dr_lizardo

Hello again SG land.

I guess I'm about the same me I was last update. Pretty fucking brutal time at work lately draggin the soda through the snow. Boss called me today and wants me to come in monday, which I normally have off. So for me this year christmas is basically a non-holiday, it just splits up my weekend. And I kinda need the time to heal from the work week.

Whatever. I'm taking the view that I'm sailing through a storm. Nothing for it but to ride it out, if you ever do. I guess the course I'm taking is my best reckoning as far as courses to get out of the storm go; get the best camera I can and try and take the best images I can with it. Being pretty much lacking in people or business skills I better get images good enough to be arresting. I don't really know that I can do that, at least not consistently, but there's a big red truck waiting for me, letting me know what the stakes are if I don't at least try.

A while ago I was reading something, I think by the dalai lama, where the author remarked on how people don't realize how much suffering it takes to feed and clothe and house one human being. Having a pretty brutal job like I do makes me very conscious of such things. Earlier this evening I had a bowl of soup at a really nice noodle restaurant here in my hometown of northampton mass. I had a coke with it, one of my coworkers brought it there. But I can see the boats and noisy iron machines that hauled in the nets that brought the shrimp up out of the sea, I can feel the gritty dirt around the carrots, I can see the combines reaping the wheat for the noodles. And it was a really good bowl of soup, very relaxing to sit there and enjoy it, but I know that no relaxation went into it.

Last week I was working at keeping the truck ON the guard railless windy icy roads on the way out to readsboro VT and I was listening to an interview if Isaac Mizrahi on NPR, and he talked about being optimistic, among other things. One thing that I found noteworthy in the interview was that having grown up in a household with very chic, beautiful jewish women, was that in paying attention he learned how to listen to women. You cannot really overstate the importance of that sort of thing, imho. If you're going to be something like a fashion designer, you really need to be able to communicate with your clientele. I can imagine but I can't communicate all that well. I remember seeing one of natalie portman's princess amidala costumes and what I felt upon seeing was that I could feel the state of mind of the person who designed it. That's just from doing pottery and doing a little drawing, it lets me know what the design frame of mind feels like, having been in it. But I don't really know how to tell people about it. Other than showing the the stuff I've made I suppose.

But another thing I picked up from the Mizrahi interview was the importance of being optimistic. We have to try to enjoy our time on earth while coming up with the money for the bills. I'm pretty pessimistic, (like you didn't notice that) both by nature and nurture, so it's tough for me to run optimism software. I can see there's power in optimism, or that you need to put power into it, or something like that, but I find myself having trouble with the question of what to be optimistic about. I can take some nice pictures, but so can a lot of people. Lots of people can get the excellent equipment that exists nowadays. Is there something I can do with it that hasn't been done before? I guess there ends up being a long list of uncertainties. I've had the thought that when teenagers get totally wasted and wrap their cars around trees and other stupid things like that, what you're seeing is actually a survival mechanism at work; young people have no idea of what is awaiting them out in the world and they really need to have an almost suicidal level of overconfidence to set out and make themselves a place in a world they do not understand. At least it works that way sometimes, I think. I wish I was one of those people with blood in their veins, who do not understand why other people have fear in their veins.

I know that I basically run on fear, but I can consider possibility that I might not always be. As Carlos Castaneda put it I have a cubic centimeter of a chance of success. I see myself standing on the bridge of a ship with waves crashing over the bow and the wind and rain blasting at the sails and at my face, and I have to steer a course through some of the more violent parts of the storm in order to get through it. I might make it.