Analog

Lately it seems - for good or ill - I'm compelled to experiment with my own image. Questioning what it means to have this form. Who or what is this person who appears this way in the camera's eye? Must one be attractive to look at, as I was always told, or is it okay to be ugly, distorted, deformed? 

Most of all, what if a person's inside doesn't match their outside? Can an image capture the nature of person's soul?

It was with this kind of  thing in mind that I was playing around with various photo filters. (Also, not gonna lie, just because they looked kinda cool.) I went through lots of them before I tried the "bad TV" filter as a lark. Bad TV. How cute! How nostalgic! Except I threw it on, and there "I" was. My true nature. It didn't work on everyone...just me.

Intrigued, I tried it on scads of photos. baby pictures, teenage Halloween parties, the grab shot of me on the night of the dreaded stocking incident downtown. The pictures were not more attractive, but they were more true. 

No matter what time of life the photos were taken, the distorted photos seemed more real than the unaltered ones. There is my answer, I suppose. Strange to think that all this time, my soul has really been an analog TV on the blink 

Go And Catch A Falling Star

The summer, which began mere moments and also a million years ago, is beginning to dwindle. It's been full of far too much and nothing at all. Among those moments  -  during that hazy period we called July  - was the appearance of comet NEOWISE. While it was faintly visible from the end of our street, it wasn't quite visible enough to be sure you weren't imagining a milky streak in the sky. With this in mind, we headed into the hills above town to have a look.

We traipsed up and down the roads around the lake while bats flitted and wheeled above us. I broke away from the squabbling others (the hills were too steep, the walk was too long) and followed my instinct up a trail that led above the tree line. After a space of that particular summer quiet while my eyes adjusted to the dark, I suddenly saw. As otherworldly as any star but seeming all the more so for its novelty, the comet appeared, faint, but most definitely there, and before the others arrived - just for a moment -  my own secret. 

image source NASA 

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/comet-neowise-over-washington-dc-0