Sake Later
Saturday. There's a protest march in San Francisco against the current war-invasion-terrorist rockets-civilian deaths in Lebanon and Palestine later this morning and I, feeling better this week, have thought of travelling over on BART and taking pictures. Given the realities of the Middle East at the moment this gathering will be labeled anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, pro-peace, pro-Muslim, anti-Muslim and other pro and anti stuff that will get you into a bad argument with complete strangers should you be foolish enough to bring the subject up.
My rationalization is I haven't sent the insurance papers in yet on the new camera which I would undoubtedly take to this affair and most likely I'd be hit on the head and have it stolen or trampled upon, someone thinking I was pro or anti something they were upset about taking pictures to buttress my obviously off base position in the fucking International Media.
(Note Rien's entry on the use of dead children by people with an agenda and how the media has swallowed their hustle without comment to gain readers. Not all media by a long shot, but it makes you wonder why there was any fuss last week over the photographer who'd doctored his photo of a burning Lebanese city in PhotoShop to make the smoke darker and more ominous; similar, I would guess, to what Time magazine did in darkening O.J. Simpson's skin in the photograph they used for their now famous cover during the trial.)
This disconnect between the day to day quotidian realities of life (breakfast at the usual place, nod hello to the waitress, read the paper, buy a bottle of diet Coke on the way home, swear for the five hundredth time to not drink a bottle of sake the night before, wonder if I can put off going by the office) and the larger world picture spun to us by the media (Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Darfur, tsunamis, wars, starvation, the body parts of dead women and children blowing in the American wind) can be weird when you think about it reading the paper over your early morning muffin.
I'm pretty much numb once the day gets underway making it obvious to me I live inside a dream that has no real connection to reality and that I can continue to live in this dream, just as the folks around me can continue to live in theirs, as long as I can still put food on the table and keep a roof over my head. If you can't put food on the table or put a roof over your head you have to, well, get out there and deal with the world nose to nose where life is problematic. Perhaps that's what has us freaked: life looks like it might become problematic - these people with their bombs and such - nose to nose and much too exciting.
Later. Spider Forest arrived late in the afternoon from Netflix. A Korean movie with a weird complicated plot punctuated with the occasional episode of R rated nudity. So I didn't go to San Francisco to shoot any pictures. I didn't pay attention to the various beyond the ocean tragedies reported in the news. Watched the movie, understanding little; went to bed a bottle of sake later.
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