Sunday, August 31, 2008

party

Terrific mojito party last night at upsidedownhippo. Goblin was in wonderful form demonstrating her fully healed mobility. I wish I’d brought more Obama buttons to distribute, I easily gave away the six I brought along. One partygoer had a secret theory that McCain picked Palin to throw the election. Somehow I doubt that. I see her now on his official website which is, itself, so packed with billboard crap it looks like a cheesy commercial site. The blue they’ve picked is a wishy washy turquoise and the busyness of the front page makes the site look like something McCain himself might have built in an intro to web design short course. There she is, her hair in a tight conservative up-doo, looking like a parody of a soccer/hockey mom. Nervous smile, leaning forward, staring eagerly into the lens. Although many of us will say he’s shot himself in the foot, we need to learn from the last two elections to never make simple assumptions.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

veep choice

Sarah Palin is John McCain’s vice presidential selection. I suppose he thinks she will bring on board the disaffected Hillary supporters. I find it somewhat insulting since she’s opposed to pretty much everything Hillary stood for. About the only thing they have in common are the breasts and vagina. However, democrats underestimate her at their peril. She’s young, strongly conservative, attractive, has executive experience, and can present a terrific narrative. Furthermore, it’s very difficult for men to debate women. We’ll see how she does in the carbon-arc glare of a national campaign. She may have vulnerabilities we don’t yet know, she may become a star. We’ll see.

Friday, August 29, 2008

corn

Ever since reading Omnivore’s Dilemma I’ve felt discouraged whenever I shuck corn. Having learned that there is a piece of silk for each kernel I just know there’ll be no getting it clean.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Beau Biden

Glued to the TV watching the democratic convention, I was enormously moved last night watching Beau Biden introduce his father, the vice presidential nominee. Beau told the story of the automobile accident that occurred between Biden’s election and the time he took his first oath of office. The accident killed Joe Biden’s wife and 1-year old daughter and left the two boys seriously injured. He wanted to step away from the senate seat he was about to take as the youngest senator ever elected. But of course the old lions of the senate, Kennedy, Mike Mansfield, Hubert Humphrey, talked him into taking his place. The story was emotional and now, as we all know, even more than 35 years later, its impact can still be felt. I expected the shot of Jill, Joe Biden’s current wife, sniffing back a tear. And the brief brush of Michelle Obama felt a little gratuitous. But I did not expect the shot of Jon Stewart wiping a tear away. That was an odd surprise.

However this is not what moved me. I was sad for his story, yes – such a thing is always tragic. What touched my soul deeply was what he said next. Five years later, he said, they “Dad, my brother and I, married my mom Jill.” My heart heard him say “mom” and I felt a rush of gratitude for someone who understands. My mother married my father when I was five, after my mother had died very young of cancer. She gave birth to my two brothers. I have never called her my step-mother, nor called my brothers half-brothers. Others sometimes insist on naming the distinction, but these words are meaningless to me. In fact I find them offensive. They seem to call into question the relationships, questioning not only their closeness but their validity. This woman is my mother. These men are my brothers. The fact that blood may not tie us to one another is inconsequential. We made our lives together and not one of us every thinks for a moment that we are not “related” to one another. Relationships are what we make them. Those other words are only what the culture dictates by terminology.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

convention II

Hillary Clinton’s classy act tonight brought tears to my eyes. It was better, even, than her insistent speech last night. I never thought I would see in my lifetime a serious candidate for the presidential nomination who was a woman, or a person of color. Never. And now here we are. Geraldine Ferraro’s nomination was historic. But no one ever really believed she and Walter Mondale would win that election. Running against the hugely popular actor turned acting head of state their chances were measured in a thimble. But this is real. This intellectual powerhouse will be the next president. Shattering the image of president as a guy you’d like to have a beer with, this is a person of many dimensions. Always, always, misogyny is stronger than racism – Shirley Chisholm my congressperson from NYC – who ran for president in 1972 said she always felt more discrimination based on her gender than on her race. It is a fight we must continue. Progress is happening, the majority of delegates at the convention this year are women – 100 years after the first five women delegates attended a convention in Denver. But for the moment, this moment, this man is the right candidate.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Rest in Peace, Rachel

I first met Rachel King during my very first abolitionist event. I participated in a civil disobedience action at the Supreme Court on January 17, 1997 – the twentieth anniversary of the execution of Gary Gilmore. There were 18 of us – we called ourselves the DC 18 – and Rachel was one of the support staff who remained on the outside. She was an attorney, but was mostly there as a photographer. But she’d broken her foot about a week earlier. Hobbling around was hard and carrying her camera bag was even harder. She wasn’t necessarily graceful about the entire situation, but her foot was bad, the situation was difficult, few of us knew each other, and making requests in that environment was tricky.

Rachel and I struck up an email correspondence almost immediately after that and the emails were deep revelations of the nature of both our connections to the movement. We connected instantly. When she came down to attend the first session of our journey through the DC courts she stayed with me. I was shocked to see her, even though she’d warned me that she’d accomplished one of the things on her list of things she wanted to do before she died – shave her head. In fact, Sam Sheppard, son of Dr. Sam Sheppard the man on whom The Fugitive is based, did the shaving for her. I was impressed with her celebrity hairstyle but it made her head enormous. And cold. I had to lend her several hats and I wondered out loud about her timing. The dead of winter is not the best time for head shaving.

This was the beginning of a fast friendship that lasted the dozen years until now. Last night came the news that she’d finally lost her battle with breast cancer. She died in her home in Maine surrounded, yes, by friends and family. Only 45 years old. The abolitionist community, to which she was completely dedicated, will miss her sorely.

Monday, August 25, 2008

Convention

Well Olympics jail is over and I’m now in Democratic Convention jail with a kicker from the US Open in case there’s a break in the Convention schedule. I’m such a sap, I love hearing all the hopeful speeches talking about how we’re going to make a difference. It reminds me of the 60’s Bobby Kennedy rallies I stood at cheering my little heart out. I love seeing the big tent of all the authentically diverse people at the Convention – not like the created diversity of the other party. Attending a Democratic Convention is on my list of things I want to do before I die. I really want to go as a delegate, but I’d go in any capacity if I could. I wish I were at this one, it’s going to be historic. If I were there, I’d be on the floor every possible minute just drinking it all in. It’s almost 8 PM and Nancy Pelosi will be out to speak in a few minutes. Then Teddy if he’s well enough – that’ll be a moment. I remember leaving work one day in 1980 to attend a Teddy for President rally in midtown. He was challenging Carter for the nomination that year and maybe if he’d have defeated Reagan. Maybe. I wish I were in Denver. Tonight is apparently American flag night. Maybe later they’ll have Michelle signs.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Staunton

Every night after we’ve been out on an abandoned site shoot I lie in my bed and feel for coal miners who suffered from black lung disease. Having seen an actual black lung recently, I think of the way coal dust accumulates in the breathing apparatus – clogging the alveoli, hardening the bellow and shrinking it to an unusable size. The air in yesterday’s buildings was heavy with asbestos, black mold, lead paint dust, and decades of sweat and toil. In Staunton, VA, the DeJarnette facility began as a Lunatic Asylum that later became Western State Prison. Now it’s being converted into condominiums. One building is completed the others in various stages of readiness. Most of the flavor of the prison, and the asylum, has already been removed. We went into rooms where dust and paint chips had been swept into a neat pile at the side of the room, garbage bags full of peeled paint and construction trash were carefully grouped by the door awaiting pick up. Doors and fixtures had been removed, and evidence of new construction was pervasive both inside and out. Mostly it felt like shooting a building renovation. The occasional remnant of prison life reminded us of the place’s second purpose. But from this shoot the biggest souvenir was that fiberglass feel in my lungs with every inhale as I slept.

Saturday, August 23, 2008

olympics jail

Olympics jail is almost over. Tomorrow the closing ceremonies will finish us up until February 12, 2010 in Vancouver. Although on Sunday they will say 2012 in London, those of us who watch Olympics look forward to the winter sports between summers and the summer sports between winters. We love it all; each one is a break from the other and each one a major event between off seasons.

The eighty million hours of television we’ve seen this time has been tolerable in what we’ve missed. Always too much, never enough. The real time coverage is exciting. Even the taped coverage is nicely done. We’ve learned about NBC’s upcoming series, especially Kath and Kim. We’ve seen Jeremy Warner’s too-close-together eyes when he finally removed his shades for the 400-meter medal ceremonies. We’ve seen Michael Phelps and his huge “that’s gold” after number eight. We’ve seen Nastia Liukin get silver for tying for first on the uneven bars. We’ve seen both USA men and women drop the baton at the handoff from three to anchor in the 100-meter relay. We’ve seen the Chinese take, amazingly, only seven of eight possible golds in diving (but not a single medal ceremony). We’ve seen the last of Olympic baseball and softball, for eight years at least – until they can be reinstated.

The men’s marathon will take us to the end, and who will carry the American flag? Who could it be? Who?

Friday, August 22, 2008

about a dog

I love the sound a dog’s floppy ears make when he shakes his head. As I sit in my office at home, across the alley a yard houses two springy pit bulls. Just jaws with eyes, they have enormous heads. They’ve not suffered the indignity of cosmetic surgery, which animals definitely do not require, so they have their velvety ears and slappy tails. As I drive through the alley the male meets me at his back fence, the female is tied up on a long chain and can’t reach the fence. They’ve recently made her chain longer so she can get to the fence in only one spot – but she can get there and she’s happy about it. I get out of my car to pet the smiling beasts, they’re always happy for a pet. I pet them because it seems inevitable that they will one day escape. They can jump so high that clearing the fence is only a matter of time and will. No doubt they can get out if they feel like it (well, not the girl – she’s tied). I want them to like me for the time they’re running around loose and panicked. They’re not trained for meanness, I’ve seen small children out in the yard playing with them.

As I sit up in my office trying to concentrate on work they’re lying down out of my sight. But every now and then I can hear the flop-flop-flop-flop of the soft ears swinging around the head like those balls on the tiny plastic drums. That sound makes my heart sing. It means somewhere a dog is relaxed and happy and just being a dog. And every time I hear it I wish I could be a dog too.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

driving

Baltimore is not even an easy city to drive. Entire sections of the city – not outlying sections, but close in popular destination sections – are cut off from traffic in many ways. No grid here. The center part of the city, like a long fish, is traversed by three main north-south streets. To the left and right lie several popular neighborhoods: Hampden, Fells Point, Canton. But you can’t get to any of them easily, they require roundabout approaches through winding streets that backtrack and circumvent large obstacles like a college campus and a slash of highway that runs downtown. There are simply no good east-west routes, all speed is to the up-down and none to the cross. This is magnified by the setting of the lights, every one is red as you try to drive east or west. Trying to get from side to side is an exercise in frustration. Trying to get up and down can go smoothly except for the war-torn quality of the roads themselves. A city that forces you to drive should not then impede your progress in this manner. Chicago, they are proud to tell you, is laid out entirely in a grid. And if you look at a map it is, indeed, laid out that way. But all the streets have names, no numbers at all. Unlike Washington or some suburban DC cities like Arlington, VA, the street names indicate no relationship to one another. So although the grid is easy to traverse, it is not easy to navigate. But at least Chicago provides its citizens with decent public transportation. Baltimore is scraping the bottom of that public transit barrel. You are forced to drive in Baltimore if you want travel to take less than an hour at minimum. Decisions made over the last century have reduced Baltimore to simply a large town with bad transportation and no help on the way. If those who run the city really cared about public transportation they’d make it expensive and difficult to drive instead of continuing to try and accommodate the cars. Although it’s difficult to get to the neighborhoods, it’s simple to get downtown. The way a beltway removes life from the interior of a city, Baltimore has set up its north-south routes to be straight shots for getting to work fast. None of this will be good, all must be reconsidered.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

walking

In Baltimore when you walk somewhere, unless you’re in the inner harbor part of downtown, you can count the number of people you pass on two hands and still have seven fingers left over for making shadow puppets. You can say hello to each person you pass, although in Baltimore different races look through each other as though they don’t exist. You can walk for thirty minutes and not pass a single public trashcan. You can, however, pass dozens of dead trees. It’s a town where bike lanes “end.” And a town that requires you use a car but where the streets are pockmarked as if by war and warped like a record in the sun. Not a place for pedestrians.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

low tech

I actually prefer the low technology to the high. I’m a pencil sort of girl as opposed to notes in a blackberry. I like ice cream cones rather than a low calorie, factory processed, fudgecicle on a stick. I want my paper Sierra Club calendar, not iCal. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give up the pictures I get to see each week in a paper calendar. It’s a small bit of pleasure taken away by the electronic environment. The new storage is easier and smaller, but the retrieval is always riskier. I can put my hands on a note I wrote 44 years ago making a bet with a friend about who’d be married first (not me). But I no longer have any way to access my dissertation stored on five and a quarter inch floppies and composed in WordPerfect. (WordPerfect, by the way, does not merit a spellcheck underline as it’s obviously now a “word” in our vocabulary.) The virtual world we inhabit now leads us to believe that the electronic is real and the real is merely stone-age sentimentalism. It leads us to reverse metaphorical and literal meanings. When we say “Jane comes home from school and literally glues herself to the television,” we mean figuratively. And when we use “figuratively” we mean literally. Metaphor is turned inside out and accomplishment is reduced to moving and storing pixels.

Monday, August 18, 2008

one photo



One building viewed from another at HCB.










stand by

Blogspot is not letting me add images. I'm trying to troubleshoot. Please stand by!

Sunday, August 17, 2008

shooting at HCB

Another photography excursion yesterday (resulting in the late, late entry last night). Went up to Ashley, PA to the abandoned Huber Coal Breaker. What is a coal breaker, you might be asking. Apparently it was a factor where coal was broken up for use. It’s long closed down, and, oddly, pretty much completely open. As we climbed up into the bowels of the tall buildings kids on dirt bikes, grown men on ATVs, and middle school girls did their thing near the buildings. The middle schoolers wandered by as one of us was shooting outside. They asked if she had a myspace page and told her about the coal miners who haunted the breaker. For a building that’s completely open the graffiti is minimal.

Shooting inside was difficult. It presented the double problem of being enormous and being difficult to move around in – hard to get far enough away for a good vista shot. Structurally the building was filled with disasters waiting to happen. Catwalk metal plates worn through, stairs missing, coal dust floating in the air creating all kinds of lens flair. When I got home and tried to sleep I could understand the black lung disease I saw last week in the Bodyworlds exhibit. Even after a single afternoon trudging around in an abandoned coal factory, not even a mine, my lungs felt as though they were filled with fiberglass. Breathing felt scratchy and labored.

I wasn’t particularly pleased with the shots I got, but I’m working on managing raw images. Blogspot is not letting me add any right now, but I'll do it later.






drug commercial

And now for a commercial interlude: I’m so glad that teenage boy found out about Plavix for his mother who’s suffering from PAD (what the !@#$ is peripheral artery disease?). But she’ll need to be careful about the side effects: “if you develop fever, unexplained weakness, or confusion” (confusion? confusion? what are we talking about here?) “tell your doctor promptly as these may be signs of a rare but potentially life threatening” (oh man, (whining) it’s always life threatening) “condition called TTP” (what the !@#$% is TTP?) “which has been reported rarely” (phew) “sometimes in less than two weeks” (what!?) “after starting therapy” (I’m not in therapy so I guess I’m safe) “other rare but serious side effects may occur” (omigod what could they be, I’m confused).

Friday, August 15, 2008

ticket exchange

Everything so surreal these days and we don’t even notice any longer. I recently exchanged a couple of symphony tickets. I remember days, long ago, when you'd walk up to a box office and hand the seated woman wearing a black sweater two tickets asking for an exchange. She'd reach behind her into a small cubby and pull out a stack of tickets held together with a thick rubber band. Flipping through them, she'd suggest a couple of locations and then take out the two you wanted and hand them to you. Then she'd take your tickets and fit them back into the stack for the date you were exchanging out of. The entire interaction took about 90 seconds.

No more. Now I walk up to the window, give the intern on the stool my tickets and tell him what I want. After about two minutes of fiddling with his computer he tells me why I have the tickets I have. “These are your regular subscription seats.” I smile and say OK, but I really don't care why I have these tickets, I just want to exchange them. Back to the computer for him: tap, tap, tap, tap -- vacant eyes staring into the computer screen. Finally he looks up at me and says "OK."

OK? I'm done? "yep." I walk away from the window. No tickets in my hand. No receipt. Nothing. The exchange has been made (I suppose). The interaction took over five minutes.

I have a distinct feeling of dis-ease. Do I have tickets? He tells me they'll come in the mail. The mail?

Thursday, August 14, 2008

garbage cans

In London there are no garbage cans in the tube. Only when you emerge from the underground and then you can find a place to dispose of it on the street. They do this, I’ve heard, to deprive terrorists of places to leave bombs. Not bad thinking, I suppose. And I didn’t mind at all carrying a banana peel from Marble Arch all the way to Westminster (not all that far, but two subway lines away) and up into the street to find a place to throw it away. Stowing a banana peel in one’s bag is messy so it made the journey in my hand, but it was a small sacrifice in the global war on terror.

On the other hand the trashcan shortage here in Baltimore seems without rhyme or reason (especially reason). When I moved here I found that I could walk from my apartment to my office and pass not a single trashcan, but five mailboxes. I considered mailing my garbage, but that would be a federal offense. Now, years later, the mailboxes are mostly gone – fallen victim to workforce shrinkage at the postal service – and the garbage cans remain conspicuously absent. The current mayor seems to be trying to give us a place to toss our refuse, a couple of garbage cans have been appearing here and there. But the need still far exceeds the presence. No reason, like the eternal GWOT, supports this no-garbage can mentality. It seems to be simply a resistance to public trash. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of garbage, but Baltimore seems to just want to keep it inside. Yeah, keep it hidden, that’s the ticket.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

back to work

Vacation is over. Back to work today. Already during the course of the day at least four emails from the anally controlling AD about things I need to take care of. I don’t dislike the AD, just wish she’d dial it down a couple of notches. We do need someone who pays attention to detail (especially at this shop), but the love affair with what the technology tells us often spins things right off the table. Wish me luck.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

thy neighbor's bike

My neighbor is getting ready to go out on his motorcycle again. He always starts the thing up and lets it loudly percolate for a while before he mounts and rides off. There have been times the bike’s been out there running for twenty minutes before he finally silences it by taking it out of range. It’s one of those noises that gets in your head as just annoyingly noisy. The motor sounds like it’s in my house. I don’t know what kind of bike it is, but I’m betting, just based on the noise, that it’s a Harley. Why does it have to warm up for a decade before he putters off on it? Finally, he’s gone.

Monday, August 11, 2008

medal hunt

Olympics jail is closing in on me. My Olympics partner wants to watch Michael Phelps try to make history with his quest for eight gold medals. For some reason I don’t find the pursuit all that compelling. It’s nice, I suppose that this hometown boy is trying to win eight races. But the thousandths of a second the timing is down to make victory feel almost inconsequential. How, I wonder, can we just keep going faster and faster? Is there no ceiling, or floor rather since the numbers keep sinking lower, to how fast human beings will eventually be able to swim? Will we soon see the 100 meters won in 11.27 seconds? Will swimmers one day finish races before they even enter the water? I don’t have anything against competition. And I adore all the pomp and circumstance and ritual and challenge attending the Olympic games. Somehow, though, the Phelps set up feels too culturally loaded. The deal being made of his medal hunt feels too much like it comes not from him but from some newsish desire to create a 2008 hero after the grueling primary season that gave us an old man and a black guy, after the last seven and a half years of an oaf in the White House, after five years of endless war. It’s a pseudo-event waiting to crack apart. I want to see Phelps race. But I just want to see him swim his best in a field of swimmers also doing their best. It’s not that I don’t care whether he wins. But the medal count jingoism feels dangerous and explosive.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Last Last Comic Standing

I’m not sure why, but I watched this year’s version of Last Comic Standing. My LCS partner checked out after last year, but I love comedy and was up for it again so I checked in. But this has got to be the last time. It’s not that the comedy was awful, although it was pretty poor, the show format defied any sort of explanation: logic, entertainment, snarkiness. Lots of preliminary comedic “challenges,” comics performing at car washes, at the playboy mansion, in Bed Bath and Beyond. But none of these lunacies were really had any impact on the outcome of the competition. Three, count ‘em three, actual challenge “competitions” and performances saw one of two (and one immediately eliminated) female comics perform three times. And then it was over. “America voted” and then, even though the votes were in the remaining seven performed again. After they’d after they’d done their best two were sent packing based on a vote that had nothing to do with the routine they’d just performed. Then there was a “finale” – ninety minute snoozefest featuring Jon Lovitz and Triumph the Insult Dog who performed with exceedingly poorly attended continuity (cigar in the mouth, cigar out of the mouth, eyes askew, cigar dropping out, oh hell what does it matter anyway). Repeatedly the two hosts stood like popsicle sticks trying to figure out what to do, three times they told one of the lined up comics they were eliminated. Then down to two, they took 15 minutes of air time (including a five minute commercial break) to announce that the winner was the woman who’d survived three challenges. The first female winner of Last Comic Standing. But it’s hard to imagine anything more anti-climactic. After they reminded us of past winners, including the mediocre Jon Reep and Josh Blue, it was hard to imagine this winner making anything of this terribly choreographed “opportunity.” The best winner, Alonzo Bodden, wasn’t even included in the role call because the year he won the show was cancelled after the penultimate episode; the audience didn’t even get to see the winner. Not a good sign. The format is altered every year; but a fix has been elusive. The elusive format does nothing to create either a following or any desire to appear on the show since there’s no way to know what you’ll be asked to do. Shrinking audience, bad comic contestants. No reason to watch.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

Olympics

Olympics are under way and I’m in Olympics jail – wanting to watch as much as possible so never leaving the television. I’ve heard that something like 3500 hours of Olympics will be on TV over the next two weeks. I don’t think I can do that much, that’s almost 146 days. I don’t have quite that much time before school starts. Just FYI my spellcheck automatically capitalizes the word Olympic. Interesting. What if you want to use it as an adjective?

Friday, August 08, 2008

Eckford

My visiting houseguest friend is trying to change the name of my cat. This large, completely black cat came to live with me four years ago. I went through several different names for him and felt dissatisfied with all of them. Finally, in desperation, I settled on Ivan – so he could be a black Russian. But it never felt right and I never called him by that name. Instead I always called him buddy. Not so much as a name, but as a description of our relationship. A couple of years later I realized what I really would name a black cat is Eckford. Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock 9, was the woman in that famous photo by Will Counts (one of the top 100 photographs of the twentieth century). As behind her a white woman, mouth contorted in hatred, is shouting venomously at her back, Elizabeth walks calmly on. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette called it “hate assailing grace.”

I could never tell anyone that the cat’s name was Buddy because I thought that was far too commonplace as a name for an animal. As my godson always said with disgust when I let slip a “hey buddy” when talking to him “Buddy is a dog’s name.” I was just too embarrassed to admit I had named an animal Buddy. So his name was always reported as Ivan, but I’ve always called him buddy. After I figured it out I thought Eckford would be a great name for a black cat. But I felt unable to change his non-name of Ivan. It seemed stupid to give him another name I wouldn’t use.

So my visiting friend has been calling him Eckford since she arrived (and heard the story). I think another two weeks of her doing that and his name might actually change. I will ask my graphic designer friend to make up name change cards for us to sed out announcing his appellation alteration. And I can start calling him Eck. I wonder if it will stick now since she is going home tomorrow. We shall see. What do you think?

Thursday, August 07, 2008

colonoscopy

We’re getting closer to eight-eight-oh eight. The opening of the summer Olympics and my friend CH’s 50th birthday. Woo hoo.

A friend is visiting with her new beau. He is going through treatment for colon cancer, the cancer that killed my mother over half a century ago. I’m reminded of my reluctant quest for a colonoscopy several years ago. Nagged relentlessly by my family and urged on firmly by my doctor I finally agreed to go see a doctor of the rear. First I insisted on a woman and found one who then joined in with the eternal nagging. She was nice. She seemed concerned. She kept calling me saying I really needed this, the family history indicated it, I should have started having them at age ten…that sort of thing. Once she called me from her car. This doesn’t sound unusual now, but it was eons before every grade schooler had a cell phone – I imagine it was one of those enormous car phones that required hooking into the automobile’s electric system and were mounted permanently and inconveniently directly at the driver’s elbow. Ultimately at that point, being honest with my insurance company made us all think they would not pay. The quest was, thankfully in my eyes, on permanent, in my eyes and again thankfully, on hold.

Years pass, I can’t remember how many. And the family nagging – why didn’t I just lie? – was intolerable. A new doctor was even firmer, and in a quieter way which was that much more irresistible. Another visit to another doctor of arrears, this one a wacky sort of guy. I sat in his office listening to him be thrilled about being a butt doctor. “I love what I do. Love it. I love being a doctor. It just so happens that I examine colons all day.” I think he loved it because he didn’t have to deal with patients – they were all, of course, unconscious and silent. His large dark wooden desk was completely empty. His office looked like a furniture showroom – no signs of anyone actually working in there, just a desk with chairs, a matching dark wood credenza, and some quiet industrial carpeting. So I agreed to the procedure.

His office called the insurance company. I called the insurance company. The insurance company created that well-known situation in which you are actually required to lie. As I hung out on hold waiting to talk with someone I listened to their cheerful loop of medical advice. I must have heard five or six times of the importance of screening for colon cancer. So their recording probably would have green lighted the procedure. But the agent would not. Of course they’ll never, ever (ever) tell you before you do something whether they’ll cover it or not. They’ll only say “probably.” A final decision can only be made after the procedure is completed and the bill submitted. But family history was not enough for a colonoscopy. A sigmoidoscopy, maybe. But let’s not go overboard and explore the whole colon. Nah. The only indicator that could get you an actual colonoscopy was the presence of actual symptoms. So when they said cancer screening, what they really meant was cancer confirmation.

I was about to walk away again. But the butt doctor called me up and with an audible wink asked me if I had any of these symptoms. And he read me a long list. Finally I agreed. Yes, I have this one. (I won’t share here, you’re not my doctor. Nor will I say whether it was actually a lie or not.) And so I came to have my first, and so far only, colonoscopy. I must say – it was awful, I never want to do it again. So don’t bother nagging.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

the commission

The Death Penalty Commission hearings are underway. Commissioners are hearing testimony from invited witnesses who speak for as long as necessary and the public who are asked to “make it brief.” Scott Shellenberger, State’s Attorney of Baltimore County, is overeager in his desire to discredit witnesses who discuss problems in the death penalty’s application. My hope is that even those who may be on his side of the issue will see through his transparent attempts to imply people like Deborah Fleischaker, former director of the ABA Moratorium Implementation Project are not credible. He accused her of traveling the country testifying that the death penalty wasn’t working. Well of course she travels speaking, she was the director of an implementation project and people wanted to hear the results. Commission Chair Benjamin Civiletti actually cut him off as he was starting to run down the list of places she’d spoken. The only pro-death penalty testimony heard from invited witnesses yesterday was from Phyllis Bricker, the daughter of the couple murdered by a man currently on Maryland’s death row. Her story is heartbreaking, her elderly parents were murdered 25 years ago and the case has been in and out of the courts that long. When she said she and her family have been waiting that long for “justice” Civiletti said “which you interpret to be his execution.” Finally. Someone points out that justice does not necessarily equal execution. Far too many people phrase it this way without even a second thought. I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched news reporters standing outside the SuperMax saying they were, we all were, waiting for “justice” to be done as if this were how we all thought about executions. When Civiletti made his remark she seemed not to even understand it, as if her singular interpretation was the only one possible. Justice requires fairness.

I was moved by the story told by a citizen witness of his violent father. The father tried to kill him and eventually murdered his step mother and step sister. He spoke of what it was like to be the son of a man convicted of murder, what it’d been like to testify at his father’s trial, and how the experiences had shaped him. His powerful story continued as he told of his nephew’s murder twenty years later. At the trial he spoke of seeing the to the son of a man who’d murdered his nephew and thinking about what this poor 9-year-old boy was going to have to go through. He never mentioned the death penalty. But his message was clear. Even a violent murderer has a family; his actions have an impact on those people too. The relationships are never simple, a web always connects us to one another. Even if the connections are invisible now, later they will manifest.

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

bifocals

I’ve been wearing my new bifocals for about a week now and the headache they gave me in the beginning is starting to go away. I didn’t think I could get used to them and I’m still not sure that I can. These are not for close and far, they are for close and really close. I found myself swapping out different strength pairs of glasses when I was working on the computer: one for the computer, a stronger pair for reading books or papers. It just felt ridiculous. So I went for the bifocals for computer (arm’s length as the eye doc said) and reading. But I’m having a tough time getting used to shifting my eyes and my head every time I want to read something. If something’s arm’s length – like the computer – I’m looking through the top part. But the hard line – I’m not sure why he ordered a hard line, but he did – seems to be right in my line of vision so I have to slide the glasses a little bit down my nose which makes them not quite right. As I approach the bottom of the computer screen I have to either drop my head or lower the glasses because I don’t want to be looking through the lower, stronger, part of the glasses – it’s too strong and it blurs the arm’s length stuff. Then if I want to read actual paper I have to slide the glasses back up toward my eyes and tilt my head counter-intuitively up instead of down so I can sink my eyeballs to look through the reading half of the lenses. Oi. The entire operation still requires way too much fiddling, although now with a single pair of glasses. The line in the middle still gives me a headache. It feels like my vision is literally resting on that line. Sometimes it feels as though I’m looking directly through it and that makes me feel like I’m an old camera lens where you brought top and bottom halves of your screen together to adjust focus. Everyone with bifocals told me I’d get used to it quickly and then I’d do it without thinking. Still awaiting that conversion moment.

Monday, August 04, 2008

some shots

My arm is sore from the tetanus shot I got for the two gouges from going over the fence, but it’s better that I got the shot now since I plan to do more shooting in such environments. My excitement about photography is completely reignited by this shooting expedition. Here we were seeing mill life at a sudden cessation. Papers left on desks now blown all around the room, work shoes lying in piles of paint chips and rusted dust. Water is the enemy of order always. As the windows break and the weather comes in the mill everything begins to break down. Some papers in one of the offices were dated 2002 so it’s been only six years. But the disintegration of the environment is rapid. The stillness of the abandonment, even with the occasional small animal creating a noise, is palpable. I’m hoping to become a much better photographer as I keep on doing this. Here are a few photos from my very first expedition.



Greased gears















Window Seat




















Portrait of the artist as a long exposure photographer.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

clamshell

I just opened and set up my paper shredder. There’s nothing really remarkable about that, except that the shredder has been sitting, packaged, in my office for about four years. This is how unpleasant opening clamshell is. I moved the thing around my office for four years, tossing thousands of credit card offers whole into the recycling, rather than attack the thick impenetrable plastic it came in. I know I’m not alone in hating that clamshell packaging. Ellen Degeneres has a joke about it: listing what’s wrapped in it but then pointing out that lightbulbs…“thin, thin plastic.” It’s true, of course. The packaging is a cultural statement on our habits. It’s hardly ever to protect the product, but almost always to prevent pilferage. Opening the stuff is a dangerous exercise. Scissors are ineffective, box cutters dangerous, I’ve heard can openers are safe, but I’ve never figured out how to use one with the shell. Rare is the packaging that permits the buyer to neatly pull the sides apart. I usually wind up bloody and of course the cuts aren’t clean – the ragged edges gouge the flesh. Fingers are at the biggest risk and it seems incredible that deaths have not resulted from slashed arteries. And then of course there’s the environmental impact. I’d like to make a vow not to buy items thusly packaged. Let’s see how long I can go before I run into something I need that can’t be found any other way.

Saturday, August 02, 2008

mill shot

I’m sorry I missed August One. But here I am on two. I was actually in a place with no Internet connection, how strange did that feel? On the way to my brother’s house to help with the kids/move my car turned over to a hundred thousand miles. That’s 100,000 with five zeros. I am now the fave of the littlest of those children: An-def is my name. Middle child has a favored object: a small, child sized rainbow umbrella. She does everything with it, including sleep. My first night there I checked on them before I turned in and there she was, splayed out on her back left hand hanging over the edge of the bed, loosely holding the umbrella handle as it rested jauntily on the floor. She would absolutely not be without it.

Today I met up with another friend for a photo shoot in an abandoned mill. The oldest mill in Delaware, apparently. I injured myself climbing the fence – two pretty bad scrapes that tore my pants and are now cushioned in brightly colorful bruises. My tripod broke and I punctured my knuckle trying to make it do what the broken part was supposed to do. As a topper I lost the back of an earring, but the earring stayed with me. Through all this I did not complain. Rather I was delighted to be shooting in this enormously rich environment. Will post a shot or two after I get them out of the camera.