when your tide rushes over me
there's only one
way to figure out
will ya let me drown
oh will ya let me drown?

The Power of a Photograph

 Art is limitation. The essence of every picture  is the frame. - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

 A way of certifying experience, taking  photographs is also a way of refusing it—

 by limiting experience to a search for the

 photogenic, by converting experience

 into an image, a souvenir. - Sontag, On  Photography

 I photograph to find out what something will  look like photographed. - Garry Winogrand

HONY (Humans of New York) is this guy who takes great photographs of people. Each person featured on HONY is generally photographed alone. It's shown me how close-up shots of a person effectively alter your perception of him. Look at the man pictured above. I suspect that if I saw him in a crowd, I'd just see a disheveled old man. I'd avoid eye-contact. But now I see him and only him. I'm forced to reconsider him. I see a man with tired and sunken eyes that have seen a lot. And s that a suspicious or amused face? Dunno But I do know I am interested.

I guess you'd think I see him better now that I see him as an individual. True.

But seeing him alone also causes me to glorify him. Now a man wearing a colorful turban is a wise man, a sage full of counsel and exotic experiences. Oh, he doesn't have a shirt on? What a simple-minded man who doesn't care what others think of him! What a great simple life! Look at those gaunt shoulders. Must get lots of exercise. I should ask what he eats to stay in shape. 

In Which I Avoid the Elephant in The Room

• I look forward to this weekend. For months now, I have been heated, poured into different molds, reconstituted, cooled for a time, and then heated and poured out again. I gotta find myself again. Trees and hiking and shit have always helped me do that. Here's to you, nature.
• Each time I walk into a courthouse I am immediately smacked with two impressions: 
• (1) How important this stuff is. I walk into a courthouse and see the woman who is about to be evicted from her apartment, and I know that lawyers like me will decide where she sleeps tomorrow. 
• (2) How self-absorbed lawyers are. We are suit and tie society. We flash our secure ID passes as we enter, avoiding eye-contact with non-lawyers. But we can tell they notice us, and we relish in that.
• The court rooms are dingy, and even the ones with polished mahogany desks have gum stuck underneath. Cases are decided flippantly, clerks play favorites, and judges who have eaten breakfast are kinder to plaintiffs than those who have not. I have taken a look inside the sausage factory, and it is not pretty.

---------------------------------------------------Interlude-------------------------------------------------

                            

• These observations are really just pour-overs from observations about us people in general. You are forever so self-absorbed that you have no idea what you've done to someone, and your fading memory lies to you. And the most tragic thing of all is when the good memories flicker and burn out with no one to think of them anymore, though they are the reason we are where we are now. 
• The unnoticed thing about endings is how they precede beginnings.
• What if life throws you lemons and you have no pitcher to pour the lemonade into? Or what if instead of throwing you lemons, life just throws you lemonade? Everyone loves lemonade until it gets poured on them. 

Carolyn: I need you to do some research for me on the “volunteer exception” to the NY Labor Law.

20 minutes later….

Finney: There is a “volunteer exception” to the NY Labor Law.