could even say that I'm proud of them. Tonight my photostream views on flickr passed a thousand. All of this served to remind me of the fact that I generally approve of my photography far more than I do of my writing. That despite the fact that I would probably strongly consider trading my eyesight for being a talented writer. Watching Michelangelo struggle with his talent as a painter while his heart lay in marble seemed fitting somehow tonight. Of course he had that whole greatest artist that ever lived going for him. 

I have an ex whose blog I read secretly. I've gathered from her writing that she has the opposite problem from mine. She longs for the visual arts but has this incredible aptitude for the written word. I would love to write as truly and clearly as she does but I don't think she has any idea of just how inspiring her writing is. 

I'm not going to stop writing. And I'm not going to stop thinking that someday I may produce something that I can be proud of. And I'm not going to stop taking pictures. 

Early News

I did not do what I was supposed to, what I had been prodding myself to do lately this morning. I did not open up Scrivener and start writing before checking to see if anything horrible had happened to the world since I went to bed. Predictably something had and I spent the first part of my morning refreshing the front page of the New York Times watching as Benazir Bhutto had been attacked, was fine, was injured, was critically injured, may be dead, was killed, and finally was assassinated. Television does updates better because it is a very now medium. It is strange to watch the reports come in in the printed media. For a little while I was refreshing the Google News feed by time which laid out the speculation before giving in to the facts. As for the murder itself, what can I say?  The winners are those whose only god is named pain and chaos. More people are going to die.  More suffering is on the way. Freedom from oppression, corruption, fear and uncertainty are farther away for all Pakistanis. An unstable country in an unstable part of the world slips closer to chaos and lawlessness. 

Late Start

This morning I titled my journal entry “Late Start” because I didn’t wake up until eight. That is a good two hour later than usual for me and I hadn’t even been up that late last night. I had some strange morning dreams though. I seem to remember being Queen Elizabeth’s head butler and being pissed as hell at her over her attitude. I’m not even going to try to figure out what that might mean. Anyway, as I got to writing it started to come out that I was referring to more than the lateness of the hour. You see, I turn 39 tomorrow and I still feel like I’m just starting to figure out my creative side. All my journaling feels like I’ve been sketching for years without ever starting a canvas. Tomorrow feels like it starts a countdown. These are my final 365 days to produce something before I turn 40. It’s funny but I actually feel good about that. Getting back into the habit of writing daily is starting to turn some dividends. Out of the blue this week I’ve had a couple of new ideas about a play that I’ve been mulling around in my head for years. I spent this morning checking out a new writing program to start turning those ideas into something tangible. It would do a lot for me to finish a play in the next year. Even a lousy one. My creative life could use a little completion. 

Astral Weeks

I was looking at my LastFm charts the other night and thought just how much "writing music" dominates the top of the charts. For years and years my favorite album to put on in the morning when I write has been Victorialand by the Cocteau Twins. For a couple of months it was Brian Eno's Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. The Life Aquatic Studio Sessions was combined with Victorialand most of last year to kind of nudge me into consciousness in the morning. This week it has all been about Van the Man. I bought my first copy of Astral Weeks on vinyl over twenty years ago. It has remained one of my all time favorite albums through that entire time. If I had to pick a single desert island album it would probably be this one. It just seems to operate outside of time. I like that. I like it when music transports me and this one brings me to places that nothing else does.

Seasons of Light

Another short post this morning I'm afraid. I got up early but Monday is my early day at work thanks to a weekly conference call. I've been trying to work on four projects every day before I do anything else. Sometimes it's tough to get them all in before work. The first thing I try to do is copy at least one of my longhand journal entries onto my computer. I've been writing on the computer since the beginning of 2006 but I have about a thousand pages of longhand that I'm trying to play catch up on. Because I was running late I skipped that part yesterday. I had been working on my September to November 2005 journal but decided to skip around a little bit. I'm going to try to get everything I've written since I moved in here into my iCal by the end of the year. So this morning I started with October 29, 2005. That was a banner day for me. My first morning in my new apartment. It was fun entry to copy. To make up for missing yesterday I did the 30th too. There is a shell-shocked feeling to both of them. I was finding it hard to believe that I had found home. They are happy writings. 

The next thing I do is my morning pages. Since I use a computer now it's hard to keep track of what constitutes three pages. From copying old journals I think that three pages longhand for me ran about 500 words. So I try to put down at least 500 words to start my day. Then I look for a new affirmation. A daily quote to put my day in a positive light. I skipped that this morning. Oh what the hell I should be able to fit that in. I'm typing this sitting next to my Harvard Classics. Let's try the random search method. Carlyle rarely disappoints. Okay, here is a snippet, just a phrase to set a mood, "…most of us, looking back on young years, may remember seasons of light, aerial translucency and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the prison house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding." That seems to fit with my fabled nostalgia. 

The last thing I try to do is this. Publish something to my blog. I'm having a good week of it. This is my sixth straight day publishing, and would have been my ninth day journaling if I hadn't lost last Monday's entry in a technical breakdown. Well that's it for me. I'm to work.