The river flows backward 1
They say “the devil is in the details.” He truly is, you know? It’s when I’m wrapped up in the minutiae of things that I find myself closer to the edge, trying to find some comfort out of the intricacies we value in life. Certain books, a submissive collar, a ballgag, a tube of lipstick: what prefigures my attention? One of my favorite authors, Darcey Steinke, spoke to the ennui of detail at the beginning of her novel Suicide Blonde: “Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips? An acidy scent ribboned the pawned tub, fingering up the shower curtain..” It’s always in the details, the minutiae that briefly distracts but ultimately delivers the killing blow called “irony.” Irony is the devil’s cudgel. Steinke again: “Taking another sip of bourbon, I put on the plastic gloves and began parting my hair at the roots. As the dye snaked out there was a faint sucking sound, like soil pulling water, and I wondered: if I were brave enough to slit my wrists would I bother to dye my hair?”
What does one do with those moments of solitude, when everything is weighed and measured and comes up lacking? I sit here in the silence and ponder such things always. I’m 46-years old going on 47. While I feel I’ve been a lot of places in my life and done a lot of things, I feel as if my life didn’t start my life until 40. In those fleeting memories of what passed before, the opportunities blown that have created this solitary existence, I find myself being what I detest. I detest those with a sense of entitlement, and yet I find myself miserable because I want the dream of the gorgeous, intelligent ‘young’ other. Want. Need. Desire. I am the sum total of frustrated desire. My photography is supplement to your absence, the substitute addiction as A.A. would be to alcohol. I graft, transfer on to you everything that’s pressing my consciousness. Maybe it’s unfair, but it’s my modus operandi.
“Specks – specks all over the third panel, see? …” This is another of those beginnings from Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama.
It’s always in the details.
