Thursday, September 25, 2008

Summer's End

Ironic you know? Tonight I log in to do the little update, put some some words in there, and it turns out there's 267 posts in the history, and it happens that i'm putting up 267 photos on tonight's update. What does it mean?! Hey. I'm no numerologist, but i'm sure it means something. two and six is eight and seven is fifteen and that comes back to six, you do the math. Let's just call it balanced. (apparently though, if you WERE into numerology, Six is the number that is owned by Venus, and well. You probably know about Venus, (the chick planet) all about Love, Harmony, The Arts, and Beauty... Call it a coincidence if you want to, but I'm just letting you know what happened when I logged in to update.

So, yeah. I've been busy with some stuff. I had a summer in my absence from the internet, and therein was a girl. Nobody could tell me different.

You know, this morning I woke up laughing at myself when the clock sounded that now age-old ocean waves sound that it makes. I could never describe it like I saw it, but let me tell you, it rocked my little planet... So there I was. It was me, and Sheila, and of all people, Vince Vaughn. But not your regular old Vince Vaughn, it was the Vince Vaughn from that movie Clay Pigeons, where he plays this guy, Lester Long. But it wasn't really Lester Long either, it was a sort of faux-faux Lester Long, but sure as shootin' it was Vince Vaughn, Me and Sheila sitting at a table in a diner somewhere. And the thing is, we were trading places, this guy Lester Long and me, and I was giving it up. Letting go of Sheila, something about a business card, a number, something, I couldn't tell you what exactly it was, because I already told you, I can't pull up a way to explain it to you like I saw it, but somewhere in that moment, the three of us sitting at a table in the diner, Vince across from the two of us sitting side by side, the whole damned thing turned into a sort of Disney animation, and Sheila and I became these kind of stylized cartoon versions of ourselves, and Vince remained all human, like that movie with Don Knotts where he becomes a fish or something, and I looked over at Sheila, and she was just as beautiful as ever, but just smoothed out like a cartoon would do. Everything all tuned up for you, and even her voice got more feminine (if you could even imagine such a thing) and all the details and color and even the light splashing through the windows was just perfect across the table, and well there it was, I'd handed him the card or whatever, and she flipped her hair one way, and she looked completely heart broken, and her voice kicked up about 4 octaves, and her eyes got even more cartoony as she looked at me, and was saying something like, "I never thought you'd do that to me, I never thought you'd leave like this hunny..." or something like that, and it was totally heart wrenching, and I was looking at her, and there she was with the beautiful blonde hair, and her doe eyes looking at me, and the light just perfect, and she had on this cartoony trench coat, not too much unlike the one she wears all the time in real life, and suddenly it's over. It's ending. I turn into this lug-headed baboon for not realizing that she didn't think i'd really go, like, honestly believed I might just keep taking it, whatever it was in the dream, and so now i'm an ape, and the scene is closing with this funny shape, like when you look through a keyhole in a movie from the late sixties, and you see the shape of a skeleton-key-hole in silhouette around the couple in the room or whatever, except in this case, it's a big stylized fedora, like Sheila wears all the time, and it's zooming in on us... she as beautiful as Jessica Rabbit, times ten, and me a big baboon, and Vince completely blowing out of the picture all High-Key, and it's morphing, this fedora frame, into the kind of Feather Font I saw the other day on Notcot, but still it's the fedora, but all feminine, french, candy stripe-mod style, and it's closing in tighter and tighter on us, and she's so beautiful it's even better than a cartoon can do it, and as it gets smaller and smaller and all i'm seeing is this fedora, the words "the end" start writing themselves in that famous Merry Melodies font from back in the day across the middle of the fedora, and suddenly my alarm clock is making that Ocean Sound that I wake up to every day, and I say to myself outloud, "And... Good Morning!" and suddenly there I am lying in my bed alone here on 4th street laughing out loud at myself to the sound of the ocean, because man, you couldn't have made it more real, more ironic, more painful if you were Saul Zaentz, and you really wanted to prove a point.

Just intense. Perfect.

And pal?

That's really like a 4 second preview. Because I already told you. I could never explain it in a way you would understand it. It's a real "You Had to BE THERE" kind of thing.

The good news?

I was there. And for the most part, there was a camera around.

So the pictures, well. I'll be honest with you, I didn't put them all up. I probably left out a cool HUNDRED or so that I didn't think would be appropriate, but trust me, they're good ones. And another thing that kept getting in my way is, since it didn't end the way either of us wanted it to, I was having a really really hard time even editing them. So for those of you who've seen my pictures over the years, i'll let you in on a little secret.

The pictures that LOOK like I took a second to work on? I did. I did them while Sheila was right here on the couch behind me. She was sitting not more than 10 feet from where I'm typing right now. All the rest? The ones where the color don't seem like dTown color? Where they seem like maybe they're straight out of the camera, or maybe even worse? Well. I just couldn't bring myself to even look at them without her here. ( Get used to it. ) I tried man. I promise I did. I sat in front of this computer for days saying I'd do them justice. I'd make the pictures the best pictures ever. I'd sit right here and tune each one of them however long it took to make them absolutely fucking perfect. Frame after frame was going to just blow you away. Put you there in the driver's seat with me and really take you on home.

The thing is... I couldn't. I simply couldn't stand to look at them knowing what I know. (cut me a little slack. I mean, in the cartoon, she's the hotter than a blonde Jessica Rabbit, and i'm a god damned baboon.) So what I decided tonight was, I would come home from work, (got out around you know, 11) muscle through the photos, and then just get 'em up there. Whatever shape they're in, just GET THEM UP onto the internet, and then I'd make some silly promise about how i'll come back and fix the ones I really want to fix some other time.

But i'll tell you right now. I'm not going to. I'm never going to. They are what they are. They are what my camera saw, and then what i thought I could safely put in front of you without getting too much grief on the backside. They are my entire summer. For whatever it's worth to you. Stem to Stern. Sky to Land. Dust to Dust.

In the series of photos, you can see so many things. So many moments. A whirlwind in the life. I parked my car the closest i've ever parked my car to another car. I saw my father. I went to Yosemite. A friend blew his head off, and I went to the beach. I got dumped. I got back together. I got dumped again. I swam in a lake. I worked. I relaxed at the spa. I went to the beach some more. I mean, everything's there man. It's all right there for you.

It all started with me and a girl named Sheila, and it ends with me and a girl named Sheila.

And in the wake? well. Who knows how it all pans out? I sure as hell can't tell you. But i'm hoping the pictures will tell you something.

They explain where I've been. Why I haven't been on the internet. Why I don't really even take pictures anymore, (truth be told, I still take them, but really I don't.)

I imagined i'd go on about all the different stories. All the things we did together. Down to the purchase of the nice smooth brown sheets. The Cheladas, the 555's, Napa, Lake Berryessa, North Beach, Arcata, all of it. But here I am thinking, Baaaa.

I would go on about the other stuff too, like the release of that new Canon 5d (*SEND ONE TO ME PLEASE), the new iPods, the new Chuck Palahniuk movie, so much new stuff, but they have other blogs for everything, and since I don't even log in any more, what the hell am I going to tell you about that you haven't already read about?

I thought I'd tell you about all the books I read over the summer, what my take was on them, and how I finally started giving ol' Yahoo! the boot for filling my mailbox with over 37,000 spams in the past month alone, but no. I just don't have the juice. It's all there. It's in the pictures.

And just like life. When something bad happens, you look back, and all you see is the good. I look at the pictures, and I gotta tell you, I'm hard pressed to understand why it is that i'm just sitting here banging away on a clickity old keyboard in my apartment and there isn't a Sheila on my couch.

But hey.

It happens to all of us.
Each and every one.

Get your nose out of the water, and your chin off the floor.

Look at some pix, and think to yourself, "well son of a bitch if even when he's down, it still looks like a damn good time in danconnortown."



And Sheila? This post and these pix are dedicated to you.


Good times,

dTown | Listening to Deathcab, 3:00am | 63˚ and this post was "made on a Mac."

(in the future, find under -Archives/ fladeedle, 2008, September 25)

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