…grey…
...or stories of the square man with a paper hat...
…GREY…
The morning was so old, gray and boring it might have been its own character.
A square man in a paper hat approached the wetland with his pepper braided mustache and proceeded to look, for watching would have required more rest. The world was generous when he let it happen. Not that nothing is outside of physics, more like psychics are an outcome of a world that presents uncertain truths as absolutes. This idea is meandering because that’s the idea. The next time you meander consider youandering instead.
He squinted out at the fog flecked halfway horizon. A mile ahead there are redwood stakes and hollow steel tubes set to show the county’s highest peaks on those clear days where everything is so still and sure and precise you need to look away. He came here for the repetition of going somewhere he hadn’t been before, though the familiarity felt like a used book. He daydreamed about drawing the boarded brick buildings at the dead end of his directionless misturn.
A few days south was where he liked to play bocce. He was competitive during an era remembered most for the checkered Cuban suits he wore. Famously his hobby ended with controversy over a cracked jack, Gergo’s secret pocket of sand, and an aggressive kiss on the governor’s lips where he whispered “chupa isso, porco, garoto” through a coughing grusty cloud of a day’s pay tobacco, rolled by a man called Chico the Child.
The barking humps of fur between the baby sheep and the electric fence look like what happens when you never have an indoor day in your life. Some beasts get it too good. They are never forced to reckon with the knowledge of too many others. The square man with the paper hat had conquered his haunted hours of blaming someone else, replaced the apathy of blaming himself, and outlived the creative possibility of blaming god. His purpose now was only to find out.
Alongst the honking of the awaking geese, the harking sheel of a baby egret chasing its mother, and the raspberry tongued growl of a mud-toeing mallard, he stared at the flag coated man holding a twenty foot marker pole and felt how wet he could be if he put away the fire.
…BENT…
In the back where no one looks, important ideas were noted by folding.
It is the same cold that starts conversation and breaks bones. The kind that twists your tits into salt cut marble. The rest couldn’t be ancient, it looked like reality stars smearing their grease painted sneers under weighted blanket forgettery. The square man in a paper hat began his day as he usually did, kicking different scents of laundry around a snail wood floor, rumple thrashed piles to sort the sense of later.
He had come to find confinement agreeable. A man can only fight himself so many rounds before the judge makes a decision. The body is a plaything. The body is a tool. In this way, as in many others, we know man to be the same as technology, not different.
Today the square man in the paper hat had appointments he wouldn’t keep. He worked on his disappearance. There is a way to describe actions that become mundane, and that way is this. He did what he needed to do. What that is, you aren’t supposed to know. Real secrets are wordless, describing them is dishonest. Yet we know they are out there, understandable as you or I.
The square man in the paper hat made calls from memory to friends who never picked up. He assumed it was anger and misunderstanding denying the connections, but it was probably priorities and timing that stood in the way. To really know someone can be harmful, intimacy imitating intimidation. And so he sat in his box and waited for strangers to look at him with interest, he was willing to let their words be his.
…HOLD…
The square man in the paper hat sits on the bending right corner of an oak bench, a match in his pocket. He goes into his dream not expecting to come out. He notices little, little scratches on the polish of the merlot iron toes, little itches on the unshaved chapped crevice corners of his envelope mirth, little orbits in his oculus, sleep on the wandering notice of finally forgetting, not for good but for sport.
I found him with pencil shaved at his sides, lead slits like the kind that make plastic lemon paper mustaches on clown nosed men at the dime & quarter store.
We’ve been erased, he said, and I believed him, the cold of the disappearing ivy hoisting marsh boards underneath poorly buried power lines at the edge of where a heron rests.
…LONG…
Confusion like an alarm clock, what was I remembering? As if having an idea would fulfill any adjustment the square man in the paper hat desired. He was one of the lucky, mentorless and self led, but he had caught an epic yearning and so stayed sooted in that infernal space that leads many a man to nowhere.
He wrote a list a dozen years ago, yet he never checked a box, only made himself new ones that said the same things. To-doing is the art of the future. He was a relic, wearing conundrums, as most do, for safety. What is the point of being alive if not to notice that you are, and so the weight of so many things on top of him would become character and story. Sharing the lives of others is what let him live for so long.
As the sun tried to cry through a hillfull of clouds he listened to the banshee wails of four crayon orange hat witches swimming past the ruined pier driftwood pelicans scratched at when the day set. The color was cotton candy snocone, the vacuum whir of everyone else sleeping like a yogi on a raft in the river. The square man with the paper hat stretched in all directions and like most conclusions, he ended far from where he started, which is to say he ended here.
…i left the photos above looking large this week, felt like it made more sense with the words the way they are…i also avoided doing my usual thing where i lay out quotes around an idea because i just wanted my words on this one…below are some of my favorite grey photos from the first couple of months of this year, i hope that you enjoy them…in the footenote below i also offer a little more context on what i was thinking about while writing this piece…i know it has been a while since i published, had a weird month where i lost my biggest client while also having to work on offboarding them and it sucked way too much scammooshes of my time…if you are still here reading this i am thankful for that…grey matters…
FOOTENOTES
I was thinking of things as I wrote and edited this (duhhhh). Mostly helpless violence, protest and self immolation. I’ve grown tired of people telling me about what they know and understand, black and white and dictionary reality. I’d rather go crosseyed. That is what it looks like when I get dressed in someone else’s mirror.
Make my self.
I’ve been taking and sharing weekly photos on purpose for a few years now. It feels peaceful and wasteful. I’d like to try taking/making more pointless photos. Practice what I preach so to say. The best nonsense makes no sense, yet all sense has some sense.
Repeat my self.
If I’ve learned one lesson in this life it is to stop making lessons where there are none. This isn’t irony, but a beckon call for invention. Make up a word or a feeling and wear your wrong shoes. Productivity is a grey paper value painted with water.
Undo my self.
Thanks to Coco Liu and Ed Mirago & friends for your feedback on this.
This was quite the surprise. Usually your stuff looks like a middle finger to all the middling grey corporate crap.
I just reacquired my Raspberries album! Go all the way! My heart and face reflex hugely when I consume your photography. I feel instantly lifted. And am reminded of how much beauty is in the world. Details matter, black, white, gray, color. You always capture it well!