When soldiers come to take you and your family away for reprogramming to serve in their underground sugar caves, I will sneak into your house late at night and eat all of your chocolate chips. Oh, and I will take everything you have ever written to our secret press, Limp Member Publications, and print it for everyone to see under the title, “Barracuda Sneeze Agent.”
- Circa 1999: I dream there are lobsters infesting my underwear drawer.
- Fact: If all the people in the world were laid end-to-end at the equator, most of them would drown.
- R’s opinion of me: “Man, sometimes you just have too many f*cking opinions.”
- Entry from a close friend’s journal, circa 1985: “F*ck you, God!”
- Paradise Lost, then found again with a metal detector.
True story about mentally ill neighbor, circa 1999:
She wears a fur coat regardless of the weather, and prowls the streets looking for rat trash, coming and going at ten minute intervals. She stares at the ground and won’t look at me when I say hello. In the late afternoon, she carefully arranges the following items on my doorstep, all of which have obviously come from the street:
- 2 lipsticks
- McDonald’s fries box
- Butterscotch hard candy
- Sheet of paper with the photocopied words, “Let’s get drunk and screw.”
Entry from years ago in the Blakk Bük…
Lately I have been deeply troubled by imagining what it must feel like to get hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat. Once in a while I think I’d rather be wearing a helmet. But then I’m worried about my knees, my face, my groin. Soon I imagine wearing full body armor.
A week after I started thinking about this, it dawned on me that I should be wearing one of those giant foam suits they use for simulated dogs attacks, or in those classes where they teach women to kick attackers in the nuts.
They used pepper spray on unruly fans at a football game recently, so maybe my foam suit should have its own oxygen supply, like a high-impact space suit.
Maybe I should just go live in the mountains.
Today was beautiful. Blue sky, breeze, cool then warm. I felt friendly and happy to be working outdoors. At the same time, though, I became really discouraged by a couple of things…
- People who can’t be themselves in photos. When I point my camera in their direction, they lock up like deer in the headlights. Sometimes other people, often their parents, will tell them, “Turn and look at the camera,” or just, “Smile!” They don’t understand, nor will they ever, the value of genuinely candid photojournalism. I humor them by squeezing off a frame, thanking them, then deleting it from the card. These are the same people who will tell you that they aren’t very good photographers.
- Chili Cookoff. It could be fun and exciting, but quite frankly, the chili is a tin plate filled with ground beef and doused with “chili powder.” Chilis aren’t powders, people. They are the fruit of a nightshade, and can be delicious when fresh or even frozen. Or when the “chili” isn’t a pile of ground beef.
- Funnel Cake. Enough said.
On the other hand, I saw lots of people I know and like, and they were all happy to see me.