Straight Edge Life

There I was on a couch in suburban Phoenix looking around at all the fine things decorating the walls, listening to the crystal clear audio from the 6 mid-range, high and low-range speakers… watching razor-sharp images radiating from the widescreen hd tv, feeling the custom cut stone beneath my feet and realizing that I wouldn’t want any of it if I could have it. The most comfortable thing in the room were my dirty and grubby clothes. Stinking from the sweat of carrying a loaded camera bag in the sun I sit and I sweat and I fight the recycling power of the central air conditioning. The gunky grit from sunscreen in my hair, the sunburn on my neck, like 300 count cotton sheets. The strap rash from my nikon slr on my collar, a dip in the pool.

When I think about the future, whichever one I may choose, I do not think about lexus, audi and bmw. I do not think about a 600mm lens, granite counter tops or swimming pools. When I think about the future I think about long days wandering in the sierras. I think about scanning film and processing raw files. I think about cutting wood by hand and sanding miters. I think about the feeling of mat board through cotton gloves and the smell of glass cleaner as I prepare to encase a print in it’s permanent home. I think about being fit because my life and my job have made me that way; not because I have forced it to be so out of sheer will power and stubbornness.

In upscale corporate suburbia Phoenix there are comforts and there and distractions. But there is nothing I can imagine so disquieting as to watch my passions being silenced by golf courses, planned malls, cloned corporate tract homes, and home owners associations. A quiet death of dehydration in the desert would be preferable. At least there you would know the hallucinations are illusions. In suburban hell the hallucinations are made real by a board of planning and an army of inexpensive mexican national carpenters. I wonder what they are singing about when they work? Getting paid to build hell on earth in a place that until recently was considered hell on earth. I wouldn’t want that job. The desert is no place for a house.

My trip to California fell through. I would have liked to go, It just didn’t work out. Now I’m here for the second part of my vacation and I am both loving and hating every minute of this experience. My need to shoot and my care for most everything else in my life are growing and dissolving respectively. There is nothing like seeing yourself in 15 years and realizing that you’re heading in the wrong direction. It’s so easy to lose perspective. I hope it doesn’t happen to me. Or if it does I can get back on track and learn something from it.

It is extremely good to see the people I am staying with and I do not judge them for an instant for the life or location they have chosen. It is indeed comfortable and impressive in it’s own right. More importantly it’s giving me inspiration.

Enough for now, up early for more shooting.