Anything Good This Weekend? #23
Battling for memories.
One of my special skills is always thinking about life as being on an unseen timer. It’s not at all comforting, but it does help me orient my priorities.
A lot of the time, I ask myself, “Will I get another chance to do this?” And if the answer isn’t an obvious “Duh!” then I start weighing the grief I’d feel if we miss out on something before the Life Timer goes off. This is a roundabout way of saying my wife’s Pop-Pop is quite old now, 93, and he is declining a little faster and faster with each passing day, and we just don’t know how many more get-togethers we’re going to have, and so yes it is a long drive, but we don’t want to miss anything.
So, anything good this weekend?
Between June 13 and June 15, I…
Played a number of great board games from Leviathan Wilds to Nusfjord. Fishing and climbing, these are my comfort themes this weekend.
Read a splendid MG novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, by Kelly Barnhill. Not only do these books help me with my own work, they’re also just a joy to read.
Watched the Phillies sweep (!!) the Blue Jays. My mother-in-law was with us for the first game before she went to protest in Philly on Saturday.
Got together with the rest of the family on Sunday for Father’s Day with my wife’s Pop-Pop. He is a gem of a man.
When I got seriously into photography six years ago, I didn’t understand why I was taking photos other than because I liked the physical act of hitting the shutter button. The simple magic of making an image was my driving force. In the last six years, I’ve found and re-found my style and my purpose, but at the very bedrock of why I make things is one simple joke I tell: “There are our precious memories!”
I tend say this when someone is groaning because I’ve slowed down a walk to take a photo. It’s cheeky, but it’s also true. These are our precious memories, and I don’t see anyone else here with a camera, and won’t we all be so much happier in a few years to have these images? It’s not that I take photos because I think everyone is about to drop dead, but I kind of do. For more on this idea, read To Photograph is to Learn How to Die by Tim Carpenter. That tri-essay book is a work of art and brilliant theory.
I am someone who looks at their archive with regularity. I go back to the very first photos I took with my very first camera and I cringe and I smile both because I remember. What scares me about death is not the finality—though, that is uncomfortable—but rather, I don’t know where our memories go. If this sounds familiar and like every book I’ve ever written, then you’d be right! Leave it to someone who spent a decade documenting music culture to want to preserve things. Everything really is just a manifestation of your base anxieties.
So, yes, everything creative I do is really about a battle for memories. And, yes, I am often encouraged to put down the camera and think a little less and just be. But what some don’t totally get is the camera and the writing, and the incessant thinking, is how I be present. Making art is how I commune with the world, and at the simplest level, having more photos of Pop-Pop and his tiny glass of juice is better for my emotional wellbeing than having less photos of the same thing.
I take photography so seriously because I like it and it makes me happy, but also because I know there’s a timer on everything and I think we’d all like it a little more if when someone’s timer beeps, we have a collection of photos to try and cheat out a few more ticks on the clock. This could also be because the anniversary of my brain surgery is in a few days. Something about almost dying as a teenager really does rewire your relationship to memory. So it goes.
That’s all from me this morning. I never really know what I’m going to say when I open up the draft editor for these weekend notes, but I am always happy with the results. Hopefully they’re nice to read. Until next time.