This is all verbose juvenile sludge, but its my juvenile sludge, so it goes on the website regardless. Look at my photography or illustration if you want to see someone confident in their work, this is far more vunerable/worse (not that the two are related).
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Photographic Amnesia
Been reading too much Susan Sontag, tried to imitate her voice but shes really academic so I just sound like a dick.
Photographers have a curious amnesia. In music, literature, painting—all these domains maintain an almost religious relationship to ancestry. The musician cannot escape Bach; the poet carries Frost (or if you're my age and insufferable, Kaur or Plath) like a phantom limb. This mythologizing of predecessors does not merely represent nostalgic reverence but establishes the crucial dialectic through which new work interrogates old forms. The inheritance is inescapable.
Photography's practitioners, however, operate in what might be called a perpetual present. Beyond the obligatory genuflection toward Adams' "sublime" landscapes or Weegee's brutal urbanity (references that have calcified into cliché rather than living influence, the hiker who schleps a tripod as if they needed to steady a daguerreotype, the class tourist), most photographers demonstrate a startling indifference toward their aesthetic forebears, often unoriginal but never engaging in an intentional theft or study.
The conventional explanation—that photography consumes its practitioners with technical demands—collapses under scrutiny. The camera, that "democratic machine", requires minimal expertise. One gains a working knowledge of exposure, sharpness, color, in a concentrated half hour. The true complexity lies buried in engineering laboratories, physicists toiling away to make the process as sleek as possible; the technology has been black-boxed, rendered accessible through deliberate mystification of its underlying processes.
Even the analog chemistry, supposedly more craft-oriented, follows manufacturer prescriptions with minor deviations. The darkroom ritual amounts to preforming procedure with modest improvisation—hardly the profound technical immersion claimed in nostalgic defenses of the medium.
There exists, of course, that peculiar affliction endemic to photography—what might be termed "equipment fetishism"—a subspecies of consumerist desire that has colonized vast territories of photographic discourse. The photographer's obsession with pseudo-technical minutiae—sensor dimensions, dynamic range, lens resolving power—marketing buzzwords replacing substantive aesthetic inquiry. Forums and websites proliferate where heated debates rage over incremental improvements in machinery, and yet, these fixations often fade as soon as one has either made the purchase, lost interest, or entered a reactionary fetishization of technical limitation, (the usual suspects being B&W and the aforementioned chemistry). The only individuals who manage to stay engaged in this cycle of acquisition are the older suburbanites whose coffers are filled by way of dentistry or some other bougie pursuit, the equipment itself pristine, unused.
What emerges from this ahistoricism is a population who's work is forever contemporary, perpetually amnesiac, endlessly reproducing banality while convinced of its originality. The same ethereal landscapes and poverty pornography, either documenting the classically beautiful, or naively extending the definition.
Honestly, I don't mind. While I don't necessarily subscribe to the "whitmanequse" equality of every moment—there does exist some hierarchy of subject and composition—so many of the activities I preform are constantly obsessed with some sort of iterative mastery, its nice to have a gambling addiction.
A helpful technique for me to clarify the meaning of a word to myself is to consider its opposites. Lines- inverted
Contour and Value, antonyms disjointed by a linear absolutism, lest marks fade into others.
Discrete demarcations, marked or not. A zebra's photo negative the same figure shifted, absence defining presence, presence absence.
Queues dissolving into scattered points. emptiness the inverse of many? or the singular against the crowd? Depends on your attitude, the additive or multiplicative inverse
The playwright chooses the latter, naturally, always an attempt to scale their voice: not silence, a beat
Connections fray. Dropped calls, snapped clotheslines releasing their burden, garments tumble, mud-stained, free.
Clothing-lines canceled, clearance cubbies.
.Disorder, at the end of the line
/1/ you can suggest an outline with a gradient of shades (values), but if a line must be a line than this gradient is an opposite
/2/ if you have a defined line and then invert the image it the line is still there
/3/ Opposite of a queue is scattered points. Whats the opposite of many? 0 or 1.
rest are self explanatory
peripheral patterns
Everything has an unstable foundation, a noisy floor. My ringing ears, the swirling patterns against my shuttered eyes (phosphenes, they call them), the gain of a microphone and the haze on a lens. Our subconscious automatically subtracts most of it from our perception, and we’re equally harsh when we tune our instruments. Low cuts, high cuts, slicing the pie into the narrow sectors of essential information, expected results. Consequently, always suppressing more than just the noise. How much do I ignore that I’d rather actually observe? a funny joke at the end of the table, a cry for help drowned by the whines and rumble of construction. What patterns are so consistent that I mistakenly brush them off? “Oh, don’t worry, they’ve always been like that.”
Idk, I feel like I miss a lot
April 6th 2025
April 6th 2025
My father turned 50 yesterday. Odd feeling. Half a century. My grandparents always said that they'll know they're truly old when their kids turn 50 and in the same manner I now feel closer to fully grown. My mother actually turned 50 first but I was in seattle on a day trip, flown in by my now girlfriend with 4 dollars in coins on my person and a whole lot of hope. It felt different though, my mother is a bit of an ageless entity, both in appearance and in the sense of some universal force. Maybe that's a sign im still far from my initial assertion, having maintained a mythologized maternity, but i dont care about the :once youre old enough youll just realize that your parents are people to" The woman is too omnipotent to humanize. Im joking of course, but all of this is relative to my father, who in many ways has been more of an older brother. My bio grandpa died young and so it seems my fathers paternity is more "drawn from memory" (in the way you might describe Micheal Zegen -> Jake Gyllenhaal) cracking and splintering into all other states of emotional connection, like you toook a prisim to the beam and plucked out a few of the colours, extracting essential elements and leaving imperfect approximation. Anyway on the subject of age and aging -> the aesthetics of age, I feel as though most in my family have embraced father time with, at least, a reluctant side hug, (The strength of this existential greeting inversely proportional to its daily counterpart . Some of my aunts in Miami had gone a little nuts, but theres an understanding regarding the temporality of silicone and saline, most of them have given it up). Today though, I saw what happened when you throw away a side hug and replace it with a restraining order . Skin pulled back as tight as to reveal every movement of sinew and striation, beautiful only during brief moments of serene static. (funny how that word is an auto-antonym). A smile so bright and perfect it seemed as if it belonged to a predator that swallows its prey whole, never having toiled under the abrasions of seeds or bone.
short story
short story
The ground was rather dark—a hydrated, mushy brown—the type that you could stare into as it engulfed the tread of your boots and then some, riding up past the red-painted belly of a ship, dangerously edging up upon the planned state of affairs. The shoe's uppers were waterproof; I had sprayed them with one of those lacquers of questionable safety, off-brand RAIN-X, hoping my T-shirt pressed against my mouth would suffice as enough of a shield against a shield.
The mud gave way to concrete as I finally got back onto the sidewalk, a street large enough that someone had decided you might actually need to walk from one place to another. My car had finally crapped out a few days prior—some old shitbox that I'm surprised didn't kill me, always leaking something or producing great billowing gray clouds—spring weather minus all the green, painted red. In any case, the walks were long, but no matter. The peace and quiet was necessary, and given the lack of glass in my back passenger window, the exposure to the elements was done in stages, weaned off the security of shelter.
That window didn't shatter so much as surrender—a splintered constellation birthed from a single determined point of impact, the glass seemingly holding its form in defiance for a brief moment before collapsing inward like a tired argument. Or at least I would like to think it did, some final moment of agency against its aggressor. I didn't actually see it happen. It happened on a Sunday, though it could've been any day, really—time having lost its rigid demarcations before the building where radiators hissed secrets in Morse and the fluorescent lights replied, flickering back in epileptic protest, occasionally whispering lines from Shakespeare or Polish obscenities. Kind of a monkey-typewriter sorta situation.
Mrs. Abernathy would swear it was the ghost of her old man, though she'd say this while clutching her rosary beads, the plastic clicking against her nicotine-stained fingernails like tiny insect mandibles. The landlord blamed "neighborhood elements," a euphemism as transparent as the window once was—which is to say, slightly opaque—as the neighborhood was overwhelmingly white. The truth was surely stranger; the vehicle was clearly not worth robbing... I plodded on home.
The stairwell greeted me with its familiar symphony of creaks—a five-note melody that had become as reliable as a metronome, yet augmented with the squish squish squish of my not quite so waterproof shoes, marking each ascent to my third-floor sanctuary. The hallway was a tunnel of identical doors, save for Mrs. Abernathy's, which had always been adorned with seasonal wreaths that never quite aligned with the actual season. Today's featured faded plastic poinsettias, despite April's insistence outside.
I noticed the silence first.
Mrs. Abernathy's television—normally broadcasting game shows at volumes that suggested a determined resistance to hearing loss—was conspicuously mute. The ambient hum of her ancient air purifier, which she swore kept the "particles" (enunciated pejoratively) at bay, was absent. Even the perpetual argument between her cat and whatever demons it perceived in the corners had ceased. My key slid into my lock with the usual reluctance, but I paused mid-turn, attention caught by a thin ribbon of something dark seeping beneath her doorframe. Not water—too viscous, too deliberate in its advance across the worn hallway carpet. It possessed that particular rusty quality that the body recognizes before the mind can properly name it.
I knocked. Three times. The sound fell flat against the door, as if the space beyond had become infinite, unable to travel through the vacuum beyond.
The landlord took seventeen minutes to arrive — I counted each second, watching the dials on the small clock at the end of the hallway advance with indifferent precision. Several hours off of course, only thing of any consequence this moment and the next. He spoke little, fumbling with his master key, a man accustomed to leaky faucets and late payments stunned by the reality of genuine tragedy.
The door swung open to reveal Mrs. Abernathy splayed across her floral armchair like a discarded marionette. Her rosary beads and various capsules were scattered across the linoleum—tiny plastic galaxies against a universe of blood that had pooled and begun its slow pilgrimage toward the hall. Her television remote remained clutched in one hand, a warrior entombed clutching the hilt of its sword.
The room smelled of copper and White Diamonds perfume...
so it goes.
Two days passed before I could sleep, missing the noise emanating from her room like a boy sent off to the countryside, some unfortunate Shanghainese schoolboy tilling the Gobi, the only distraction from my thoughts the soft hum of locusts and swirling winds.
The landlord had already posted a "For Rent" sign on her door—entrepreneurial pragmatism recovering faster than human empathy. I'd caught him earlier scrubbing at the hallway carpet, his knees pressed into the wet fibers as he worked the stain with visible discomfort. He scrubbed with the uncertain rhythm of someone following instructions they hoped they'd never need again. The carpet remained discolored—the shadow of occurrence reduced to less morbid explanations, a spilled drink perhaps, presentable enough for prospective tenants who wouldn't know to look for ghosts in the fibers.
"The nephew's coming tomorrow for her things. Says doesn't want the furniture.". he gestured broadly towards the unit, as if id want to adopt the traumatized Lay-Z-Boy. He stood, knees cracking like wet kindling. "Never even met her."
I ran into the nephew later as he cradled a large box and a pet carrier, the cat inside delivering a chorus of hisses: an aggravated snake, a bitten tire. The nephew himself was a little older than me, salt and pepper hair, slightly overweight, outfits sourced from the typical wellsprings of male indifference. Costco flannel, a white undershirt that managed to appear faded despite a complete lack of color. I struggled to imagine what objects he must've grabbed from her flat, their Venn diagram more a discount bicycle, two circles tenuously connected. Mrs Abernathy was many things but never boring, vehemently catholic except for the Ouija board stowed away upon the refrigerator, reserved only for when tired by the futility of Christian prayer. Its purpose, to speak to her beloved. Not her late husband, but the fleeting memory of a truck driver who wooed her once, twice, thrice as he was passing through I-90, meeting an unfortunate end due to a common break failure in the Mack B2x-E. Her consolation prize was a gruff veteran from some unspecified conflict. Mrs. Abernathy usually spoke about things in general terms, "The War", "My Show", "The Store", the last two of great important to her. "My show" was old reruns of Love boat, media which had become progressively rarer as time marched further from the season 10 finale, the few VHS recordings in her possession worn with use. "The Store", a K-Mart from which she had raided the holiday clearance aisle for, given the volume of items, several decades. Especially represented was Lent memorabilia, as if she could counteract the abuse of her vices, Menthol Kools and Rosé, through a strong material turnout.
--end of line---
What my dreams look like
Homogeneous uniformity
Like groundhog days or dead horses
Papal hymns, repeated verses
Isn't it funny?
Escapes wasted
“what has”
Not what could’ve or should've or would’ve or wouldn't have…
Why bother really, with all future locations?
Suppositions and Propositions and Dispositions
Bark-in’ general*
Obsession with advancement
Brittle little coverings
Can I not be left-
Bereft of prescience, of foresight
To my myopic deposition?
*bark in general (brittle little coverings), Barking general, as in officer shouting orders,( obsession with advancement(
Short Story i had to write for English
He sits imprisoned in a foreign land, unknown vegetation under his feet, prickly, with a patronizing hostility, punishing those unaware of what is and what isn't. Men converse in strange tongues, lashing at each other with fricatives and guttural sounds from the deep recesses of their throats, ironically, likely uttering mundane actions, pleasantries, or anything uncharacteristic of the harsh wall of noise emanating from their mouths. The climate is cold, yet with a powerful sun, such that the world is momentarily plunged into an ashen winter depending on the clouds overhead, a nebulous reel of film modifying god's sunnier projections. The boy walks quietly along the white walls that enclose him with a languid expression on his face. He watches the other members of his entrapped clade toiling for as much as he can bear, then tries to dream as much as possible in an attempt to escape from the desolate reality that restrains him.
He has no memory of a prior experience, or from whence he could have come, possessing only the most rudimentary understanding of the local vernacular, enough to express desire for elementary substances: water, food. The other members, despite their suffering, care for him with a pitiful curiosity, and the wardens turn a blind eye to the ghost which encircles the world.
Once, in the boy's scanning of the walls which enclose them, he discovers a particular dark patch on the expanse of usually uniform concrete. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small painted strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. They speak of hope and splendor, of sorrow and tragedy, of love and hate, words that feel familiar yet unattributable, like the blurry recollection of a face one might have met, a reflection in water. Fragments of great tomes and scripture, some extensive record of a humanity reduced and flattened to some region of scrawled text, things past. Picking up a charred stick from the ground, he inscribes a reply, and begins the trudge to the glorious goal of slumber.
Over the course of years, they engage in their quiet conversation, leaving messages for the other to read. His correspondent writes of what had been, and he writes of what continues to be. As the boy becomes imbued with the context of history, of himself, he begins to age, flattened time expressing itself within the body, the awakening of some ancient, dormant pathogen. The boy, now the man, becomes more extensive with the length of his replies, the wall covered in miles of symbols, as if some mythological spider had danced around the perimeter with brushes attached to its legs, eventually becoming so densely overlapping that the walls seem to be entirely covered in random noise, only intelligible by those who constructed it.
The man becomes obsessed with discovering the identity of his correspondent with the zeal of an individual who finally tastes what they have missed, severed serene solitude. Denying himself his once prized sleep more and more, hoping to catch them in the act. Only when he finally succumbs to exhaustion does he discover another portion of the wall layered in barely intelligible script, and once he finally musters the ability to remain vigilant throughout the entire course of the night, the replies cease entirely.
The man’s insomnia becomes permanent, try as he might to atone for prior obsessions. As the mind becomes more and more exhausted, he begins to forget the meaning of things, the name of the grass beneath his feet, the food he eats, and finally, most destructively, how to interpret the expansive mass of black carbon before him. Reduced to an infantile state, he finally sleeps once more.
The boy wakes from his slumber confused, no memory of prior experience, or from whence he had come. He settles into a kind of routine, the other members caring for him with a pitiful curiosity despite their suffering, and he begins to explore the perimeter of the gray walls before him. Once, as he walks, the boy spots a lighter patch in the usually uniform wall. Upon closer inspection, the patch comes into focus as a matrix of small carved strokes, and upon even closer inspection, the boy becomes surprised by his ability to comprehend such a random assortment of symbols. He picks up a rock and begins to scratch in a reply…
The walls are covered and uncovered by the shadows of expression, clouds overhead passing through the light of the world, marked and erased by an eternally restless figure.
False Excuses. The following is kinda true, an amplified expression of teenage anger.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, and certainly not me. My character is my own creation- the thoughts, words, and actions said and done to me interpreted in my own patent manner, and yet the subunits of those perceptions are borrowed, their complexities divisible into common, shared elements, inherited genetically, socially, culturally. My grandfathers were awful men, by all stretches of the imagination. Arrogant drunkards, two of them criminals (in the legitimate sense of the word), the third a soldier, and entirely absent in the raising of their children. The worst was my mother’s father, a Hobbesian anarchist: nasty, brutish, and short. As such, she developed a hatred for the virile latino, Ulibarrí’s horse. Quick to anger and quicker to strike, patriarchal, womanizing, the universal constants of the struggling man. And yet, she married its mirror, masqueraded as a different flavor. Absent are the beatings, the confinement, the overt disrespect, but in their place: verbal lashings, a refusal to help pawned off as ‘inability’, and a hidden mistress. The origins of my existence are not love. The label of love was given to the fetishization of a foreign woman and escapism, packaged by gauze, traumatic adhesive, and delivered with an unconscientious acceleration. Of course, can anyone blame my father? Can anyone blame me? When does the child, dominated by its progenitor, make the transition to an autonomous body? Does it ever? Parental determinism extrapolated out from an original sin, the devil's serpent, Quetzalcoatl’s blood. Yet we know it has agency, almost from the very beginning, it utters sentences never heard before, has natural conceptions of fear, or love, unlearned intuition. Or are those yet another form of inherited trait, evolutionary instinct.
I, naturally, attempt to distance myself from those who came before me. The pendulum’s swing, the Hegelian reaction, the third law pair. I lack the previously necessary adaptations of fiery passion, obstinate stubbornness, abrasives generated for the purpose of increasing friction, barely holding on. My disposition: agreeable, at times to the point of sheepishness. My appearance: softer. My romantic and sexual preferences on the periphery of the northern American zeitgeist, and certainly that of conservative-catholic-hispanics. Through the media I consume, I have attempted to find alternative role models for a more positive sort of masculinity, reading, watching and listening to all manner of different perspectives on what it means to be a man. In mere moments I encounter more varieties of opinion through the modern shifting kaleidoscope of information than my ancestors might have experienced in lifetimes. Hence the problem. Infinity equivalently comprehensible to 0 within the human psyche, indeterminate forms, the internet's firehose overexposing mental connections to null, to paralysis. What remains then, is the constant, generational influences. My relationships are consistently short flivers of sensationalism, antiquated biases are replaced with modern misconception. Youthful revolution exactly that, cyclical motion.
As I begin to grow into my body, to graduate from an androgynous, amorphous, state into a more clearly defined figure, the distrust remains, but directed at the self, insecurity, generationally sharpened to a point. Muscular definition derived from a late interest in athletics alien to skin and bone, the use of my anatomy upon another giving the sensation of self-violation. Introspection, like invasion.
These are the rivets of my armor, personal reasons, explanations and validations that construct my overdominant adaptations, useful only within the environment for which they were created. Your tone of silent anger, your tact, your political machinations of discontent were entirely alien forces. You are older than me, yes, but even if we were equal in age you would be still , wisdom a function of lived experience. Similar upbringings, but you have not hidden behind failure.
The genesis of our argument was inconsequential, but I augmented its impact to an extreme degree, expecting reciprocal retaliation, as if I was playing an adversarial game. You looked upon me, a bitch unwilling to engage in the “playful” melodrama of her pups, an older brother doing schoolwork. For all my attempted auto-interrogation, I have only attempted to externalize the blame, to translate it upon another medium, avoiding personal responsibility at all costs. Even this admission is yet another way to accomplish the above, selfish abuse to absolve a conscience. Such a ritual occurs periodically, the indulgent desire for reconciliation, a mind so egotistical that it believes acknowledgement of its own wrongdoing as ultimately effective, and the acknowledgement of the acknowledgement even more so.
Eye trouble
lately my right eye has been bothreing me a tad, a bit of an ache, some persistent sensation where its like somone has wrapped their greasy little paws around it and given it a squeeze, like an actresses shoulder in Harvey weinstiens office (the oscars are on). I think its the screens, although im not sure. Cant seem to quit the habit, even with watch history turned off to nerf the algorithmic reccomendations. I was supposed to study today but instead all I did was watch a george clooney movie and aimlessly drive around atlanta, not being able to stop anywhere because my card was cancled by my father for goiing to the zoo and now I cant pay for parkigl plus the whole damn cityy was locked up because of the marathon Todays videos an explination of the war in ukraine, an "essay" on the goonification of culture, amongst other things. Ill be moderately annoyed if this eye problem is actually something thats gonna be consisetent long term and or lead to some sort of legitimate degradation in my vision, because ffs if one of the last things my right eye ever saw was, not the setting sun or my mothers face or some rare species of bird, but a video entitled the goonificatioon of culture, i might just go and poke out the left eye aswell.
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