Character Study

     My memories of traveling without a seat-belt in the back of my parents car in the 1970's are some of my happiest. Listening to songs that were often cut in half by the 8-track player , I watched as the stars and street lights of night traveled through my reflection in the window .  Amongst other dangerous things  I shouldn't have been doing in a moving vehicle I often hung my head, hands and feet out that window as part of elaborate dance routines to the songs.  As Kenny Loggins sang "For once in your life /Here's your miracle/Stand up and fight" I  stood up on the seat and made little punching gestures to the sky before plopping down to the floorboards and singing the words  "This is it !" to the song of the same name.
      When my singing and dancing  began to grow tiresome with my parents we would switch to playing games, like spotting  different colored cars and fast food restaurants. Fascinated by the character cut-outs I would see attached to the outside of child day cares , I would scream out everyone I could identify .
      " MICKEY MOUSE, BUGS BUNNY, HECKLE AND JECKLE, GROVER, AND ... " my voice would grow silent as our car passed by , until minutes later when we would pass another "MR MAGOO. FELIX THE CAT, HUCKLEBERRY HOUND..."
       My head would turn back to see the daycare growing smaller through the back window of the station wagon before eventually disappearing for good, likely due to copyright infringement laws. Along with these characters , went the ones that decorated my cereal boxes and the ones that hung around McDonaldland when I went to burn my  (then)little ass on a hot metal slide.
       One day a few years ago, I thought I saw a Mickey Mouse out of my peripheral vision and the thrill of this unexpected discovery caused me to nearly wreck my car in a drastic u-turn. As I squinted at the sign for the daycare that featured the mouse in question I thought maybe he had been either been changed enough to avoid a lawsuit with the Walt Disney Company or that the daycare was for somewhat ungifted preschool artist. If it had turned out to be the later, the next piece of this exhibit was Disney's Daisy Duck interpreted as Warner Brother's Petunia Pig and the final piece was one I might have titled "Who ate the last cookie?", as it depicted a decapitated Cookie Monster.

        After seeing a beloved muppet reinterpreted  by a young Joel - Peter Witkin, I remained silent for two years until I inadvertently passed another daycare and began to scream again.
       "BIG BIRD !!! BRER FOX!!!!  " were the only two names I could scream this time, as it was the only two they had, but it was more then enough.

         As I pulled into the driveway I  quickly snapped the pictures on my cell phone delighting in the fact that it was a classic version of Big Bird ,as he might have looked back when Roosevelt Franklin was a major player on the street . Brer Fox on the other hand was simply unprecedented, almost unbelievable to witness . I could have believed I was dreaming until I took into consideration that I was a forty-three year old man taking pictures of a daycare while sitting in my car, and with that I realized I was in the same dangerous position I was back when I wasn't required to wear a seat-belt. I could hear Kenny Loggins ask "Are you gonna wait for a sign? Your miracle?" and with that I looked at the sky , and punched it.
        

Hot Dog and a Shake

     I had a friend of mine I used to work with who always told me such smutty stories, and I adored him for it. Once you start dating someone your stories become decidedly less bawdy and in effect less interesting by default. I know if I don't live vicariously through others my stories will almost certainly consist of mundane domestic bliss and who the fuck wants to hear that shit? I certainly don't.
      It was an early Monday morning when he told me about attending the city's flea market with his boyfriend over the past weekend . Taking notice of an attractive gay man who was cruising him there , he decided to bring his boyfriend all the way back home before immediately turning around and returning to the flea market by himself.  Upon hearing this much of the story, I expressed my disapproval .
      "You had to go all the way back and forth to that flea market twice? That is such a waste of gas! Your boyfriend is like one-thousand years old - could you not have easily convinced him to take a nap in the car? I mean that is a huge flea market - couldn't you have just left him somewhere to look at a bunch of boring old Civil War shit from his heyday while you went after that trick ?" I asked.      
      "Well, I just wanted to be able to take my damn time !" he said somewhat extravagantly . " You just never know what's gonna happen next! I mean, look at last week at the gym - I didn't expect to get fucked in the steam room! I figured chances were , I might only get to blow that guy at best! ".
       It's true you really never know in life when you are going to get fucked, but most of us don't give it that much thought - we just put on clean underwear each day one leg at a time and hope for the best. Even knowing full well that as a gay man at any flea market you could easily throw a rock and hit some cock ( or is it "throw a stick and hit some dick"? )  I could not help but applaud his confidence in this situation. The thought of transporting an elderly person around was enough to exhaust me to a point of doing literally nothing else with the rest of my day , but then to also bank on the concept of someone that you cruised still having any interest in you a whole hour later was completely unheard of - they surely would have thrown another rock. My ability to believe in my friend was validated when he told me that he did manage to find the stranger at the busy flea market again and then have some sort of mutual masturbation session with him in an out-of-the-way restroom  .
       "It was so fucking hot !" he exclaimed . "Only thing was , someone had left a half of a hot dog in the urinal and it was hard to keep a boner going whenever I looked over at it. The bun had soaked up a lot of the urine and it just sorta laid there all bloated looking .".
        It was with this detail that my memory began to jog back to a much simpler time , when I was about 12 years old and my family  had gotten a new refrigerator. Upon moving out the old refrigerator that had predated our time living there , a mysterious object rolled out from underneath it causing me to scream a loud , shrill , high -pitched noise that would generally come out of a woman's mouth in a horror film.  Much to our disgust it was an old hot dog that had managed to turn avocado green in it's undetermined time underneath the refrigerator of the same hue. For years I wondered about the green wiener's origin story , one that would keep me pondering what kind of person let's a hot dog roll under a refrigerator and then just leaves it there, and worse yet, does that said - person still reside in this house? It's hard to get something that horrific out of your mind until you begin to imagine someone you know from work trying to jerk off with some swap-meet stranger in a flea market commode with half a hard-on.
         I began to feel like he was telling me about the events out of sequence because surely the half eaten hot dog that had found it's way out of a mouth and into a urinal did so after witnessing the events that had transpired between these two men , not before. Still , I did my best to pay attention to the story of two men who shared a moment , were pulled apart by obstacles in their paths and then reunited by destiny only to face an ironic hardship .
         "I still busted a nut! We both did!" he said , as his devious smile became wider on his flushed red face , his eyes got noticeably smaller.
        Despite the inclusion of a happy ending , or so to speak, all  I could think about was that half eaten hot dog with the swollen , urine- soaked bun laying helplessly in the urinal. Was it happy to live vicariously through the actions of others or was it discontent to only function at half of it's capacity? It still managed to appear red, the tint of  excitement , while that other wiener , left home for far too long was simply green with envy .

Something Hard in my Mouth

  Because I live in both excess and denial, I decided that my lunch was not enough and I should treat myself to a dessert. Since I rarely carry any cash ( or more specifically, have any money)  I had to count out the change in my Kermit the Frog wallet and figure out what ninety-something cents could get me. I walked around the mall's food court which closely resembled a third world country and offered me little more then free samples of mystery-meat on toothpicks along with a bout of free diarrhea to follow. When I noticed a woman pulling a tray of peanut butter cookies out of an oven , I did not hesitate to make my decision.
     I bought the cookie and typically, began to eat it before the cash register drawer closed.  Two bites in, I bit down into something hard. Maybe, I thought in my haste, I had eaten some of the wax paper that the cookie was wrapped in,otherwise surely it was just a crispy edge of the cookie or uncooked wad of flour. Unable to break it with my teeth, i reached in my mouth and pulled out what looked like a little bone. I was about as pleased with this discovery as I was with finding the Gloria Loring compact disc George once slipped into my collection, and in fact made the same proclamation with both ("What the fuck is this?!?") . 
    I immediately turned around and confronted the Indian family that both worked at and apparently lived at the restaurant that the cookie was purchased at. They each handled the small ( most likely rat ) bone in their gloved hands , studying it and commenting on it in their native language until passing it to the final family member , a man who decided the best way to test the foreign object was to put it in his mouth and try to break it with his own teeth. Leaving his mouth open as he clamped his teeth down on the apparently unbreakable object his face contorted into what looked like a character from a "Popeye" cartoon or even worse,  an actor from the " Popeye" movie . I personally could have done without this haunting image, but since I had to see it , i felt a strong need to describe it to everyone I  have encountered since the incident occurred . In my experience, there is only two kinds of people who put things in their mouths without question; babies and whores. Whatever the object actually was mattered much less to me then the fact that it was definitely a non-cookie ingredient.
     I told my coworker I was having lunch with at the time ( a girl of white - trash descent ) about the ordeal as we left the food court.  She offered me the sort of comfort, I could have only gotten from her .
     "Motherfucker! I ain't trying to get in your shit or nothin' but that shit was in yo' mouth first, then his! Wasn't that fucker afraid he might get AIDS or somethin' from you?" she squalled in the food court as I picked up my pace to leave.
      "First of all," i explained "I don't have AIDS! .  Second of all , you cannot get AIDS from, sharing a bone, well, actually, oh, never mind!" .
       She went on to ask "You at least got yo' money back  from them motherfuckers - right?" . 
       I stared at her split ends and said "Of course I did!".
       Actually I didn't . The Indians had picked this exact moment not to understand English, and instead of money only offered me another cookie, which I of course ate, because I live in both excess and denial.

The Blind Photographer

        A popular anecdote I used to use as a photography instructor was "Before I became a professional photographer my photographs were blurry , scratched and over- exposed but now that I am trained I know how to make them blurry, scratched and over-exposed!"

         I especially love a blurry picture.For years I have taken high speed photos in low lighting to capture that little moment when my model lingers in between poses. When he stares off away from me . When she takes a deep breath .

    
          The logic of taking a picture out of focus on purpose is completely lost on my mother. 

          "She's cute. Too bad it is so blurry" she says after seeing a picture I have been in love with all day.
  
          "It's not out of focus - It's breathing!" I challenge back, as if I could change her mind.
          
          In recent years my eyes began to weaken and I would open them to see the world the way I had been presenting it for all these years, a beautiful blur . For a long time I ignored the handicap, partially out of vanity but mostly so that I could see my vision ( as ironic as it was) realized.  After giving it a little thought , and by that I mean I could hardly think with the constant pounding in my head caused by my eyestrain, I got my eyes checked . I got the glasses but hesitated in wearing them outside of driving or reading , fearing how they altered my appearance. Making myself a turkey sandwich one day , I patted down the bread to feel my palm greased with mayonnaise and the thought that glasses would make me look stupid suddenly seemed a bit petty .
        
          One day, upon completion of a self portrait, I put my glasses back on to inspect the image.  I took inventory of several new white hairs that had merged with my brunette curls and realized that maybe all they were doing was adding a bit of contrast . I noticed the little lines under my eyes caused from time and the little lines on my nose caused from where my glasses had been sitting and I think how these little scratches might actually add depth to the composition . Still, It can be quite off putting seeing life through this different set of lenses.  Everything is suddenly in focus , if not abundantly clear and oddly enough I want time to lag a bit longer  .