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As you can see below this post is tagged with the phrase “daily photo”. Which means that it’s part of my practice of taking pictures every day. What is not readily apparent is that while there is at least one pictuer a day, because of the format restrictions I’ve come up with for this blog there is also usually one post per day, with only one picture in that post. So at the most, one picture gets published per day. But for each that gets used, there is at least one other that gets taken and processed and uploaded to my photobucket account. There’s quite a few of them over there that haven’t been posted yet, and I don’t quite know what to do with them.

For example, this was taken the same day as the above image. Why did I think that the first one would make more sense as the lead off? I couldn’t tell you. For the most part the relationships between what I’m writing about and the images I’m posting are oblique, but I know that when the time comes to figure out a post there’s always one picture that seems to make the most sense. And sometimes that picture choice eliminates the topics for the post altogether.

For example, today I’m tempted to write about the odd habit that I’ve noticed in certain women to continually pat and smooth their hair. I see them do it on the subway often, women who’s hair has been coiffed into swooping bangs and straight sides: they form their hand into a kind of mitt, thumbs opposed to all of their other fingers which are held rigidly parallel; then they grasp the hair and slide it between the the thumb and fingers. I suppose the grip is to keep the nails from snagging the hair, and the hair has been straightened in some way, so the smoothing is to keep it all straight and aligned. There is something that reads as so considered and technical and yet unconscious in the gesture that it marks for me the extent to which these women feel observed and displayed, how the regime of appearance has become so utterly internalized. The other night I watched the “Housewives of NJ” and a couple of the women there did it frequently, more so when they were agitated. Many times a preen can be a mark of power, a subtle amping up of allure: think of Mae West adjusting her furs or rolling her shoulders. But this gesture just seems trapped to me. Trapped in a constant state of disrepair.

Now have I taken any pictures lately that I could place alongside that? I think not.

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How bad do you have to be as a business owner when you offer both bikinis AND wifi and you can’t keep the place open?

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Today is my blogiversary. Seven years ago I began complaining here about digital culture, and I’m still a crabby guy. Today it’s a bit harder to know what to write about, and to make the time to do it. I’m happy for the community it’s brought me and the many ways it’s helped me stretch what I do. I never thought that I would be a person who insisted on having a camera with them all the time, or that I would know half of the people I know here now.

In some ways this activity has drifted far from the “sitting in the cafe with my notebook” origins of all my journal keeping and we don’t yet know what the cumulative effect of all of these millions of self revealing documents will be. Here’s a time where more people than ever are leaving a record of their thoughts and impressions, but doing so in a medium that is shockingly fragile from a historical viewpoint: barely more lasting than speech.

Perhaps it’s fitting that thought, which begins as patterns of energy, should travel the world the same way. The printed page provides us with an illusion of continuing past the end of our bodies. Very few artifacts will ever survive the demise of this planet and most of us have had no hand in them. I make art objects in the hope of providing pleasure and possibilities for other people, but do they really need to stick around physically? Framed that way, I should probably lighten up. None of the things I fret about here matters all that much. Think I’ll crab on for another year.

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Look what has appeared down the street from my office: one of those it-doesn’t-matter-how-much-rent-we’re-paying-for-this-space-because-the-whole-damn-space-is-really-an-advertisement-designed-to-rebuild-a-flagging-brand “product experience” restaurant/gift shop things. I took a quick look inside and had to flee, because it was packed, and utterly chaotic as a visual environment. I also took a look at the menu and decided that the various “treats” on offer weren’t worth either the half hour it would take to get them or the five bucks they cost.

Pop-Tarts fall squarely into that category of foods that I actually like less than I think I do. After that tickle of nostalgia around the thought that “hey I buy my own food, I could have Pop-Tarts if I want”, I realize that all things being equal, I actually don’t want. But I really did grow up in a simpler time, because it’s shocking to me that my mom used to send me off to school with two chocolate Pop-Tarts in my gut as breakfast (sorry Mom!). I didn’t complain then and I’m not complaining now, but damn, that was some dodgy nutritional thinking we were all engaged in then.

The other thing that is really odd to me about this “retail environment” is that the dark lighting and pseudo-industrial air of furtive indulgence immediately reminded me of the fact that the storefront currently occupied by the Pop-Tart World used to be occupied in the 70′s and 80′s by a concern called Peep Land where adult products of all sorts were sold and where men drifted through the back booths in search of something a bit racier than a toaster pastry. I couldn’t help superimposing those two time frames in my mind and the floors started to feel distinctly sticky. Thus, my hasty retreat.

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Off to Jersey for the weekend. Here’s hoping for fun and relaxation. I think I’ve packed everything I need.

Lot of walking around yesterday which led to some good photos. I’m feeling more at peace.

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Tried once again to solve the problem of wifi collapse on the eeepc: I got my hands on a dvd drive and did a system restore back to the factory original settings. No go – which leads me to conclude that it is indeed a hardware problem, not a software one. It looks like I will need to move on and consider a replacement.

It’s easy to get bummed out about these sorts of things: when I have a machine that I enjoy using, especially one that I shopped for for almost a year before I purchased it, I get attached. It’s also disconcerting how wedded I am to having a laptop at hand every minute of the day. That’s not exactly a good thing. Some how the machine becomes symbolic of all the work I could get done, and without it I feel cut off. It’s simply a perception, not the way things really are. But there you go.

Yesterday as I was outside picking up sculpture supplies and feeling a little bereft, I decided that I’d treat myself to a sustaining meal instead of my usual rushed and thoughtless eating. I went over to Souen, one of my favorite simple, non glamorous restaurants. It’s macrobiotic and I always feel much more emotionally together once I’ve eaten there, even though, as Dominick has reminded me, the food there is all stuff I could easily cook for myself. But once again I was thwarted: the location is being renovated. Good for them and all, but I was really hoping for my Planet Platter with extra daikon. So it was salad at Chopt instead. It ain’t easy to be a crusty old techno hippie these days.

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For those who are wondering, here’s the new Friday the 13th tattoo. Looks to be healing up nicely. I was a little worried because it spent much of yesterday dangling in the Delaware River and out in the sunlight, but there seems to be little ill effect.

I was out in the river because I was on my first tubing trip, with twelve pals. The water was shallow and calm, the sky was clear, and although there were a lot of lines to get to everything, it was still a great day.

Once I got home however, I found that something seems to have happened to knock out the wifi on the eeepc. I spent much of today trying to diagnose the problem, with no success. I can’t tell if it’s hardware or software. I tried enabling the wlan through the bios control panel, but it isn’t even showing up. The next step would seem to be a total system reinstall from my original system disks, but that would require an external dvd drive that I don’t have. After two years has the netbook bit the dust? I’m glad that I got the second generation that had the ethernet port enabled, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to post this right now. Problem is that most of what I do on it is dependent on wireless access, especially now that I’ve taken to running Jolicloud on it. More diagnosis tomorrow.

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Another Friday the 13th, another day of $13.00 tattoos at Daredevil Tattoo. I missed a couple of chances last year so this time I would not be denied. I was not alone in that determination however, and even though I got there an hour and fifteen minutes before opening time, there were already thirty five people signed up ahead of me. (And there would have been more if my friend Mike hadn’t been there twenty minutes before me and put my name down. Thanks Bud!). We were waiting for a hour before the flash of the day went up, provoking the press to the window you see here.
I didn’t hit the chair until nearly 2pm, Mike having departed a bit earlier after deciding that there wasn’t anything on the sheet that he was interested in. Luckily, I got stuck by Michelle, one of the owners of the shop we had a quick talk about the neighborhood, my other ink, and laughed over this previous episode. One of the reasons I love going back to Daredevil is that they’ve managed to keep the shop relaxed and low on the attitude.
As usual, the time in the chair was over a bit too quickly and I was back outside, looking at the ever lengthening line, and quietly buzzing from endorphins. I’ve a nice little addition to my collection and a pleasant bit of pain on my leg.

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…I was irredeemably late. I woke somewhat ashamed of it, turned and tried to find sleep again. Can your credibility die in a dream?

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