Winding, Crooked Trails

Almost five years

around a thousand posts

several thousand comments 

friendship and love and hot stuff and lots of emotions

priceless

but it's time

thank you to all who have been on the trails with me

If you turn over enough stones........

My experience(s) have taught me that there is beauty just about anywhere, or at least close enough by to seek it out, except for maybe prison, Disney world, and New Jersey.  I've been around a pretty good part of the world and in almost every place I've been, when I've had the time to do me some seeking, I've found it.  You just gotta turn you over some rocks and do some looking, knowing where you are and what's around helps.  We live in a pretty ugly city/town, whatever it is, thousands of heaped upon each other town homes and strip malls and every retail outlet you could ever want or not.  Toronto is a wonderful city, but here, not so much so.  Fortunately, we live in a quaint little contained village in the midst of the tumult.  On a pretty river that winds it's way to Lake Ontario from way up north of here in the headwaters of the Niagara escarpment, with speckled trout and salmon, carving it's way through stone pushed forward by glaciers, the surrounding soil rich with peat and loam and all that alluvial stuff that will grow vegetables the size of your head.  Huge old stadium size barns on even huger farms with lots of cattle and horses, lambs, and goats and everywhere the rivers and creeks and brooks and standing wetlands, the kind of land that makes hard work art and inspires the artist's to work hard.  There are farm markets with all the things that can be baked and pickled, picked or butchered.  Beef that was on last week's hoof, fish lifted from cold waters yesterday, eggs recently under feather, fruits and vegetables just picked or lifted from black dirt.  Artisians of every medium. Canvases are painted.  Wood is carved, ceramic and clay are shaped. Glass is blown, wool is woven.  If I open my mind's past I can see the foothills of Kentucky, the hollers of Tennessee or the dells of Wisconsin, upstate New York, even the rolling farmlands of the Midwest, but here it is fitted uniquely into the glove on the hand it's been dealt.  I've only begun to photograph the area but given that it's only a half an hour's drive I'm sure I will get around to a more extensive capture.  Until then, here are a few early looks at spring in the Hills of the Headwaters.

And if I turn over enough stones.......  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

for my dark angel

My Dark Angel

Sorry, I can't frocking get you tube to upload to here.....grrrrr

No video, just some beautiful audio

Up close and personal

So Many Roads Reprise......I used to write, really I did

He stood at the corner, a busy, bustling, hustling, bristling corner. Watching  the orange man telling him how many seconds he had left to step into the street. With his slow shuffling walk he knew he would barely get halfway before the cross traffic would begin bearing down on him.  Sometimes he thought it was the only time he was seen, when he was in the way.  He halted his step and faced the other direction, waiting for a light change that would allow him time to get safely to the other side.  It wasn't out of his way because he didn't have one.  He had long ago lost the way.  Ways and means, he had neither, and this was just another choice in the direction of his life.  He was tired to his marrow, wearing it as his primary facial expression. Grimed lines, deep, and he often had the look of a coal miner with the traffic soot smudged across his forehead and under his eyes, streaked into his neck.  His hands and fingers were dried and cracked and always painful, always.  His thinning hair was matted and greasy and his eyes were rheumy, not from booze but from misery.  He  didn't drink, why would you want to be any more dulled than this?

Sometimes he surprised people who by the random chance of proximity  were forced to be conversant. Surprised that he didn't panhandle them, surprised that he spoke the language clearly and correctly.  He could see the question in their eyes, unasked, what happened?  Mostly fear, what would it take for me to be reduced to such stinking existence?  Less than you know my friend, less than you know.

Choices as mundane as which way to cross the street, which road to take to get to your destination, the time he shuffled left to avoid the oncoming punk who dipped right and leveled him to the pavement with a forearm to the face at the disgust of coming in contact with what he could not abide. If he'd moved left, if he'd held his tongue so many years ago, if he had been able to love without his own fear for what he could not abide.  Less than you know, my friend, so much less and he knew what  they didn't, that you pass a point where you can't get back, past that point of hey you could work, any able body could, you get past that when you reek with the stink of hopelessness.  When your only two rules are I must eat and I must sleep without dying.  When your mission is the mission.  When your health can't be insured because you don't have any.  He heard the unasked questions, how and why, and did you ever have rippling muscles and a cock that stiffened and a place to put it?  And did you love and were you loved and did you have a craft, make things, were you happy?  He did and was and did and was.  What he made most often was the wrong turn at the wrong place and he learned that luck isn't good or bad, it's just luck.  The hardest lesson he learned was that what you can't have hurts so much more than what you don't have.   

His reverie was shattered by the blaring horns and he realized he was barely half way across another road and being seen because he was in the way.

He shuffled soles with holes and mumble gummed beneath his breath, less than you know my friend, so much less than you know.

then there is color

black and white and crops and obsessions and some other stuff

One of my favorite things about digital photography, other than shooting to your heart's content, is the manipulation that's possible with free software like Picasa.  I'm an inveterate cropper and I like to play with focus and tone and contrast and saturation.  And my favorite, black and white.  I used to shoot some film black and white but it's even difficult to find the film anymore and experimentation is expensive with film and that brings me to another reason to love digital.   You can photograph anyfuckingthing you want with no fear of a developer selling your art as porn world wide.    I've always photographed my women frequently and to play art with their images is a great way for me to spend time with them when they aren't there in the dimension you can touch. 

A great hobby for an exhibitionist and a voyeur.  I'll admit to being a bit obsessed with the visual images I observe and produce but it's one of my less dangerous obsessions, perhaps that's why I have singled it out so much the past few years.  I even see the sensual in my landscapes and to combine my love with the beautiful places on earth?  I hope you see some of what I feel.  I love to make the beautiful even more so by my intrepretation.

 

 

Some combination of....

a dream, some real, and the word of the day.  Sometimes I want to write it for how it would sound.  I've always wanted to write what is better said out loud, like Dr. Seuss.  He's easier to read than me but I'm not much for short sentences and even though we both make up words his are much funnier.  I also like not always making sense. 

The way it all began was she didn't really ask him to dance she just was all of a sudden dancing with him, not that kind of raise your arms and sway your hips on a crowded dance floor to find that you have gyrated and gravitated to another partner, not that kind of all of a sudden dancing with someone new.  It seemed to him that she just floated into his arms and he was to learn later that she had a gift for these sudden appearances out of some place he wasn't even aware of at the time.  Some ability to make herself present as if it was her preordained right and it was the sudden presence of her so intimately in his embrace that caught the attention of four watchful eyes across that large dimly lit room and resulted in the certain skidding to a halt, a no moreness, of the two active yet very different dalliances that up until that moment were the life he was juggling.  The juggling of two of anything that can be held and tossed into the air becoming so much more difficult when the third was added to the fray, and him not being trained or even interested in keeping all three in the air at once he let the first two fall to the floor with what was to him an audible thud.  That final that quick.

Lost to an ethereal dark haired girl whose first words were a breathy question, him feeling her lips forming the words put into him with her cheek against his and her mouthing them against his ear like she was painting them on a canvas, her whispering "do you know frisson", him saying "I do now" and her so matter of factually coming back just as breathy but with the brush of her lips bolder this time, coming back and drawing it out into what seemed like her sharing her life story with him, saying, "I'm one that lasts, like a frozen moment."   

And with not so many more words than that, certainly none more succinct, he found her sharing his space, pushing his things to the back of wherever they were to make room for hers, again, out of nowhere like she was already packed.  All he ever knew of her was what was in front of him at the time, she being without a past or a future.  He accepted that there wasn't so much of a him anymore, anymore than there was a her that he knew much of, other than the her that was with him.  There was only this themness, and it was, in the frozen moments, enough for both of them, not knowing where one began and the other left off. 

And she was that, a frisson that lasted, and she did freeze moments and there were no questions and no plans and not much was even said, it was mostly just done and it was the most righteous and sure and he later, when she was gone, from out of the nowhere she came from, with that same ability to make herself disappear as if it was her preordained right, he didn't even move his things back to the front of where they were, he just kept reaching out past what used to be her until he could no longer see what was no longer there.    

If I were in charge.....some of this shit would change I tell ya

Stuff you never hear anymore.......

"I got a busy signal."

"The phone just rang off the hook"

"I need change for the phone"

"It's for you, it's long distance"

And some phone stuff I hate.........

that "if you know your party's extension" bullshit..how often do you?  Activate the directory?  NO.
I'm here to talk, not spell.  Imagine if they did that in China?  M-I-N-G..........ack

prompts, I hate prompts

I REALLY loathe voice prompts where you have to talk to a dumb ass machine.....how stupid does that feel?

"Say, technical support, questions about my bill, or let me talk to the next available representative so you can at least be frustrated, blown off, and pissed off by a living breathing asshole."
Machine doesn't even realize when you're grumpy.

I want the tone to beep right after they say, you may leave a message after the tone..........fuck all that other shit that takes another 30 seconds.
I don't want to page the person, I don't want to leave my number, they already freakin' have my number and I'm sure the fuck not staying on the line...........why would I?  They ain't answering, who am I gonna talk to?  Stay on the line for additional options?  For stalking, press 1, to stick a pin in this person's virtual voodoo caricature, press 2, to activate this person's remote controlled ben-wah balls, press 3.  Just give me the freakin' tone for god's sake, now.

And of course I DETEST people who can't talk on the phone and drive at the same time.  I like to go by them when they're all spaced out and driving like shit and lay on the horn so as to disrupt their conversation and hopefully make the person on the other end of the call realize they're talking to a mental midget.  If you can't do both at the same time, pull the fuck over.

How many times do you suppose someone has been on a conversation and all of a sudden heard the SCREECHING of tires and CRASH/BAM/Boom.   Would feel kinda weird to go, "hello, hello, are you ok?"  and not get an answer.  Only the sound of someone like me laying on the horn cause the asshole couldn't do two things at once. His last words were "oh fuck".  Betcha the service provider kept charging for the open line til the battery was as dead as he was.

My land line voice mail, when it gets full but you have a new message, says to me..........the following call will be deleted from your mailbox, then it plays the damn message I got 3 weeks ago and I have to listen to the entire thing before I can delete it.............grrrrrrr.......sometimes it needs to delete two to accommodate the new message so ten minutes later I finally get to it.  "my husband's on the way over with a shotgun, you need to get out now!! 

Oh fuck.

Why am I so much more profane when I get like this?

One more thing.....

Dear customs and immigrations folks at the Canadian border.  I'm not a terrorist.  I won't drain your social services, molest your children, raise old glory and claim you as American territory, or speak disparagingly at always finding the french side of every product I buy and having to turn it around to read the directions.  Seriously, it's like tossing a two headed coin, I ALWAYS come up french.  Maybe it's because I've traced my ancestors to Canada from France as far back as at least 1758.  Meloche and Richelieu and Pouget, that would be my folks, who knew? 

Anyway, quit fucking with me and let me in the damn country.  Holy hell my family was here before most of yours.  I've poured thousands into your economy and aren't you really just kind of Minnesota north except less warlike and more liberal?  Toronto, Buffalo, Sarnia, Port Huron, what's the difference and what's the big deal?  Open the freakin' borders up on both sides for craps sake.  Not like you don't have the space.  What'd we ever do to you other than a little land grabbing and attempts at some mild oppression?  We even play hockey now and I'm thinking in C instead of F already, you can see I'm on board here.    We let you have BC after all and kept Idaho, cut us some slack.  I love your beer and gravy on french fries so come on.  We have millions of illegals and it gets all our fruit picked and burgers flipped so how bad can it be?

Melanger tous les ingredients dans une casserole avec couvercle allant au four a micro-ondes.....grrrr

Sometimes I feel like Fly at her in-laws.

Dayum

I ain't no boy no mo

Happy Birthday Richard II

20th Birthday
First year away at college
First day of spring
Spring break on the beach in Florida

It's your oyster sonny
Go find yourself some pearls