;)
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?