Jobe and Kalib stand in as I put, "Contemplating..." on hold for yet another day

Yesterday, before I headed off to the funeral that I had mentioned, Lavina called to let us know that, once again, Jobe was not feeling well and to ask if Margie could come and spend the night and care for him Monday, today. Naturally, we agreed - we would do anything for little Jobe and his big brother, Kalib.

So I dropped her off before I went to the funeral.

As recent readers know, my plan for today was to delve into "contemplating the future of this blog, part 3" and to let three parts do it.

But I have a huge amount of work that I want today on what for me is a most important projectand I do want to be distracted from it any more than necessary, not even by this blog.

So I am going to keep it short and simple. While I will still be working on that project tomorrow, if I can get enough done on it over the next 12 to 14 hours I think I will feel okay about taking a couple of hours in the morning to nail down part 3.

And, as coincidence so often seems to happen in my life, the funeral - or rather my history with the woman for whom the funeral was held - ties into this theme in a way that I had not even considered until mid-way through the services for her.

So I will use a few of those pictures as I contemplate.

In the meantime, here is Margie and Jobe.

Even when he is feeling under the weather, Jobe tends to be optimistic and pleasant.

He is a very rare and wonderful little guy.

He did cry though - he cried when he saw me start to leave. He reached out his arms toward me. 

So I did not leave as quickly as I was going to. I went back, took him in into my arms, retired to the couch and held him for a bit and did a self-portrait of the two of us.

The thought occurred to me that in so doing, the bug that has got him might come and get me, too.

But what the hell. I've been got by lots of bugs in this life. I have always gotten better. Should this one get me, I am certain that I will get better again.

Before I left, I also had to find Kalib with his spatula. I looked into the TV room, that will be his bedroom when the time comes for him to move out of mom and dad's room. There he was, watching TV. He had his spatula with him.

And this from India: Banu and Ravi

Banu and Ravi - parents of Soundarya, Sujitha and Ganesh. It is the morning following the wedding of Soundarya and Anil.

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Shiny bling at Ama's apartment warming party

Ama has now moved into her new apartment and so threw a little party last night to celebrate. The invitation said that everyone should come in a state of bling by wearing something shiny. As you can see, Melanie had a shirt with glitter and shine, but Jobe forgot and came with none.

So Ama gave him a shiny red wig.

Jobe in his wig.

Ama gives Jobe a kiss.

"Get me out of this damn thing!" Jobe protested. I was impressed. He could not say a single word the last time I saw him and now here he was, cussing up a storm.

Jobe - looking more like Jobe.

I forgot to wear anything shiny or blingy, too, so Ama came up with something for me, too. I would show it to you, but I have to live in this world. Once people saw me in the bling that Ama gave me, that would be harder to do. So I won't show you.

Oh, hell. Here I am. There goes my career. This is it for me. I'm done for. Why would Ama do this to me?

I've got to go take a shower now, then leave for Anchorage to attend a funeral.

Now that people have seen me like this, I almost feel like it as well be my own.

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Clyde flies twice and I sleep long

You know all those mornings when I wake up shortly after I go to sleep, after getting just three or four hours of interrupted sleep? Those mornings when maybe I head off to breakfast alone in the solitude of early morning Family Restaurant?

This morning it happened just the opposite. I slept and slept and slept. I did wake up a few times, very briefly. I would look at the clock and then go right back to sleep. When I took my final glance at the clock, it read 10:03 AM. I still felt very sleepy, like I wanted to sleep and sleep some more, but, it was after 10:00. It was time to get up.

So, I closed my eyes for just a few seconds, resolved and fortified my mind, then got up, did what needed to be done and headed out to the kitchen to get my oatmeal.

When I stepped into the kitchen, I noticed that the clock read 11:45 AM!

Over one-hour and forty minutes had passed in the few seconds between the time I looked at the clock at 10:03 AM to the moment I forced myself out of bed!

My point is, I used up all my blogging time for today in sleep. So, instead, I am just going to quickly present these two images that I took in the fall of 1992 showing our late, great, Clyde. Little Clyde Texaco.

Clyde was a bad cat. He was the baddest of all the cats that ever graced this household. The baddest.

Oh, but he was a good cat!

And he was an aviator. He knew how to fly. Here are two of his flights.

I will do "Contemplating the future of this blog, part 3" Monday.

Tomorrow, Sunday, I have a funeral to go to at noon and I have a good many non-blog things that I want to do today, so it is a cinch that I will not have time to post part 3 tomorrow - but I will put something up - something short, quick, and simple, like I just did today.

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Contemplating the future of this blog, part 2 - thieving monkey robs women and children; Chicago basks in the winter sun

The cat.

As you can see, a sunbeam found its way into our house yesterday. Chicago found her way into the sunbeam.

Now, I will return to the discussion that I started two days ago, but left hanging. I will carry out this discussion against the backdrop of a thieving monkey that I met at the Lal Bagh Botanical Gardens in Bangalore during my first trip to India, after the wedding of Vivek and Khena.

The monkey.

First, to clarify, my contemplation does not include any contemplation of shutting this blog down. No. No contemplation of that, whatsoever! At times, I wonder what madness it was that ever possessed me to start this thing in the first place, but I did start it, and I did set some goals and I intend to reach those goals.

Times have changed, I have changed and I do not see any kind of future for me in paper publications. Paper publications are my past. Plus, electronic, digital media seems to me to have been developed especially for people like myself, people who like to work independent and solo, in both words and images.

So I will keep blogging, but is clear to me that if I am going to survive in the short term, I must scale back a little bit. I will still post every day that it is reasonably possible, but maybe I will make three to five of the posts that I put up each week very short, involving one to four images, possibly as many as five and if I get carried away, perhaps six or seven. 

Then, maybe two to three times a week I can do posts with a dozen or more images, plus narrative. Maybe one post a week could be a true work of exporation.

Even as I scale back, my goal will be to soon come roaring back, after I figure things out and come up with the means and time to make this blog into what I have envisioned to make of it.

So far, I am falling very short.

The monkey eats a bag of peanuts that he had just stolen from a small child.

My goals are stated both in the sidebar and in the title and subtitle, but I will restate them:

I started this blog because I had lived in Wasilla for 28 years. In my own home and among my own family, I was very comfortable and felt very much at home, but out in the community of Wasilla, I felt myself a stranger.

My photographic and journalistic work had all been done outside of Wasilla. All I did in Wasilla was to assemble the photos, interviews and information that I had gathered while traveling to other places into whatever paper publication I was working on at the time.

This was an all-consuming, exhaustive, pursuit, one that left me no energy or time to get involved with Wasilla life itself - although I did manage to go to (and photograph) quite a few of the baseball, football, track, figure skating, drama and other events that my children involved themselves in as they grew.

As I do now, I would walk a lot, ride my mountain bike, and cross-country ski - but this happened at a time when the woods and hills were still open to me and so these were solitary exercises. I would often put in days, weeks, or even months of walking, biking, and skiing through the woods without running into a single other person. When I did, it would most often be Patty Stoll, The Fit Lady, who recently died of cancer.

So I started this blog in part to get to know Wasilla better, to explore the community, to meet and photograph the people, learn what they do and think, and make a record of it.

I did not want to lose my connections to Rural Alaska, and so the other part would be to keep going out there, perhaps for shorter periods of time than I had before.

And because I am a person who must - SIMPLY MUST - get up and go somewhere new and far away sometimes, I left room in the blog for this, too.

So I planned to use this blog to tell stories about people here in Wasilla, elsewhere in Alaska and anywhere else in the world - hence, my title:

Wasilla, Alaska by 300 and then some

After I had been at for awhile, I suddenly realized that I, an Alaskan born into exile in the state of Utah, had spent my entire career looking for my home, my community, and my family - and that is ironic because in doing so, I so often left my family behind as I journeyed off to other places without them. 

Hence, my subtitle:

One photographer's search for community, home and family

As the monkey finishes his peanuts, a nice Muslim woman gives it a cookie. Surely, the monkey will appreciate this and be grateful.

But I find that I am still doing pretty much the same thing. I have not really explored Wasilla and the people of Wasilla at all. Although at a less intense level than before, I still go off to other places to take photos and gather information with which to put paper publications together.

When I am in Wasilla, I continue to have little interaction with the larger community. I spend my days, right here, in my office, attached to my house and garage, sitting at this computer, struggling both to make sense out of the work that I have gathered in other places for a paper publication, to get a blog post together everyday.

I still do not have the time to go out and track Wasilla people down in their environs, photograph them, find out about their lives and then put together a piece of work that describes this town.

When I go out for a walk, or bike ride, my ski trails having been taken away from me, I take my camera and I photograph the dogs that come barking at me, the ravens that pass overhead, this and that, an occassional person. I take my camera to Metro Cafe on my coffee break, to places where I eat.

I photograph what catches my eye. I then put the pictures in the blog and then write. I never know what I am going to write until I write it. I am not seeking out and gathering stories in the way that had intended. It is true that little stories pop up and reveal themselves, sometimes over time and I do like this aspect of what I am currently doing, but it is not enough.

When I get together with my family, I include that as well. I never intended this. I did not mean to create a family blog. I planned to include my family, from time to time, but to a much lesser degree. I had planned to explore my community - but I have barely touched it.

Hell. I have lived in Wasilla for 28 years and I don't even know Sarah Palin! If we crossed paths, she would not even recognize me.

I don't really feel too bad about that, though.

Kalib and Jobe recognize me.

But still I need to better get to know the people of Wasilla. 

The monkey does not appreciate it. The monkey is not grateful. The monkey wants it all and so goes for the women's picnic basket.

There, see - I ramble again, wander from the main point - this blog and its evolution I want to create a real publication, one that I use to do meaningful work and to truly explore the world around me, beginning right here in Wasilla but never limiting myself to Wasilla.

I do not have the means and time right now. When I get out there, I still do a better job of exploring the communities that I go to than I do of Wasilla. When I go out, I actually do go into people's environs, I do photograph them, I do learn and hear their stories, what they think of life.

It then becomes a bit of a balancing act as to how much of that work I save exclusively for the project that I am working on and how much I allow to go in this blog.

I spent much of the summer of 2009 on the Arctic Slope, working on Uiñiq magazine. I blogged throughout, but put very little of what I saw, photographed, and learned ever got into the blog. Yet, when people commented, I was amazed both to see that people from outside the Slope thought that I was really bringing them into the life and that people of the Slope were appreciating what I did, too.

Yet, I had shown only the tiniest sliver of the work that I had accumulated.

I decided that once the Uiñiq came out, I would take each story and redo it here - so that I could actually take readers on a caribou hunt, a seal hunt, that I could introduce my readers to the family in Wainwright who had taken me in and made me a part of them, through both happiness and grief.  This was the kind of thing I was going to do.

And all of these stories were larger than what I had been able to fit into the Uiñiq, so I was going to expand and expound upon them, to tell the stories in greater depth - to share them not only with the readers of Uiñiq but with my blog readers, who may not number than many but are spread around the world.

But guess what? That Uiñiq has been out for a long time now and I have not reworked a single story from it into this blog - not a single story!

The monkey snatches a bag of grapes from the picnic basket and runs off with it.

Damn! Look at this! I am rambling on and on and creating so many words that nobody but the most dedicated of readers will ever read them all. I am probably talking more to myself than to anyone else. What I need to do is to rewrite this - edit it, shorten and condense it - to seek out and destroy all the typos, replace the dropped words, correct the spellings. But that would require time that I can not take.

I cannot meet my goals for this blog exclusively with this blog, nor can I achieve them pursuing it as I now pursue it - trying to keep up with the daily flow of mundane life just overwhelms everything else.

So I can't achieve my goals in this blog alone. I must add my electronic magazine to it. Once I do that, I can take stories like those that I did in the Uiñiq magazine and rework them there. I can even go back to my really old work - Alaska's Village Voices, Tundra Times, the Fort Apache Scout, find good images and stories, then find out what has become of the people in them and update it.

I can do new stories that I seek out and create specifically for that publication. I can go back deeper into my own past and heritage and tell the stories that I want to tell from there. 

This will mean that I must streamline and restrain the blog a bit - in order to grow the electronic magazine.

It will mean that I must generate the funds to go at this full time - as I can not achieve this goal if I must work for someone else to make a living and putter at this on the edges. This MUST become my full-time work.

Well, I have more than used up my time and space for today.

I guess that I will have to post a part 3. I will dedicate part 3 to my thoughts on how I might shape that new electronic magazine and what I might do to raise the funds to accomplish all this.

I had meant to include all this today, but I rambled too much. This is too long right now and I have no more time for it.

To be continued.

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For seven years, she refused to date him when he would show up at the motel; now they have been married seven years; a temple blessing; contemplating, part 2, on hold

As you can see, I wound up at Family Restaurant again this morning, but for a different reason. Jobe has been vomiting again, so Margie left at about 8:30 this morning to drive into town so that she could babysit him. I figured that it might be my only chance to ride in a car today, so I had her drop me off at Family on her way. I took this image after breakfast, as I was beginning my walk home, maybe a bit less than four miles. It was a bit after 9:00 AM. This may look dark for 9:00 AM to some of you, but for us, it is amazing to see how quickly the light is coming back.

As I walked along Lucille Street a raven would come flying by, always headed south, directly over the road, every few minutes. They all looked pretty intent to reach their destinations. I figured that these were ravens who nest out in the hills near the foot of the Talkeetna Mountains, but make their living in downtown Wasilla, primarily off the food that people discard - the ravens that I see at Taco Bell, Carl's Jr., McDonald's and such.

It was morning, and these ravens were going to work.

It was garbage pick-up day in our neighborhood.

As I did not have a car and had already walked four miles, I figured that I would just skip my Metro coffee break and listen to the news in my office while I edited pictures. But about 3:30, I was overcome by a strong desire to get out of the office, so I took off on foot for Metro Cafe. It was snowing now. 

Here I am, walking down Lucille Street, toward Metro. Look how heavy the traffic is! Yet, it is too early for people to be coming home from work. Why are all these folks driving down Lucille?

I arrived at Metro a little before 4:30, closing time being 5:00. Carmen invited me to look at her wedding album. They got married seven years ago, when she was 38, Scott 48. It was his third, her first. She met him when she was working at the Best Western Motel on Spenard in Anchorage. He would sometimes come and check in for the night on his way to and from the Arctic Slope oil fields and each time he did, he would ask her out. 

Each time, she would say no. He would tell her that one day they would marry, she would be his wife and would have his babies. She would say, "no!" This went on for seven years. Finally, she agreed to go to a movie with him, just to put an end to all the nonsense and get him out of her life. Anyway, she was Catholic and he was not.

That one date led to the marriage. It could not take place in the Catholic church, but "God knew what he was doing when he brought us together," Carmen says.

Scott has completed all of his cancer treatment and has finally gone back to work on the Slope, where temperatures have been running in the -50 range, with -75 and even -95 windchills. Carmen says he is finding the cold a bit hard to take, given the aftereffects of his radiation and chemo treatments.

I hear that it is warming up now - into the -30's and -20's.

This is Ryder, who came to Metro Cafe with his mom, Buffy, and his Aunt Danielle. Ryder drank hot chocolate and, except for me, was the last customer to leave.

I had planned to walk home, but Nola offered me a ride. I decided that seven miles was enough to have walked today. I got into the car. Nola brushed the new snow off the window.

Nola drinks a bottle of water as she drives me home.

 Okay - Part 2 of Contemplating the future of this blog will just have to wait until tomorrow. This post is long enough already.

And this one from India:

Inside one of the temples at Pattadakal - blessings are offered.

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