Exhausted, he crawls down Shrock Road, trying to envision the next ten years, trying to figure out how to shuck responsibility and get his work done

Yes, here I am, yesterday afternoon, crawling my way up Schrock Road, exhausted, sipping at an Americano bought from Carmen at Metro, wondering how to make what I want to happen these next ten years happen.

I must add a magazine to this blog. I simply cannot refine any kind of story in blog format. In a blog, you get the daily slog. A little piece of the story here, another there - this one left out altogether because even though maybe you got it in your camera and in your notes and your recordings and you think it more vital and compelling than what you have so far posted, the date just keeps changing and you must move on before you can complete it.

So this will be kind of an experiment - the daily slog, portrayed in the blog, and then at some point the refined stories in the magazine. 

I don't know how to do it - how to set it up, how to fund it. But, damnit, I feel it in me - a force, driving me irrevocably toward it. Me, wandering here, wandering there, mostly in Alaska but not totally - not when there is a place like India sitting out there, waiting for me to come back, and Argentina, awaiting my first arrival - meeting people, photographing people, conveying slivers of their stories, which are my stories, and your stories. Sometimes not traveling, but just staying home for long periods of time, telling the stories around me, dredging out past black and white negatives to tell those stories, too - as I saw them then, as they have evolved - to revisit and look upon the faces of those so vital when I photographed them, dead now, existing only in memories, some of which I have been fortunate to capture in slivers lasting maybe 1/250th of a second in length.

We are all part of one big story, only pieces of which ever get told and no one ever gets to learn but a few of these stories, yet, in these few, everything is told, even if what is told is very little of the whole.

So, if I can be so fortunate as to get ten more years of life and functionable health, I will do it. I don't know how, but I will.

And then you know what? At the end, once I am dead and gone, some clever person will take it all and condense it into a narrated slide show that will tell the whole story in one hour - maybe half-an-hour. Ninety minutes, if I am lucky.

Ha! I'll be dead. Luck won't matter to me then. I will be neither lucky nor unlucky - just past.

Maybe tomorrow, I will break away from everything, take you surfing, tell you how I came to be a photographer.

Maybe not. That is a blog post that will take a little time to put together, and I am afraid that I have been spending too much time on this blog and must force myself to cut back for awhile.

That is the contradiction. In truth, I cannot spend too much time on this blog. No matter how much time I spend working on it, it is not enough - not enough to accomplish what I want to do, to tell the stories I want to tell. But I have to force myself to break away from it, to push it aside, because I need to feed Margie. I need to keep a roof over her head.

I must buy cat food, and kitty litter.

Sometimes, despite all the love I feel, I just hate responsibility. I just want to take pictures, and to write. Thats all I want to do. I don't want to be responsible. Responsibility is getting in the way of my work. Responsibility is interfering with my work.

So I must find a way to shuck responsibility, bear down on my work (which is not only blogging and such, but books too - towards which I am making slow progress). I do not know how to do it, I have no resources to do it. I am exhausted.

But I have the desire - strong desire. And I have the drive.

Is desire and drive enough to overcome exhaustion and lack of resource?

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Comments

[MGSoCal]

Is desire and drive enough to overcome exhaustion and lack of resource?.........You bet it is!

[Alicia Greene]

Bill, you are not alone paying bills with not enough money. Yet you do have talents that could lead you to a better financial future. I wish I was a person that could not only enjoy your talents but provide you with a contact that could assist you in finding a fabulous widely viewed outlet for your photographic and literary talents, but I'm just a fellow traveler down life's barely funded way who enjoys your tales and photos.

[Greg Thompson]

Bill, your blog is a recent discovery for me and a new daily addiction. Love the perspective and slice-of-life narratives you provide from your own little piece of the world. Good luck with figuring it all out. I hope you can find a way to make it financially sustaining.

Greg T.

[Wasilla, Alaska, by 300]

MGSoCal: Thanks for the encouragement. Logic and clear thinking tells me that it is impossible. I guess I must be illogical and muddied in my thinking, because I feel certain that it will happen.

Alicia - Thanks! All I need to do is to find about 100,000 such as you, bring in an average of $1.00 revenue per person and I am set to go!

Greg - Glad you found me. I hope you keep coming by.