funny thing, the other day i started an entry for here called near death, but i never got far with it on account of conversational intrusions from passing acquaintances. i forgot why i called it near death, but when i saw that subject line sitting in the drafts folder of this e-mail program i thought, wow. my buddy from high school ent up some pictures of his mangled and bedraggled body after a car plowed into him and a stranger a few nights ago, sending both of them into the air and onto the pavement. scary, scary shit, and real, you know, not one of those things you worry about and prepare for only to never experience it but the real fucking thing. yo, man, i know you don‘t read this but i am glad you are hanging in there and i hope you will be well.
the other day i walked from here to rockefeller center and back, a rather long distance, but i barely ever cracked a sweat. i intewnded to do the same today but noooo, the rains came. so i mucked around with some content and some gadgetry, including a new Epson Artisan810 printer, which i only spell out by name because it‘s rare that i even remember a gadget‘s full name or model#. the old printer, a canon s900, should have bene retired years ago, and as proof of its utter and complete obsolescence i left it out for trash/recycling and no one took it, not after 3 days of sitting htere on the sidewalk. usually some scavengar will snap up old like that for something but not this old piece of crap. more proof, should i need it, that i hold on to things for too long. not just objects but things.
first order of business with the new printer was to put out prints of some photos of mine. the quality of prints is professional, but i look at what i‘ve done photographically lately and i wonder if i‘ve lost focus since starting up with the fancy dslr. the pictures i got with the little canon shoint and poot were as good if not better than what has come out of the paparazzo-worthy dslr. i am not surprised, but the reality of assaying the quality of one‘s time spent can be unhappy when it is not all that great, or when it goes beyond that threshold and utterly sucks donkey dick.
i read some ed dorn poetyr today. it was good. he was crass and cynical, zeroing in on the negative where the routine is to act like all is peaceful. dorn‘s Gloucester Out is one of my favorites, though it‘s been so long since i read it that i can‘t remember much of it off the top of my rain-soaked head. “It has all come back to me“ and talk of Sousa. dorn‘s biography is over 400 pages, and i thought of that htis morning. biographies of the future will be measured in screenfuls, not pages. no, wait, though, that‘s not what i thought this morning. i just thought 400+ pages, including details on every odd job he had, was kind of a lot.
ed dorn has a magnificent tomb stone. look for a picture of it.
the lengthof the dorn bio, though, seems to rely in large part on dorn‘s own notes and journals, maintained with some meticulosity over the years. i was reminded of philippe petit‘s oddly thorough self-documentation of his plans to tightrope-walk between the twin towers. i saw the movie “man on wire“ and came away baffled and starstruck, but as i think of it more i start to question some of the fundamentals of who this guy is and how entitled he seemed to feel. i felt entitled as a young person, not because i was born to wealth (hah!) but because the military family lifestyle imbued me with a sense of privilege that took me someyears to snap out of. today i blame residual sense of self-importance that i still possess on naturalities of who i am. petit seems different. his sense of entitlement seems never to have faded. still, cynical second-thoughts aside, that image of him walking between the towers is iconic for me, in the same league as the tiananmen square protester standing down the column of tanks and (though i wasbarely alive yet and unable to understand the magnifcent escapism of it in 1968) the NASA photos of earth from space, showing what a vulnerable, bizarre blip our vast planet really is floating in its inexplicable and mysterious cradle. And it is not just the static image of the young man standing down the tanks but the video that shows him waving his arms, challenging the cowards in the tanks to run him down.
what are the other great images? i can‘t think of any. those are the only 2 photos ever taken.
i was once moved to morbid exertions by a photo i randomly spotted on the World Wide Web portion of the Internet. it was nothing, really, just a photo of someone‘s driveway at a florida subdivision. the house was a typical 2-story florida assembly-line real estate product, and the house was (as is typical florida real estate expansion) situated at the end of a road, beyond which lay nothing but empty field. you see the same thing in arizona, where seemingly massive housing subdivisions abruptly end with a long row of houses with nothing outside but untouched desert, miles and miles of future real estate and homes for future neighbors.
the image of that house, and that driveway, struck a turgid dagger into my heart. i felt i should have a driveway, a house, a turnkey structure of a home on the bleeding edge of another real-estate-courageous overdevelopment.
sometimes my ambivalence about my own days sends me lurching around, looking for examples, for things i could be or should be, places to go, hearts to break.
