Myopic Midnight Special / Assembly Area / Discuss

Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy says:

Don't you love it when somebody addresses himself in the second person? Wondering if that's worse than doing so in the third?

OK, here's the plan. The initial shots are technically, not going to be the best. The focus of my blog is going to be life during that time from when the sky starts going dark to when it's lighting up again - the night, with a little taken out of the day at either end. On those nights when I find myself sleepless, what do I go out and see and encounter or what, ten hours later, do I find myself imagining that I've encountered.

Sleepless does not mean clueless; I live in Chicago, and Chicago has a real crime problem, one of which I am well aware. I'm not going to walk the city alone at night with a real camera, because I know that I might very well come back at the end of the night without that camera. On my own, I'll bring a one shot or a pinhole camera or something else homemade, that won't look like it's worth stealing.

Eventually, I hope to find or assemble a group of people to go wandering those dark streets with, during those hours, accepting that in doing so, there's going to be a little give and take. Maybe there was this one street I looked down and absolutely had to capture as the sky just started to take on a hint of blueness, but the others were dead set on photographing the crowd coming out of Mother's to that waiting paddywagon somebody had just texted one of us about, and we had a preset route, anyway ... and stuff happens. Sorry, maybe next time.

Dreams, nightmares, booze, snacks, a little jazz and poetry followed my more booze, more than some would have me drink, but never enough to make me cool in the eyes of others, because I never chug. I sip slowly, no more quickly than my body can metabolise the tasty poison trickling into it, as I nibble a few kosher tapas - before going off to listen to a little more jazz and poetry, and seeing if the guy playing the robot has gone to sleep, yet. As I wish I could, but at least I had the sense to keep the tea kettle cold.

I write about the experience, tell a few stories - some of them true, others less so but, I hope, having some of the character of truth (magical realism), and then fall off to sleep. That's what I'll be writing about, hoping that, sooner or later, you'll see that this all made more sense than it seemed to, but no more sense than it should have.



Originally posted at 12:41PM, 15 September 2009 PDT (permalink)
Myopic Midnight Special / Joseph Dunphy edited this topic 33 months ago.