Endurance
Since last Friday, life has taken an unforeseen turn. That evening, I got a severe toothache; I called the “emergency” number for health care, and was informed that they could give me an analgesic swab and little more before Monday. I’ve had worse pain, and though the prospect wasn’t pleasant, I settled in with ibuprofen to tough it out. On Monday, the conventional staff at the dental clinic were great and got me in straightaway. A quick diagnostic ex-ray, and then a decision to extract two teeth followed. I was scheduled for the procedure in mid-afternoon.
I went home more comfortable, thanks to a numbing shot, and then returned. They took my blood pressure and then everything went to hell. All forward progress toward pain-relief was stopped until they could figure out why my blood pressure was so high. The diagnosis was malignant hypertension. I’ve never even heard of it; it stopped my treatment in its tracks. Several hours later, I had a battery of tests, ekgs, and chest x-rays.
You feel way too grown up when you’re holding chest x-rays and ekg traces. Mostly, I’m okay. But I still have the damn toothache. And I will have it, until I can get my blood pressure down. That may take weeks. Pain sucks, but it’s better than a stroke or a heart attack. There’s good news on most fronts—no renal problems, no heart problems (other than the fact that it’s a bit large) and I have no major cholesterol problems, no diabetes, or anything else—just dangerously high blood pressure. Funny, I don’t feel that stressed. I wouldn’t have thought that things would have gone this way. I was pretty bummed out when we drove home.
I cheered up a bit when we drove through a huge crowd of anti-war protestors trying to pressure Senator Norm Coleman into changing his support of Bush’s policies. Today, I saw on the news that they paraded through his office carrying signs with the names of all the Minnesota soldiers that have died so far. I love this state. Excellent health care and liberal sympathies. People seem to genuinely care about ending suffering. Compared to the apathy of people in California and Arkansas (at least in my experience), it’s truly a relief.
Some things, like this damn toothache, just have to be endured. It may take a while to fix, but it will be over with before the war.
Aliens
Government class, c. 1975
For various reasons, I remember my class in government, taken in the summer of my junior year at Foothill High vividly. It was my first introduction to Marx, and I really liked him. However, the cold-war textbook that contained that first taste wasn’t accurate—or even very smart for that matter. I was asked to leave the classroom when my comments became too passionate regarding Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker. Concisely stated, it’s this:
Shooting
Shooting with Rex, May 1, 1982
I can almost reconstruct what was going on the day I shot this picture. If I remember correctly, Rex showed up with a new and improved car stereo that consisted of Polydax 8" woofers and Audax softdome tweeters. I think the music of choice for the test drive was the Tubes Remote Control album; we went wandering around to shoot pictures for a while before I had to go to work. At least that’s the theory that fits, otherwise the photographs that show up later on the roll of people at the hardware store where I worked wouldn’t make sense. I worked nights, so I wouldn’t have went to work until around 2pm.
Bakersfield
It was a unique place.
Thinking Bloggers
I’m almost never “tagged” in any of the usual memes, but this time I feel compelled to respond. Thank you, rr, for being one of the “thinking bloggers” I try to keep track of; the second one obviously being my lovely wife Krista. Technically, Rachel doesn't count because she tagged me, but I wanted to mention both of them in the same sentence because I really enjoy watching them explore photography as a way of knowing about things.
Besides the usual suspects that can be easily spotted on my blogroll (AKMA, Mark Woods, Tom, Ray, etc.) the main blogger that has been making me think lately is Jean at Creativity Machine. Our research interests overlap, but she gets to explore the contemporary side of the sort of things I’m trying to locate in history. I'm also driven to think by the blog at Aperture, currently featuring the posts of Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen. The remaining two thinkers I’d name are radically different from your standard issue bloggers.
Stavros has been posting more frequently lately, and every time he writes something it’s worth thinking about. Whether I agree or disagree, it always is worth reading. A case in point would be his rationalization of advertising revenues for blogs. I don’t believe in blog ads under any circumstances; that makes this form of publishing the same as conventional niche publishing. But his technological answer to the problem of the lost souls that surf in was certainly thought provoking.
My final choice is not really a blogger. I am inspired by Dorothy Gambrell. Most people are probably familiar with her comic Cat and Girl. But that isn’t why she makes me think—it’s the whole package. She supports herself by selling merchandise from her site (real products—I’m really craving an Ozymandias trophy myself) and does not use ads to generate revenue. She draws daily diary type cartoons (displayed on a different site) in exchange for donations that fulfill the role of standard personal blog entries. She also, via A Small Array, provides thought provoking conceptual experiments including (at the present moment) drawings of the various professions listed in the tax code. Each day, she’s thinking—and that makes me think too.
Tourist Trap
Mena, Arkansas, c. 1986
Over the years, most of my prints have been given away or destroyed. I’ve got all the exhibition prints from shows, but other work mostly hangs out in my memory. Most of the people I’ve shot pictures of have more intact copies than mine; I was always too busy working to archive much of anything in accessible form. I left California with thousands of prints, but a series of water-park type disasters have ruined them all. Besides that, all the really good prints were given away to the people who could use them most (like Slim).
It didn’t surprise me that much that when Slim came to Arkansas in 1997, he brought with him a box of my prints (all he had left, I suspect). When his attempt at “a new start” failed and he returned to California, it also didn’t surprise me that he gave them back to me. He also left a four-track master tape labeled “Gospel Album,” his car, and some trinkets. There is a lot I’d like to say about the last time I saw him; but it pales in the light of the memory of that first phone-call after he got back to California that told me he’d been in the hospital due to overdoses three times in the space of a week.
It’s hard to think about this stuff. So I’ve been digging out some other lost memories, such as the farm I grew up on. There’s too much to say about everything. I really need to say something regarding the bastard copies of some of my photographs that popped up. It isn’t being displayed that bothers me; it’s that anyone would have the gall to claim the crap copy as their own. There are fresher, better versions on the way soon as I can bear to look at those negatives again. Perhaps I’m overly sensitive about it, but grief is a difficult thing, especially when it is stretched out over decades.
