about last week: part one

I guess i wasn't really forthcoming with you. or me, maybe. because last week i had a pretty major life event and purposely left it off here till i could really wrap my head what it meant to me. In the end, what i've decided is that it doesn't mean much more than the enforcement of things i already know and dislike about this thing we call 'the real world'.

last wednesday i got my final divorce papers and emerged on the literal other side of a relationship that began, in a lot of ways, way back on july 5th, 1987. for all intents and purposes it's been bleeding it's way into history for five years or more, and had at least 800 of it's thousand little deaths, so it wasn't a longing or a sense of loss for something already gone.

everyone whose read me for a while knows how dillegently i ripped myself apart for a long time over the loss of my family. everyone knows that i didn't handle it well, and maybe it took me longer to get over it than it ought to have. But, i'm not apologizing for being a romantic and believing in love.

and when i did finally clear the last of the stuff between her and me, and felt like for sure i was free and clear of the remnants of the relationship, and what it meant to me, it was good. Past due but good. And when we started these divorce preceedings, it was good too.

but, when it came, the finality of it. like the literal death of a body of ideas punched me up like tyson in a all girls school. i didn't see that coming.

many of you did see it coming because i'm retarded about my ideals and sometimes it's easier for you to see that than me. but, it was the death of an idea which sent me skittering for a few days.

and while i'm still not happy about what this means to my ideas on love, marriage and the world, i think that i've come to terms with the specifity of it and have begun to digest the generalities. and the general idea that somehow the conviction of one person, in heart and mind, can offset the complexities of life in this time to have some sort of personal relationship with how life works, or can through will alone hold to an idea, belief, or other is taking a pretty serious beating right now.

i loved my wife. no question. but she isn't at issue here. not for me. sure that's there in the background humming like a seedy street light, but it isnt jamming up the flow.

because i'm an extremist, and because somewhere in there, i'm an idealist, any time i get too much reality in one dose it can often throw me for a big loop.

and wouldnt you know it that on the heels of this i've begun to question my photography with an intensity not unlike the angry atheist defiling the holiness of one true god. because, there are so few grays in my thinking, because there is so little proof that my will can manifest itself intuitively.. i get the deepest sense of being adrift in a sea of ideas so deep i can't even conceive of a bottom, much less see it.

untethered and floating.

for me, and it's hard to be truthful about it, but for me the touchstone holding things together has invariably been the belief that if you focus your will on something, really focus it, anything is possible.

right now, i'm not sure i believe that.
im sure that will pass, but right now, that's how it is.

and i'm tired of aching for what i want to explore with my camera and not having the means to get there. I need a fucking model who isn't a puss, or ashamed of her body, or wanting something from me, who will let me go. take the fucking chains off and let me make something amazing.

but it doesn't work that way, because you need the body for the shot, and you have to take the brain and baggage with it.

of course, one can always hope we might luck into a situation where someone trusts your work enough to know there's going to be something brilliant coming out eventually.

there's that bitch hope again.

anyways, that's my story. and if you get me in the right mood, i might even stick to it.