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2008

Dawn

A new life begins for me, and I've decided to catalogue it with pictures. And to symbolize it, I've decided to have my picture be taken by a stranger, of me. I had a lot of preconceived notions I wanted out of a first picture for a camera.

Like birth, it should be grotesquely intimate, socially awkward at its core, and unflattering in its expression.

Like hope, it should be pure when borne in another's hands altruistically for someone else.

Like memory, it should be fleeting, absurdly off topic even, to be recalled at the most abstract and skewed moments, for purposes only the subconscious can truly understand and thus doesn't.

Like life, it is an honest start, finite with factual reality, and yet so prone to the limitlessness of our unreal imagination to shape it into what we dream it to be.

So I grabbed the girl at the counter, who seemed to be more familiar with cameras than I am, and with a test shot, like a slap to the baby's ass, she got it screaming, closed in on my face, and introduced me to Calypso.

 

 

Last night, I arrived in my new city, with a new set of dreams and aspirations I haven't even sorted out yet. That blank canvas, where you don't even know what you want to do with it. A kind of pressure to start painting and making. To do something beautiful. To make the most out of life.
     But life is long, and the canvas is as long as your life, and it's constantly reeling with time. You just have to start painting. And sooner or later that sheet of white moves on and you have more white coming up to keep the painting going. And when it's done, high above you is that mural of you.
     I've spent too much of my life afraid to paint anything. And I look up at my collage of empty white spaces and frantic markings and gestures and see so much I which I had done before. And in a way, it's avant garde and unique to me. It's me. Who I was. Who I am. And a preface to who I will be.
      I don't really intend to write all this to be all about me, but I know that there is a lot of humanity that we all share in this... And I'm hoping this moment is something that others can relate to.

I love my family. I revere my past. I look to my future. Let's see what dreams may come.
     And I'll take some pictures, so the people I love can enjoy the ride.