I maintain several filters in the interest of internet environmentalism. These include:
- a [meme] filter, which is where I post all the quizes, Name Ten Things About Joe games, etc, etc.
- a [sex]ually explicit filter, so that those who don't wish to see such things can avoid them
- A [fiction] and creativity filter, so that those who wish to see my non-photographic art attempts can do so without making the rest of you suffer.
- An [IsChicago] filter, for when I'm trying to abuse the LJ system for event planing and whatnot
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amuls_photos is a distinct LJ account, which only contains information regarding my photographic career. It is a mirror of the blog on my work website.
These filters are designed for your benefit, not mine, and you are free to adjust your viewing experience of my life to your comfort level. Just let me know. I promise not to take it personally.
All comments to this post are screened, to enhance the privacy of your requests.
He says sorry if I woke you but I just had to talk
I saw this actress, and she had your hair
I'm sorry, I'm sorry I was never there
She sits up and pulls away from me
Cradles the phone and looks at the sea
Father, have you forgotten it's graduation day
Father, I waited for your call
Father, do you love me at all
The phone rings, it's early, it's seven o'clock
She says I'm sorry I called but I just have to know
Are you just using me, and if not,
where can this possibly go
Do you really love me, are you going to leave me?
She cries louder than the crashing sea
Hush, my child,I am here waiting in your bed
Waiting to caress your sweet shaven head
That night she comes over and over and under
And after we're finished, I lie there and wonder
How long it's been since was I twice her age
And if we're still in the infatuation stage
If I can still clearly remember the day
When I couldn’t let myself feel this way
Fearing someone would come inside my battleworn heart
And once they were past my fear, they’d find nothing to hold dearly to
And in the still hours of the night
She wakes me, all in a fright
She says, Daddy, I had a nightmare
Daddy, I thought I was alone
Hush my darling baby girl,
Daddy's here.
Not to be heard over the lies
and regrets barely audible on the phone
"You could have called, you could have reached out"
She says, not to me, not to me
"Were you drinking? No? Were you high? Are you sure
"You want to lie to your own daughter?
"I understand drinking, I know what it's like to be high"
but she doesn't understand a father lying to his own daughter
Even after all these years
I lie still and breathless,
A secret kept, twice her age
A story older than that
As familiar as the curves of her love-soaked flesh
She calls him Father, while I claim the intimate
Daddy
Though neither of us ever raised her
Above her own soaring fantasies
Of a rainbow hued acceptance
Of someone cherishing all of her
Not least the parts that run
That clench her fists and hide her tears
She urges him again, "Just a message, just a text,
"Just once, be a father when I call"
What a low bar I have set
To treat her better than any man ever has
To love her as she deserves
I learned that trick the first day I glimpsed evil
I fought that battle the first day I knew apathy
Decades and lovers and a hundred mended hearts before She
Was even a bad idea at the bottom of his bottle
She gave me her body, hoping for love in exchange
and I took it, for it was a fine body
and a familiar bargain
and I call myself a better man than some
I'm writing a novel for Lent, because November is a shite time to write a novel for me. I had this great idea for a sci-fi near future dystopian thing, but then....well, this came out instead.
The names and details have been changed enough to qualify as fiction. Please don't try to break the reality boundary I'm setting up here. It's probably a TOU violation for you to do so.
If this one triggers you, you definitely don't want to read what's going to come out next.
---- BEGIN STORY ----
( Read more...Collapse )
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That's about 900 words. About 41,000 more to come. Constructive critique welcomed.
This potential loss that I fear
Would not, in circumstance or effect,
Be more painful than any other loss
I have endured over this long sojourn
But for it being *you* that I would lose
Always, it has been thus, though it took me long to see it
Loss happens, loss has become a way of life for me
Loss itself is a milestone upon every road
Yet each time, I have lost someone unimaginably unique
Each dream of the future crafted together
Each set of special secrets
Known only to Us
Long hours of learning you
Once a nigh-mystical thrill of discovery
Serving only to flay my heart open
In achingly familiar ways
Lover mine, I love you, not like a child
believing in perfect futures
But as a battle scarred veteran
Joining the fray once more
Knowing that some vital piece of me might die
As so many times it has died before.
Love is a phoenix
And We are a winged joy taking flight from ashes
Knowing that if it burns, it will leave not even bones behind
And I face that risk of loss, determined and unafraid
Except for the part where it is YOU that I will lose this time.
- Current Mood:waiting
- Current Location:Atlanta
Spent the morning having brunch with some friends and then played a game of The Quiet Year to stretch our creative muscles before Sarah had to head back to Cleveland.
The basic premise of TQY is to collaboratively generate a world setting and then push it through events week by week for a year. You start with the notion of “A post-civilization society of about 60-80 people who have just finished dealing with The Jackals,” and a blank sheet of paper. You add details and content round-robin, drawing on the paper each time you do. We had to finish our game shortly before the end of summer.
Maggie suggested an underwater setting and drew a dome-encapsuled city. Sarah added a damaged submarine nearby. Justin marked the edge of the map as “The Dry Lands” (only spoken in a raspy voice) and I added a maze-like coral reef structure to another edge of the map. Next, you pick resources, later choosing which are Abundant and which are Scarce. Maggie suggested Rabbits, and then the rest of us added Breathable Air, Fuel and Light — we quickly agreed that we should have plenty of rabbits, but the rest should be in scarce supply.
As the game evolved through Spring, we established that the society was very rabbit focused. Prestige was determined by how Snuggled you were by the rabbits, while those who were rejected by our velvety soft overlords were called The Sad. A brief exploration of the coral reef maze created only more mysteries, which we promptly forgot as we devolved into rabbit-driven politics. Johnny Kribble formed The Squid Riders, an extremely conservative group of soldiers who were hellbent on keeping life EXACTLY the way it was when they were kids. Mindy The More-Snuggled-Than-Anyone-Else was worried about the Rabbit Dome’s structural stability, while others tried to harness the rabbity love of wheels to generate power and light for us.
A distant underwater “lake” of some unknown viscous substance turned out to be a viable fuel source that generated a thick miasma (-breathable air) which would drive rabbits into a murderous frenzy (-rabbit), creating a schism within our population that lead a third of our number to move out into some under-tunnels which were (inexplicably) filled with fresh air and blind strangers who had never even heard of rabbits.
Ignoring our many worldly problems, including mysterious water-dwelling creatures which abducted our Squid Riders, the lack of important resources, and the disturbing ramifications of snuggle-centric longevity technologies, our citizens moved into summer obsessed with insane experiments of the social and genetic varieties! Some people wanted to force some of the rabbits into the newly-occupied tunnels (to integrate those blind people into our culture). Other people clamored for a more coherent and scientifically measurable system of governance. Yet others discovered strange new uses for our felted-fur textiles, including dome maintenance (the fur, when subjected to the smoke from the Blacklake Fuel, hardened in a sturdy, flexible polymer-like material with all sorts of uses). A cache of squid-control devices wreaked havoc on the newly developed Squid Riders by making squid-transport available to everyone!
Four humans emerged from the long-abandoned, long-broken submarine with only the haziest memories of who they were. A faction within our society refused to even let them near a rabbit, out of suspicion, while others protested. Denied even the opportunity to be snuggled by a rabbit, many were unsure of these strangers and their place in society. Unsnuggled, how could we know whether to trust them or not?
As an attempt to cross breed rabbits with squid goes hideously awry, one of The Final Four (“stop calling them that!” screams Maggie) suddenly recalls fleeing from an alien invasion by strange rabbit-like creatures from another planet, but the population is too busy running from The Rampaging Squabbit to pay much heed. Besides, the Bio-Luminescent Fur project and Rabbit-powered Fan Systems are nearing completion!
Sadly, we had to stop here, just as we revealed the maze-dwelling Octo-dudes, and a coalition of anti-rabbit humanists in single-man submarines.
We hope to pick up this game again and finish it off. I’m still trying to find an online collaborative drawing tool that would let me play The Quiet Year over email.
Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. Please leave any comments there.
Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. Please leave any comments there.
If you’re on my facebook feed, you’ve seen me ranting about the inadequacies of my new iPad’s user interface.
~sigh~ The podcast world continues to suffer the same problems that drove me nuts back in 2008, which is the last time I got super excited about New Media(CC). Even the video podcast world suffers from these problems, which I find really surprising — and its really, really clear that none of the major software developers out there have spent any time thinking about the CONSUMERS of podcasts. Like the self-publishing world, the underlying assumption is that this is all pointless narcissism on the part of some much abused-consumer who does not actually produce anything of substance or value. That there is no actual audience for these products, and the money lies entirely in catering to the producers of this content, and not their audience.
And truthfully, this is because the bell curve for these markets does show that the majority of these product consumers are amateurs. But maybe that’s because no one is producing software that encourages them to be anything else.
“You can print photos straight from your phone!”
“Just press record and it autmatically uploads to Youtube when you’re done!”
The difference between an amateur and a professional is that they edit their work. Professional authors have editors and publishers. Movies show different versions to test markets. Computer games beta test their games. Hellfire, even politicians test market their speeches.
Steam now offers fledgling game designers the opportunity sell “Alpha Testing Rights” on their network, bringing in capital, pre-sales advertising and feedback into the game design.
So why do podcasts, podiobooks, self-published authors and so many photogra….so many people who own cameras think they can just send it straight to mass publication, and then convince themselves that the reason their work looks so amateurish is because they’re not any good at what they do.
I cannot find a marketplace for podcasts that will tell you if a series is still active. I can barely find one that let’s you sort out the non-English language ones.
You want to have some fun sometimes, try browsing the iTunes store for Religious/Spiritual podcasts that aren’t about Christianity without using the search bar.
Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. You can comment here or there.
That scene killed her relationship with This Stranger. He reacted far more intensely than he had predicted, wouldn't talk to her about it, and slowly, the relationship ended.
By that winter, Mirage and I were over, too, and JP & I ended up finding solace in each other. We started dating for real after a few months, and she introduced me to some of her friends. Like, mutual friends of hers and TS's. She and I broke up about a year later. We're still really good friends. I see her more than just about anybody.
This Stranger moved on with his life too, presumbly. I ran into him on the street a couple of times, it was always weird.
Two weeks ago, I'm working this convention, and JP asks me if I still want to go to Lakes of Fire, this regional burn event that I'd been wanting to attend, partially for vacation and partially because I'm dating a burner, and I want to be familiar with what her interests are.
Anyway, JP says she had a friend who has a ticket and was looking for a photographer. This friend says they wanted someone to photograph the camp, to put up on the website, because they'd been doing some good stuff with it and they wanted good low light pictures,
which is something I specialize in.
This is all happening in the middle of a show, and it's all going on via my smartphone, snuck in bits of conversation while on the sales floor. I'm not really paying attention. I find out that Sunday, while in the middle of breaking down my booth and saying goodbye to dozens of people, that This Stranger had died on Friday.
It turns out, he was the head organizer of the campsite that was looking for a photographer.
I barely knew this guy and what few interactions we'd had together had not been particularly cool, you know, so, I found out when they were holding the memorial and made sure not to be there, not wanting to step on anybody's toes.
I just found out tonight that what they wanted, but were to.....I dunno, embarrassed, I guess, to ask for, was they wanted me at the memorial to photograph it for his mom. JP had asked me to photograph the event, but there was some stupid errors with the Google Group, and so it was never clear to me if I would have been welcome there by the people actually attending and.....and anyway, that ball got dropped. I dropped that ball.
I also found out last night that he died by his own hands.
And ever since I found that out, I just keep thinking, "I missed the shot."
You can talk about fault, responsibility, judgement, communication skills, whatever you want to talk about to try to make me feel better about this, but the bottom line in my heart of hearts is, I missed the shot. Say whatever you want, the image isn't in my camera, and as Steve Jobs once said, "real programmers ship on deadline."
Gah. I hate suicides. They're senseless and tragic and you're left with all these pieces that don't fit and no way to know why they don't. You want to jam them in.
I've had more than my fair share of stories like this. At least once a semester back in college, I would have to sit on one of my friends until Western Psyche opened for Admissions in the morning. I learned pretty quickly to tell the difference between the kids doing it for attention and the serious life-threatening cases.
From a very narrow perspective, you could say that keeping my best friend from killing herself was partly what caused my "marriage" to fail.
The first guy within my circle of friends who ever succeeded in killing himself, his girlfriend had known he was feeling depressed. She called him up and offered to come over and make dinner for him. He sat there, the phone in one hand and the gun in the other, and calmly discussed dinner plans and helped her make a grocery list. Then he hung up, and called 911 to let them know that in a second, there'd be an unsupervised, loaded weapon in his room, because he could hear children playing outside, and he didn't want any of them to find the gun.
It's weirdly a comfort to me to know that the last sound on earth he heard was the sound of children playing.
There have been other deaths in my life: overdoses, a girl reacting to her sexual violation, a practical joker buddy who died of some bizarre strain of pneumonia because nobody believed he was paralyzed, and on top of those, more than my fair share of suicides.
Each one has been like a hastily discarded puzzle, tiny shards of someone's life left behind on my floor, vague beyond helping.
In 2010, I danced with this guy's girlfriend without asking him, and now he's dead.
In 2003, his door was locked so I didn't bother knocking. Four days later they found him in a cheap motel room in Texas, the needle still in his veins.
In 1995, I had a beer with this guy at an Irish pub. We complained about the Chips'n'curry and now he's dead.
In 1992, I noticed she wore long sleeves in the summer. When she died, she used the blood from her wrists to write "He wouldn't stop" on the bathroom wall.
Is it just me that inexorably confuses my lack of information with guilt? Or is this some innately human tendency?
It's not like I've come any closer to learning The Whole Truth of those friends of mine who haven't passed away. It's just that I notice how little I know about anyone each time the scoreboard gets counted and put away.
- Current Mood:introspective
- Current Location:deep in my head
Booth 439, right behind Ed Beard! Come say hello, I will be here all weekend!
Originally published at Amul Kumar Photography. Please leave any comments there.
Comments
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