Each morning: pretty on the outside; ugly on the inside.
Life — well, not really, it’s people who do it — can make a life like that.
The bad news is that it happens; the good news is that things that happen become past, the darker shadows fading up to gray, and, for the lucky, perhaps dissolving to blue arching toward white.
Whatever it was, it was yesterday, and yesterday was a long time ago.
Breakup.
Whether of a friendship.
Or unrequited something other.
Not good.
Slept late and still caught the transition from dark to light, and what a dark it was this morning: clouds with a slash of dawn riven across them.
Opened the curtain, and the next thing: blue and bright, almost spring.
Not quite.
Late mid-afternoon: out in it. Same park (ageing Holden’s, perhaps). Falling temperatures; strong winds.
Home: the big glass of Catena Cabernet, a salad, roasted and seared lamb and hash browns out of a home-baked potato.
Not bad for a kind of early recovery.
Off the balcony: the blessing of a lively (windy, biting cold) sunset.
I do miss WordPress’s video-style photo compilation utility.
That I have a good eye — more than a cliche, it’s literally true here as I fall apart with the scouting parties of disability and death: macular degeneration (the left eye’s still good!), a broken “long finger” (the doctor will see it this week); and leukemia (I’m wanted, emphatically, 70 minutes away by those who count the WBCs) — helps with the sense of confinement, isolation, and solitude, much enforced by the damaged finger curtailing my guitar playing and singing, which definitely wins friends, even on the door step of 60 years, and gets in the way, somewhat, of handling a DSLR. In fact, I never imagined how valuable the point-and-shoot Lumix Lx5 would be for me. Even with the barrel extension on for filters, with the small bag I use (it’s convenient for hauling anywhere and easy to handle even with one hand.
Followers may get a sense of how I shoot just going out for a walk, and there’s not much, if anything, that anyone else wouldn’t do armed about the same; still, now and then, there’s something interesting in the take — in the above I really like the snowy tennis court series — and perhaps there’s something encouraging too about perceiving possibilities. The building reflected in the surface of a pond (and flipped) provides that kind of “now I see it”.
I shall never stand accused of not having stopped to smell the roses or, more often, having looked twice at something completely common and found a way of treating it literally, obsessively, and a little creatively.
She was my mother’s favorite.
For a long time, she had a life on the edge of a patio, but when she started to melt, she was put beneath an eave behind the house, my parent’s last, in Rockville, Maryland. At some point between the apartment fire in Laurel, Maryland and the move to Hagerstown, Maryland, I must have picked her up, dropped her in a box, and hauled and warehoused her some.
Now she curtsies on the balcony of the mansion inside a cabin inside an apartment on the eastern edge of western Maryland.
Oh would that I had garden rooms today!
Even in winter, one appreciates, have or have not, being able to step outside and move either the brush or the containers around, but I’d much rather have the house and the yard, the garden, and the overhang of a patch of woods.
Very cool news: the studio brought in a little bit of web work, and I’m going to munch through those hours in just a little bit.
In the preceding post, you saw Dean’s picture of me taking a picture (now that we’re all in self-reflexive post-modern pop modern media mode). It would be most unfair, of course, if I kept the tosser from digital memory from you:
It’s looking like the “mallet finger” (happened about five weeks ago) will be crooked for the rest of my life, as I’ve traded off splinting for a stiff sport’s tape wrap that hasn’t proven stiff enough.
I’m hoping for a hang of about seven degrees (off straight) rather than 37 degrees of horse-headed fingertip, and this week there may be enough renewed tendon there to do that.
I’m going to find out definitively in two days.
Relevant here: I’ll be able to work a “real camera” — the standard DSLRs — again!
The Lumix may be handled with one hand, although with tape on the right hand’s long finger as opposed to a metal splint, I didn’t have to go quite that far on the latest snap shots.
Of course, when I lift the camera, it looks like I’m giving the finger to everyone off the starboard bow.
If you have been following blog, you have probably figured out that I can do a lot with a little even though I’d much rather be doing a lot with a lot.
Today’s excuse: it’s yet a bit cold out there for excursion — 15-deg.F. this morning and 11-deg.F. predicted overnight.
I think I will just stay in and rebuild my computer (the 2007 home-built XP box needs it).
Gothic stock, it looks like to me.
I never really tire of these moon in the branches shots.
There was a day — frankly, that would be the film days — when the cost in materials, processing, and time may have wanted more direct purpose for the effort, however compulsive.
Now, for the moment, for the health an old man may associate with walking, a part of my routine has come down to the one-handed camera point, shoot, edit, and blog.
Fairest of the fair in recent snap shots.
That above: mid-Atlantic winter weather — Key West colors.
Tiring of these now practiced lamp post shots?
Me too!
Dean’s magic hour snapshot of the author at Fairgrounds Park, Hagerstown, Maryland, January 19, 2013.
My winter silhouette resembles Hitchcock’s.
For a few hours, Dean escaped Dean’s version of Dodge City, zipped over the mountains and stopped by for a walk in the park chased by decaf, a bowl of chili, and a slice of pecan pie at Denny’s.
Then bye-bye and back over the mountains to Dodge.
Oh the drama.
But it’s not my drama.
I’m working this week — copy and design on a politics-by-phone buddy’s cloud-based web site (industry: medical equipment and supply).
And I’ll be going out.
But not eating so much.
J. S. Oppenheim -- All Together 