Looking back at Flickr is a bit of a trip. How had I never seen that look on Dennis’s face before? Oh, that guitar: Goldie. She was lovely. Wait. Maybe he still has her. I’ve long lost track. That trip down to Freeport. We used to go places just to go places. Strange.
In a moment, I’ll look at the photos I just downloaded: a snowy day outside my front door. I seldom venture much farther, and the funniest thing is that I don’t want to. Sure, I sometimes get a little antsy, but it’s really hard to find a good reason to go out into the world. It’s not like I get home, plonk myself down on the couch, and say, “Oh, man, I’m glad I did that!” Nope. That is just not the way it is.
How’s my outlook, anyway? It’s not really a question of filling glasses, is it? More dishonesty dogging our steps. I don’t want to know if you fill your glass or empty it; I want to know what gives meaning to your life. And then, what do you do when you realize that the Shire has been saved, but not for you?
Does looking back keep me from looking forward? Is that the key? It seems to be. So, if I want to stay focused on the here and now, I need to turn the camera on the past. But what about what Sally Mann said about photos and memories?
Well, now. This isn’t what I had in mind, but those words: that fear and shame, and then, where I found it. Wow. “We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality, and beauty. But we tell it all without fear and without shame.“
Get a load of this, The Ruff Draft post that quote was in, from February 13, 2020 (I remember exactly what was going in my life at the time, and yes, I am well aware that the shit was about to hit the fan):
I Keep Trying to Clean My Room
Maybe it’s because I can’t escape the bits and bobs about politics that manage to fit through the nooks and crannies of my life, but I keep thinking about something Jordan Peterson said in an interview or lecture on not worrying about the economy if you can’t even clean your room. The point being that we should all focus on getting our own lives in order, for a stable individual should positively affect the individuals around her. They, in turn, might get their own stuff together and go on to positively affect the individuals surrounding them. It’s like that Fabergé shampoo commercial from the 1980s: “and they told two friends about it … and so on and so on.”
I keep trying to clean my room—and, truth be told, the driveway. We got a lot of snow last night, so the yellow shovel and I got reacquainted today.
February is a long month. Yes, it has fewer days than others, but it is the month I hate most. January is coming in a close second—for a couple of reasons.
Last night, I dreamed that I lost my wedding ring. It didn’t seem to bother me much, and I went out and bought another. The funny thing is that losing my wedding band and engagement ring becomes a more real possibility each day. Since October 1st, I’ve lost 18 pounds through intermittent fasting and eating mostly meat, so both rings have started twirling around on my finger. I’ve never taken off my wedding ring, and 26 years ago, when Dennis slid it on to the digit next to my pinkie, the thought of it falling off would have horrified me. Life in the intervening years, though, has changed me. With a wave of my hand and a blithe, “material goods; it’s just material goods,” I often dismiss qualms about getting rid of something of sentimental value.
If you’ve read something similar from me in the past, raise your hand. The fact that I keep returning to the same subjects is not lost on me.
I know why I write: to stay sane, but, as you likely know (raise that hand if you do), I often wonder why I share anything I write. The same goes for my photos and art. I grew up in a home that stressed doing and saying the right thing, or more accurately, looking like you’re doing the right thing and saying in public only what was deemed acceptable. In a way, it didn’t matter how rotten the core of the apple was as long as the outside shined. I’ve never been able to escape that philosophy (jettison it?), and I’m not convinced I want to, but still.
I do know that there is truth in these words of Sally Mann:
We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up. It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality, and beauty. But we tell it all without fear and without shame.
I know that I can’t tell it all without fear and without shame. The closest I come is showing someone an abstract, mixed media work of art I’ve created and explaining what I see in it, then changing the subject before they ask too many questions.
So, amazingly enough, I never shared the Sally Mann quote I’m thinking of at the latest incarnation of The Ruff Draft, but I read it just yesterday in a completely different book: Awakening Memory by Tom Morris, and oh, how I smiled when I found it in those pages. Give me a second, though. I’m willing to bet I can unearth the words in one of my hiding places. Mom slipped money here and there in her purse; I slip words here and there online and in journals.
Yup. It took me less than five minutes.
“Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my ‘remembering,’ I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.”
—Sally Mann, Hold Still
Photographs of a happy childhood, right? Because who takes pictures of misery?
And before I go, I need to go back to a different post, the fourth one I published at Collecting Thoughts Press, dated July 26, 2017:
A Slow Turning
Positive. Positive. Positive. I think I’m slowly turning my head in that direction. Recognizing learning experiences for what they are, nothing more; acknowledging the guilt and overwhelming sense of responsibility that always dog my steps and leave me feeling like I could have done better; finding the good in my work and the people around me—all of that, little by little, feels like steps in the right direction.
Five-and-a-half years ago. Those steps didn’t get me anywhere fast.
But I’m still here. I write. I learn. I play the game.