a year and a half later i finally got around to cleaning up the wasteland that was the Big Pictures part of my web site. that project is closed, though i was getting nostalgic for it again whilst looking through some of the last pictures. the quality was actually looking pretty good, if i say so myself. but the older stuff jogged memories, too. i once sent a framed print of one of those pictures to a friend. in response she nothing short of freaked out on me — in a good way, but it was still kind of over the tippy top in reaction. a year or so later she sent me a picture of the living room in her new house. my picture was hanging on the dining room wall. i wonder if it’s still there. some of the pictures were from road trips and adventures i’d mostly forgotten about of late. I’ve always loved the picture of the Arby’s sign, which was taken in Tampa.
another weird picture-related memory was when i went over to a friend’s place for Christmas dinner. it was her apartment and 7 or 8 mutual friends were there. i walked in to her apartment and found 20 of my Big Pictures on her living room wall. she had printed out a bunch of them and put them in clear plastic envelopes.there were 4 rows with 5 pictures each. it was not completely shocking, but it explained a lot of odd things she had interjected into conversations we’d had the preceding months. i didn’t always reallliizeee it at first but every once in a while she would blurt out the title of one of my Big Pictures. at times this ejaculation of verbiage seemed incoherent to me, and i didn’t always realize she was referring to my web site.
one time, for reasons of context i can not recall, she just shouted out ROUGH ROAD AHEAD! this, i realized weeks later, was a reference to one of my pictures of a road sign that said “rough road ahead”. another time, not referring explicitly to my picture, she described a day in January when Central Park was verdant and green, as if it was summer time. i realized later that she was repeating verbatim my description to her of a picture of Central Park that showed the Sheep Meadow with green green grass in January.
adding to the strangeness of it all was that she was engaged to be married to guy who was at that Christmas dinner. i wonder how he felt about all this?
mostly, though, spying on all my Big Pictures from 1999 through 2010 is kind of depressing. it’s a directionless hobby of no tangible return for me or for anyone, except maybe the above-mentioned individuals.
now i have to write up the explanation for the cessation of the Big Pictures. going forward there will be an occasional big picture posted to the top page of sorabji.com, changed not on any schedule but according to whenever i feel like changing it.
i might make prints available for purchase. i might not. the sale of those things makes me uneasy. money is money, and it changes everything about creative work. it might make me hate it.
i corresponded briefly with someone whose personal web site (which he started in 1995) led him to a career in writing. the transition, he said, was hardly glorious. he had developed a genuine hatred for the written word which he was now forced to crank out on tight deadlines virtually every single day.
i thought along those lines some years ago when i imagined getting a job of some sort working at a cemetery. as much as i love being at those places and exploring and discovering i expect that being there every day to dig graves and shovel goose shit would turn that love into dismay.
that’s why i come to appreciate my livelihood these days. the money comes from legitimate and, i think, useful products, but the income largely subsidizes the work i would rather do.
what most bothered me about that guy whose personal web site led him to a career in writing was when i looked him up and found what he was writing. it was garbage content for PG-13 titty web sites and “crowdsourced” (i.e. stolen) photo gallery web sites. he had to come up with punch lines for pictures scraped off web sites. those other web site were vaguely cited at best, if at all, and always with the hated “rel=nofollow” tag, that cynical bit of HTML backstabbing that renders the act of thievery less than worthless to the person whose content was appropriated. these inane bottom-feeding web sites abound, and the money to fund them seems infinite.
…..
Christ, it’s a beautiful night. I am at the beerhall, sitting outside in the “garden” or whatever you call an open seating area where booze iz served. really looking forward to the summer, which started to come through yesterday on my interesting ramble around Rego Park, Forest Hills, and Glendale. i was thinking about the ramble today. it was so strange to turn a corner on a sketchy seeming thoroughfare and find these little oases of tranquility. beautifully manicured lawns and silence. such silence.
