The hard part of the quarantine is certainly coming to a middle. At first, and even before social distancing, I was plagued by the implications of the numbers. If the infections reached saturation, and the death rates held, it was going to be something like 2 million people dead. A lot of stiffs. And while we haven’t really done shit but stay home, we don’t currently have 2 million dead people causing cascade failures of our cemetery and mortuary industries, so that’s one thing I worried about. There have been rumors of mass graves in some places (maybe more than rumors, but I’m not going to chase them down). So for about two days the thought of mass graves plagued me, but I was able to let that go, and then I thought of other ways in which the world was going to fall apart. That lasted another couple days, but then lockdown settled into a routine, and I was fine. Ish.
I was taking walks, I was exercising, wearing a mask as soon as everybody realized they were maybe effective. Things were as OK as they could be; I was cooking a lot, doing recipes I’d gotten of youtube. Then, I decided I needed to add some leg exercises to my routine. I did some squats. Like 10 of them. Next day, I’m having some knee pain, and it gets worse all day. The doc over zoom the next morning said sometimes inflammation is like that. So, I’m hobbling around on one leg, and a couple days later, the ankle on the other leg decides it’s had enough and resigns in protest. That was two weeks ago.
The knee really is a lot better now; I’m not having issues with it on the stairs any more. The ankle is still not right, and won’t be, I suspect, for another week at least. Everything is at a low ebb. Can’t stop Won’t stop, though.
(I did post a small note about this a week ago, but as it’s turned into A Thing, I decided I’d record the whole mess for posterity. These photos have nothing to do with the text, they’re just the three randos that were on top of the queue).
Posted on 2020-05-16T09:05:09Z GMT
I keep saying what this project needs is portraits. San Pablo is people, and for a long time, I thought of myself almost exclusively as portrait photographer, shooting what’s known as environmental portraits. People are invariably more interesting than stuff, I thought. and also, the project has seemed a little rudderless. Like “Now what?” So, portraits make sense. But.
but. I keep going out and shooting these abstractions. These things that are definitely not portraits (or are they? some feeble art-school thought whispers). I’ll get myself together to go out to shoot, and just completely freeze when I think about approaching people. In New York, I didn’t have this problem. Here, for some reason, I do. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
And, they definitely work on some level. It turns out my documentary photo project on the socioeconomic inequality in America through the lens of this one weird street is actually a weird art project about the same weird street? There are projects that require fighting, and leveling up, and do the thing you set out to do. The bike frame project is that for sure. One thing I’ve learned over the years, though, is sometimes you have to go with the grain of the material you’re using.
I remember there was this project I did in college. Speaking of bikes, it was about a local program that did free bike repair, called RecycleABike or something. Great people, taught me a lot about wrenching. But the photos from the workshop weren’t gelling into something I could use. So I decided to do something I’d been wanting to do, but hadn’t thought was ‘right’ or ‘documentary enough’. I brought a bunch of the people into the studio, took portraits against a white psych (one at a time), and did interviews at the same time, all in little 45 minute sessions. Took me maybe a week, and the whole project was done. Felt amazing.
Does this need to be a documentary project? Does the primary limitation I’ve set for myself need to be front and center in the final edit? The ‘grain’ of this project, so far, is not that of the standard sense of place stuff I was thinking it would be. I’ve read a lot of novelists’ accounts of writing, and finding somewhere along the way an unexpected turn in the story. This isn’t that, but it’s the same energy. The work is telling me something.
(I will note that I wrote this twice; the first version was swallowed by me accidentally hitting the back button. I think I got most of it, although the part about novelists was in the middle, and I concluded talking about a couple other projects that turned on me that way. seems fine now.)
Posted on 2020-05-08T07:34:49Z GMT
So, a couple days ago, I started writing what was going to be the first post on here in about a week. I got a good three paragraphs into an essay on the pain scale they give you when you go to the doctor, and then I was like, ‘I’m tired, let’s go sleep’ and well, you know the rest, because that post didn’t happen. It’s in my drafts.
In the meantime, bear with me as I’m have some difficulty moving around the house, which makes getting to my computer in the basement to do image editing, especially at the end of the day like I’ve been doing, kind of difficult. I keep running out of spoons. Really, the last year or so of not having decent mobility a lot of the time has been a drag. Hopefully, in a week or so, the tendons in my left ankle and right knee will be done being mad at me, and normal service will resume.
Posted on 2020-05-07T16:28:18Z GMT
Last week was kind of a shit show, don’t know if you could tell from the blogging, but I was kind of a mess. Bad sleep, unable to focus on doing stuff during the day, one particularly bad panic episode that saw me going to three stores and driving through the parking lot of a fourth to get new locks for the house (which was a thing I needed to do anyway, one of our spare keys went missing, but probably not quite so rushed). The calm distance from the first three or four weeks of social distance is gone, and I’m just treading water at the moment.
All that said, continuing to shelter in place is the right thing to do. Many more people will die if we don’t. It’s nuts to think that some states are talking about opening up as early as next week, (fact check me; I don’t actually know any of the dates, but Oklahoma and Georgia, my home state and the place of my birth, respectively, are making asses of themselves).
I’m doing a little better this week, trying to manage my sleep better, at least. The world is pretty messed up right now, and it’s easy to fall in to despair. But I can’t think of a time where that wasn’t true, either. I was reminded, by a friend, of the end of Ulysses:
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
I have an essay to work up about local minima and false vacuum; I think there are parallels to our current situation; the current situation is a local minima, and the new ground state is out there, waiting to happen. Anyway, the whole essay should happen sometime this week, if I can give it a polish and push publish.
Posted on 2020-04-29T08:13:47Z GMT
