Painful To Imagine
Cinco de Mayo parade indeed. There is no Cinco de Mayo parade this year, just a Cinco de Mayo festival at San Francisco City Hall, $5 at the gate. The City Hall festival has always been the parade's destination, but this year it's a destination, it seems, without a parade. Which is too bad. I gotta check the paper more carefully. I got on BART this morning at eight and found myself walking down 24th toward the place the parade usually starts (pretty much on automatic pilot), shooting the odd opportunistic shot as I walked (a couple of nice murals on the local buildings) when I noticed the street barricades weren't up and cars were parked along the parade route. Too bad. Not much of a parade last year, I'd thought at the time, too few floats, hope it doesn't get worse. It got worse.
Well, fresh morning air, pictures of murals, what the hell, not all is lost. I got on BART, got off again at City Hall to see what I could see (knowing the thing wouldn't start until eleven and I wasn't going to hang around), shot some pictures along Market street, got back on BART and here I be. Deedle-dee-dee. Not even embarrassed.
I sometimes wonder if my walking on the weekends and shooting pictures is a way to keep busy so I don't have a chance to sit down and let my mind clear and my thoughts wander. As if all the walking and photography and writing and long work hours were a way to keep myself from, um, thinking too clearly. Thinking what? Generally, if I have a thought - how to solve the world's problems in 30 days or less should a smart world make me their monarch - I write it here. Pontificate. But perhaps there are other thoughts that I'd rather not think about, thoughts less lovely than ruling the world. You never know about these things until, you know, you know.
Today I wondered - lots of wondering for someone who's so busy - what would happen if a couple, two people living together, were to keep separate journals, the agreement being neither would read the other and both would be as honest and forthright as possible in describing the day to day reality of their life and relationship? I know, I know, there are husband and wife, girlfriend and boyfriend journalers, but they're, you know, generally pretty discreet. Polite. Careful. Art, when it's art, isn't discreet. Or polite. It's, you know, art. I've drifted into that territory and the result was trouble.
You need agreement. Two journalers telling the truth, as they understood it, of their life and relationship, neither reading the other for a period of say, I don't know, six months, a year. What might those journals produce? Life through the eyes of a man and a woman, each with their own perspective, each unaware of what the other was writing, both as honest as possible? What would they look like? What could that tell us not only about the couple, but about men and women in general? (Or, what the hell, women and women or men and men, we're all civilized around here.)
The problem is ultimately this experiment would need to be more important to them than their relationship, or, at least, more important to them than any possible damage that might result (when push came to shove at the end with the reading). Good relationships are rare and difficult enough and risking one for the sake of what - an experiment? A work of art? - would that make sense? Maybe this describes reality for an artist (a real one), the "selfish" thing they talk about. Painful to imagine.
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