I had come to understand how it was that alcoholics and drug addicts (at least in the most rude and base understanding of addictions to help our readers understand how broad and vast the definition of addictions is…alcoholics and drug addicts being merely an entry point… really anyone with a cultivated addiction( sugar, porn-sex, humiliation , redemption etc) reaches a plateau of feeling between absolute loss of hope; worse than an everyday hopelessness or sour attitude; and an acceptance of the loss of free choice, even if the freedom of choice were only choices which would result in harm and degradation to the self (reducing physical and emotional capacities.) That the FEELING of the lose of an ability to FREELY choose a path, a choosing available to a being of a singularity of existence, has been obliterated, is the point of inflection. In this infinitely small moment begins the addiction, which I had discovered this night as one of many mundane nights. It is not important to discuss if there is an actual loss of choice, as such a discussion will never produce a foundational truth. Only perceptions and beliefs are truths, NOTHING else. Through the lens of this awareness, an awareness of the addictions of EVERY human being passing through the filter of this planet’s parkour, I found that moment when we pass off the responsibility of our actions to a proxy. A political/identity/facial front which we believe may excuse us from personal responsibility. Much like we don’t like BEING WATCHED while we exist, likewise, the pressure of observation of some other, on our being in our dirty diapers of remorse, regret and angst/rage, provoke us to the moment of such addictions. Addictions as in repetitive actions where we strive to redeem, as in explain quite logically in no uncertain terms, WHY and I stress again WHY, we perform these acts of self destruction, self-immolation, self-sabotaging. Even if surreptitiously, we DO IT.

We stab ourselves in reckoning a death whilst rejoicing in our life. We want to die to live, as in we want to constantly reinvent ourselves to avoid the ENTROPY:BOREDOM tuple. I go to the Turnpike, an American style biker watering hole, occasionally on Sunday evenings. In it’s quietest night there is still to be had those seeking a respite from their own thoughts, self recriminations, esteem. Vanity and a rage against being told what to do dominate the conversations. They help one another these drunken dead souls, but only to render assistance in the form of a flotation device on a raging ocean swell. For certainly they are one and all in the ocean keeping heads and sometimes only faces above the water. A debt of heartaches, loss of love, past mistakes of faulty decision lie close by as flotsam from the wreckage of perhaps a former seaworthy vessel known to them as “their life.” Free flowing libations lighten the certainty of the dark wall they face and while the laughter and smiles exchange purchase between these souls, the darkness none the less is skulking about on the periphery offering absolute perdition and disintegration. I find a common thread with them in my cluttered office desk and close living surroundings, as if I can not let go of my own jetsam, like a comforter or a baby’s thumb. The piles of cameras which surround me along with books and long playing vinyl albums and reel to reel tapes collected through decades of journey in this beautifully wretched wasteland in a solar system like a tiny crystal globe in the universe. How special it is to feel alive but to beg god to never let me never experience it again. I know this is a futile question, as futile as why I was created to begin with like we all do. A selfish desire of my parents? I think not, as I KNOW must emphatically that I do have a soul, an energy of a sort we have not discovered yet, as if not in phase with the universe we currently inhabit as matter. Then the why becomes this: why is my soul here? How did it coalesce? If there is indeed a force communicating a structure, why is it so? And why does that force exist?

My rugged little FED2 camera, completely mechanically with all it’s warts and limits is my companion today. I only have to listen to her shutter to know the speed. Her rangefinder is clunking and her lens an Industar-61. Such simple yet beautiful glass. When I shoot her, she revels in her pride and her ability. She is rugged and today I took her out to a storm. The muses dance in the high winds and my girl handles the extremes with not a wince or struggle. She is a more humble answer to the argumentative German. She is 60 years old and yet quietly functions without all the pomp and circumstance of arrogance. I’d take her over any other rig, like I’d take a drunken soul from the Turnpike over a self absorbed condescending little socialite prick, like I’d take an addict who admits their an addict over the insincere and untruthful like my ex and her poison doing the devils work. I too am at the wall like my comrades at the Turnpike. It could be the wall of shame or the wall of tears or the wall of security. How can you tell the difference? You can not. I’d rather laugh in a wholehearted way with the drunks then spend a moment with the prim and proper cunts. I’ll take my FED2 girl any day of the week.

I have pushed a broken down car across the highways of Kansas with my father at the age of 12 while the baby cried in the front seat with my mother. I have been humiliated by the system of society and it’s saccharine dances, a system I absolutely loathe. I have been damned and cut. Bled and torn. My life was a life of poverty and want. But how that lens of hunger, suffering and pain have yielded the proofed liquor, the tempered steel sword. The joy of transcendence. I will die in my boots with no recompense from the fates, no fortune of god’s wrathful eye benighted. I am a scourge and a blessing in the same presence. I am ignorant and wise concurrently. I love you and hate you all, over and over again and again and again as one begets another begets (say BEE gets on the second begets.)

I’m addicted to my FED2 girls.