Cleaner Air
So, looking out over the city this first evening without daylight savings, the sun low on the horizon, leaving the office to go home at what is now dusk, the cars and busses running with lights and I am thinking: Shit. It's winter here, it's the holiday season, Halloween is coming this Friday. I'd better buy another lens.
Eh?
No, I don't know either. A 105mm f 1.8 manual lens for the F3, something to take with me this Friday with the usual crew as we sojourn forth to take the waters in San Francisco. I need a 105. Why? God only knows. Cheaper than buying a Leica, but then, most things are cheaper than buying a Leica, a good reason I don't own one.
There's a longer explanation for this. I added the photograph of a woman I knew almost thirty years ago to the half dozen or so prints I have taped up in my cubicle at the office. Why the print of a woman I haven't spoken with or seen in all that time? Nostalgia? Longing? Old heart palpitations? I don't think so. Just an image from the past, but a woman I remember fondly, someone who gives me a good feeling when I give her a glance. I need everything I can find to jog the psyche, jog it out of neutral, jog it out of its rut and, if digging out old pictures helps, so be it. That's why you buy a new lens for a no longer manufactured camera, to jog your psyche, get it back on track. Everything helps. A sign I'm seeing light (at the end of the....). Feeling better, one hopes, in Oakland.
Halloween is big here, people party in costume all over the city, they walk down the street in costume, they take the kids to school in costume, they dance the fandango in costume, they come to work in costume. Fewer than in the past at work, unfortunately, a sign of a less happy company, but I'm committed to going to San Francisco on Friday with friends to reinforce this jog the psyche bit, bringing the camera (of course), the F3 with a new 105mm lens. (Get sloshed and not shoot a single frame.)
You're drifting.
Yeah, I had a whole section here on "seeing" and Cartier-Bresson, Zen and the art of Archery and all that. Complete shit. Even I wince at complete shit. Happens more often than it should. The delete key is your friend.
Warmer than hell when I got in this evening, the apartment closed and cooking, Ms. Emmy splayed out on the rug. Opened all the windows and turned on the fan. Two hours later at eight the sea breeze has cooled down the city, cooled down the apartment. Blew out all that triple filtered air I've been scrubbing with the air cleaner I bought while I was thinking the dizziness might be from allergies. So if the current "feeling better" hallucination is about cleaner air I'm fucked.
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