Has anything ever posed a threat to you?
Have you ever run from that threat?
Was something else chasing you long after your aggressors were lost?
Are you still running?

Could you stand still?
Could you let the running run itself out?
A predator on the edge.
A man on a ledge.

I was watching the sunset, turned wrong way round. The gravestones fluttered and the trees stood still. An angel crossed my path. Her long curls hung in the twilight. She came to sit next to me on the mowed cemetery grass, clippings billowing around us in a light wind. She spoke, but not out loud. Saying, “she was I and I was he,” for her face was now   his and the spirit let forth a husky laugh. I did as was told and took a photo…this is how it turned out.

“Whether I have imbibed or not is not part of the answer, but it would not hurt to question. I feel the souls of the sleeping city, close around me now; the halogen bulbs sufficiently light my body as I slink down the sidewalk. But the light is blinding too, and I feel it stab through my abdomen as I become translucent. Water drips down grey cracks, and either hollers or sirens from a couple streets over caterwaul off the concrete masses which block me in. I know I am a vital part of this machine, but no matter how much I query, I can’t find even whispers of what my function might be.”

What if you’ve already grabbed what you are reaching for? Case in point, this image is almost wholly a byproduct of my lack of knowledge of film processing and scanners.

A premonition made non/physical. The first time I saw this image, I knew in the future I would look at it as something that predicted the future. I knew I wouldn’t realize until it was too late. Time and love, and the Great gradual fading away. Even if my camera can only grasp halfway, I am going to hold on as tight as I can.

The temple band rounds the corner in resplendent sound, their amps creaking in the back of a blue pickup that conveys them across the city from temple to temple every night. Their notes shimmer in the evening haze. The humming thrum of the pummeling drums skittering slowly to nothing as the bugs of the night take up the song. The fireworks have already ended, and the band has surely pulled up to the next temple they were scheduled at. That day, a temporary action yielded a permanent change. Walls are an illusion. Everyday life often a ridiculous farce. A collection of moments we call a life. But for a collection disinherited, the permanent could become temporary.

For two months, I was all alone. Every evening, my body hurled between the ocean and the mountains. And every evening, when the light signaled my brain/camera, I would pull off the highway and take a picture of the sky as the sun departed again, leaving us always in deepest night. Eventually the road exorcised all my melancholy, and yet this crystallized fragment still remains.