A diary entry

I never know what to do with all the mood swings in a day. And I can’t understand why, as each passes quickly over me, I feel compelled to write about them all. Ideas, ideas, ideas, all day long. Yet every night when I sit down here to crank out something insightful, profound, funny, or beautiful, nothing comes.

So I read more blogs or I research film scanners online until I’m so tired I can barely blink, and I’ve wasted the evening once again. As you may have noticed from that last post, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this space. I’m not sure why. The same goes for my photography. I keep envisioning projects, like I’m trying to concentrate my efforts in a single direction. Again, no idea why.

Maybe it’s just another part of the process of being out of school, of shifting one’s life from the organized chaos of college to the unstructured focus of a career. Couple this with my strange desire to capture the entirety of life, to put it to record simply for the sake of preservation — which is odd for a guy who thinks nostalgia is useless, if not harmful, and tradition just an excuse to be close-minded; I suppose they differ fundamentally from memory — and I think it’s obvious that I’m working at opposing goals.

Tonight for instance, there was some political flim-flam that I wanted to talk about, which I can’t even remember now. Then I was reading one of my little Phaidon books on Ed van der Elsken and wanted to write about the joie de vivre in his work. He is another one of those photographers who make me want to ditch what I am doing and travel around the world taking artistic documentary black & whites, even though I know no such job exists. I’ve spent the last two days at work training my replacements as fill-in cops reporters (praise the Lord), and I considered discussing how strange it is to tell someone twice your age what to do. (There was also the guy who called in to work today to ask, “I was just checking if that was you guys who tracked down [a missing person]? Or was that the FBI?” The feds found him in Sacramento, apparently.) After work, a strange, lonely melancholy hit me as I drove home … but it passed once I got there. Too many starting points and not a one of them would solidify.

Ah, well, enough idle contemplation. Maybe it all boils down to a song lyric:

I want so badly to believe that there is truth that love is real,
And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.

I guess things will figure themselves out.

If I really want to get productive, I should forgo Austin for a weekend and get firmly settled in Temple. Right now my pictures are still leaning against the walls and my friend Jason’s sketches are in stacks waiting to be sorted and framed. There is art scattered across my floor, but the only thing I’ve hung is a clock.