roguemind

With my pen I will draw a single black obvious and bold line for you. On one side you wait; watching and wondering what comes next. On the other side I walk. I am life. My will is my own god and I will draw swords before I let you cross that line. You are my audience, not the mad horseman behind me with a whip. You are a society that thinks and feels and breathes. But I am freedom.

I wrote that for a assignment in my cultural studies class. It was cry against my own people. The instructor asked us to write down a short paragraph on what we would say to our country if given a chance. But we could not get political or religious. And she left it at that. The assignment and its broad range of possibilities frightened me at first. To much choice I thought. But then one night over a glass of patron those few sentences poured out of my pen and onto the notebook. A couple days after I turned it into the teacher I was called into her office. I thought I was in trouble or that maybe they thought I was going to shoot up my college or something. That was not the case. She asked me if she could quote me in her thesis on what pop culture and advertising does to the American people. Imagine that? I'm twenty-four years old and my professor with her doctorate in anthropology and a masters in sociology wanted to use something I wrote. Of course I told her yes. What an opportunity. I left school that day lost in delight. I do not even remember how I got back to my apartment. However after I got there I sat down at my desk and tried to start my book for the hundredth time.
My name is Chris and and I have no idea where my life is heading. I have no girlfriend and I am in love with my Nikon. I named her Alice after one of my favorite characters. It is an old German name meaning truth. I felt it was fitting for my vision. Photography is one of my only passions. I can still remember where it started. I was about thirteen years old and my parents gave my a disposable camera out of the blue. I guess they thought I needed a hobby. At that time we where living in Amarillo, Texas. The summers there are dry and hot and the springs are filled with thunder storms and tornadoes. This day happened to be a stormy one so I had no idea what I was going to use my new camera on. I pretty much gave up after wandering around the house for an hour or so and I left to go out into the storm. I walked to the park that was across the field behind our house. Thats when the rain and thunder got worse. I had no intention of walking back across the now mud ridden ground to get back inside, so I took shelter beneath a tin-roofed hut with no walls and a couple benches. I was there barely two minutes when the weather turned worse and the Zeus started throwing lightning all around me. I remembered the camera in my pocket and pull it loose to start taking pictures. As I was pressing the shutter release for the tenth picture I lightning hit so close to me that It knocked me off the bench. Well I say it knocked me off but looking back I probably just was scared shit less and I jumped. It was as that point that I decided mud or not I was getting back inside my house. I ran back at full speed and made it just fine without incident. Weeks later we finally got the camera developed. We were amazed at the results. Every shot but one was filled with only rain and dark clouds. That one shot however was haunting. It some how managed to capture my arm out in front of me looking like I was protecting my face from something. In the back ground almost directly behind my fingers was a blurred and amazingly bright flash. The flash of lightning looked as if it was shooting from my finger tips. That was the moment I fell in love with photography.
A knock at my door startled me and broke my thoughts up into a million pieces. I was done writing for the day.