Thirty, Flirty, & Thriving.

It's the ideal peak of woman hood. Yet what I see more often is Forty, Flabby, & Fuckless. An incredible young girl suffers the termoil of an incidental placement to such terrible parents. She breaks free, suffers the insurmountable pain of becoming whole & happy when unkempt and miserable is so comfortable because it's all that was known. The butterfly from the cocoon, & all that jazz. The higher to ascend, the more prudent the drive. Then something happens. High school glory becomes college class deprecation. Red capret now gray cement. Suede shoes now thin socks. She loses her job, falls in love, drops out, & the inevitable (yet ill timed) discovery of her loved ones just leeches and fleas. She clings to her man, stays inside. & inside. & inside. & he, stays with her. It's this beautiful iron horse exuding pink steam and railing down into a majestic land, They have each other. Every day, they have themselves less. It's a love that is stripping skin from bone, with warm rose scented acid and one day they will wake up, not as much in love. Remembering suddenly they were somebody else, that they left to sleep in the snow when their lips met. A striving author and actor and comedian, where is his published work? The incredible warrior woman, destined to save lives with the proper and just social work..where is her office? The fresh skin and clean pillow cases and pink lungs and white smiles and it's all just spoiled milk in the empty fridge. I never, never want to fall in love to just fall out of myself. I have dreams, aspirations, and heart so full of passion that I can't quite fathom fitting somebody into it. I won't treat it like a drawer I can jam full until it only opens an inch and I can't reach what what I need past them. They are only a part, there was all this life and blood and tears and torn fingerails before you met them, do not neglect that. This is why you are awake during the witching hour. This is why you can't doing anything else but gorge yourself on fast food and cigarettes. This is why you are miserable, this is why you sleep all day and are sick everymorning. This is why you think yourself little. This is why you hate me. & Why I hate you. I have the courage to try and love myself, before anyone else. 

"There's a Madness in Us All"

During a petulant time last year, I bought with my own money a DSLR camera. I read about two chapters from the booklet included. Laziness and anxious curiosity decided the rest of my education would be done with experience. That's not really it at all, half the time I'm not quite sure what wills my actions. However this year, entirely different from the last, I asked my coworker Brittani if she'd like to pose for the first portraits I would take in just under three years. With her immediate and anxious yes, all that ailed us was the perilous task of a common day off, social lives (rather hers than mine) free, adequate weather, the permission of my gatekeepers slash other employees slash grandparents. The sixth day day of this month, last Saturday, the stars finally frickin aligned. 

 Only very VERY slight edits made, all taken in manual mode, with natural light. We eventually had to chase the sun down to Hill Top Mountain, by the cemetery my mother's parents are buried, by the airport (landscape I'd dreamnt of months before I'd ever seen it) Where a solitary sunflower stalk stood, and the sun shone its sublime solace. It was a lovely contrast to the Hot Springs Park where a creepy man lurked and immediately offered his sad sack story, (okay, I'm just impatient with older men who criticize you on your film camera, despite you hoisting your digital that cost at least three hundred dollars more than his P.O.S and whoopee for having a 2 gb memory card and being three years cancer free and I'm really sorry your daughter got food poisoning from Burger King and had to have a piece of her intestine removed because it literally died from it. Congrats on keeping your diabetes in control and yes I've been checked for it and wow my grandma has congestive heart failure but I'm not going to talk about it to a complete stranger.)

It was lovely day all in all, I'm pleased with the result of my totally amateur portraits. I revel in the challenge of channeling my artistic ability, of which I have much doubt at times, terribly so, but there is a madness in us all. I want every shade of it shown, every which way I can show it.