Calendimaggio on Flickr.
A swinging ride at the Fairfax County fair a few years ago. I like how you can spot some of the riders in the trails. It gives it a haunting looking, as if they are ghosts in the ride.
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This one was taken out near Dulles airport at a place called Sully Plantation. Unsurprisingly, the DC area is full of historic places: monuments, old plantations, battlefields. The longer I live here, the more I can understand how some of this stuff just becomes the background of our daily lives. I drive past this park several times a week on the way to the gym and probably 85% of the time I don’t give it a second thought. This cabin reminds me of the Coen Brother’s movie, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is one of my favorite movies. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go away, deep into the wilderness, and spend a few weeks in a place like this. Strip everything away and live for a moment again on Nature’s time. And then I remember that I’d have to cut my own firewood and I figure living with modern conveniences isn’t so bad.
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel, our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt.
Graham Greene - The Human Factor
Washing windows in Minneapolis.
I loved this little scene when we came upon this couple. It was in Venice, one of the most romantic cities in the world. They were hugging, in love, l’amore. I walked past, snapped off a few frames, and walked on thinking that I had the classic Venice shot. Until I got home and took a closer look and it broke my heart. The girl, and they were young so I’ll call her a girl, was so in love in that moment. In a way, she’s the platonic ideal of love. She embodies every ounce of goodness that is love, every joy, every fraction of every second that exists of love. When you look at her all you can feel is the love that she feels towards him. Him? Look in the lower right. See his left hand? I saw that and couldn’t have been pushed further across the emotional spectrum. I feel sorry for her.
This was one of my favorites from the trip, although you can’t immediately identify it as Italy - specifically Florence. The scooters may be a give-away but some urban areas in the US have higher use of scooters too. I like the story that seems to appear in this photo. Is he running away? Where’s he going?
What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does it eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does.
John Jeremiah Sullivan - Pulphead: Essays
