reblogged from polaroidjesus
dark-sky zealots
The teamsters were on strike and the roads were almost totally empty during the overnight drive from New York back to Ohio. The most expensive part of the trip had been the constant supply of AA batteries to feed the portable cd player in the stereo-less car. Some stretches of road were completely empty of traffic and turning off the headlights would drop us into total darkness. Leaving the headlights off was like falling without know how far away the ground was. He had only seen darkness like that in caves. In the middle of the game, another car got on the highway. A barrage of the dead AA batteries was all we needed to force the bright intruder off the highway at the next exit. The game went on until the city lights ended it for good.
Hamilton
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Ned
Ned will tell you how he sees it. It will not be like anyone else sees it, but it will be interesting. He used to ride a unicycle to school. He is a painter.
He has always looked slight but he is one of the strongest people I know. Once, we were climbing an old rope ladder to the roof of a derelict building. The rope ladder started from the top of a second story fire escape and went up about 15 feet to a parapet roof. It snapped when he was almost at the top. On his way back down, he reached out and grabbed the railing of the fire escape with his hands like some kind of acrobat and it jerked so hard I thought he was going to pull it and me off of the side of the building. We climbed down the fire escape and went back inside the building to have a beer or ten. I was living there at the time. I am not sure how the people who were already on the roof got down.
He moved out of state and later he had some kind of break. He was in a mental hospital for a month or so before a mutual friend’s mom discovered him there by chance. He was diagnosed with Grave’s disease and they removed his thyroid and he came back.
He is living with his wife beside a lake in Maine now. He makes snowmen that put Calvin to shame. He has a beautiful daughter. He spends his days taking care of her and painting.
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Heather
The stunning redhead is Heather. I first met her when I was still living at the Taj Mahal. She came to a party there and her friend flaked out and left her without a ride. Heather wound up crashing on the couch. When she woke up she realized somebody had stolen her purse while she was asleep. There were a lot of people there that night, but we pretty much knew who had stolen it. Nobody said anything though because the guy was gone and talking about it wasn’t going to un-steal it. Leigh was there and she was mortified. It was an uncomfortable moment as Heather realized that she had spent the night in the company of at least one thief. I gave her a ride to work and that was the last time I saw her for a couple of years. She had prudently decided to hang out with a better crowd.
Later, she married Floyd’s brother and she is my sister-in-law now. She was very gracious and never mentioned the first time we met until I brought it up.
She has a daughter and a son. She is a kind and gentle but fiercely protective mother. I will see her in a few months when we go camping with a bunch of friends and family. I will watch my niece and nephew whispering with my daughters and I will try to overhear their secrets when we walk through the woods and abandoned houses to watch the fireflies.
reblogged from polaroidjesus
Leigh rescued Obsidian from some people who thought it was funny to dose the cats they had with them on tour. She was the smartest cat I have ever had. I miss her. My daughter’s cry over her picture sometimes, even though she died before they were born and they never actually met her.
Obsidian
reblogged from brerfly
Jasper
Jasper is wearing his Screaming Trees tshirt while holding a mason jar of berry blue kool aid and what was probably Popov vodka. He was a cool kid, soft spoken but hilarious once he got going.
Key elements to a successful kool aid party were:
- No air conditioning.
- Multiple pitchers of free drinks readily available at all times.
- It is fun to drink blue stuff.
- The first few pitchers were pretty weak but each subsequent pitcher got stronger as judgement and good sense grew weaker.
reblogged from polaroidjesus
Miller
This one is hard. Miller was my best friend but we haven’t spoken for more than seven years now. For reasons that are mostly my fault, his wife didn’t really like having me around. That was hard on him, and I did things that didn’t make it any easier. He was in Detroit for a while and I heard little bits of news about him from mutual friends. He has a son now. I can’t believe he has a son I have never met. He fell in love with another woman and moved in with her. Things didn’t work out and he went back home. I don’t know what really happened. Now, no one knows how to find him. I have completely lost him.
Anyway, one of my favorite things, Miller used to come over to my place on Sunday mornings. We would drink coffee, eat some eggs and fried potatoes (lots of potatoes, potatoes are cheap), and read the paper. Floyd would yell at us for waking her up on her day off, but she was just kidding. After a while, we would fill up an empty snapple bottle with bourbon and Miller and I would take a walk. The walks had no planned destination or duration. Mostly we just wandered around taking in the sights and talking for 5 or 6 hours. Sometimes we would stop into a bar and drink a beer and eat a grilled cheese. We snuck into abandoned warehouses and factories and found all kinds of cool stuff. We also wound up talking to lots of random people. I was not good at that, but it happened to Miller all of the time. He was a kind man and you could see it in his face, and people would just talk to him.
One walk found us in a stranger’s kitchen drinking beer and buying a gun and a cigarette pack with a handful of shells in it. I don’t remember how the offer was made, we weren’t looking for one, but once it happened, the logic of those walks demanded that we follow through. We only had ten dollars between the two of us, but that was enough, so we wound up sharing a ten dollar gun. Despite what Chekhov says about guns, nothing ever happened with that one so I should have probably left it out. Miller wound up with it though, so I guess I don’t really know.
I wish I could find him. I would love to meet his son. I want him to tell me that things happened the way I remember. I hope he is ok.
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Esther
I don’t know who this girl really was. I wish I could remember something about her. She looks like she is having fun. I hope I behaved decently toward her.
The framed picture in the background was found in an alley or abandoned house or it may have been pulled out of a dumpster.
The picture uses lenticular imaging to put the figure and the background at different depths creating a 3D effect. The clouds in the background were crudely animated if you moved your eyes parallel to the picture. There is also something off about the perspective of the picture. There should be more foreshortening of the figure, but the distortion contributes an effect of otherworldliness. The picture was originally included in a polaroid unintentionally but the camera flash created a visually interesting effect that made multiple facets of the cloud animation visible in a way that was not apparent looking at it with the naked eye.
reblogged from polaroidjesus
Leigh
Leigh is a sweet girl. She took care of me once when I really needed it. I never thanked her properly.
I never went back to my parents’ house after the morning of my high school graduation. My parents are members of a Pentecostal sect and very active in the church. Until I left home, I spent twelve to fifteen hours a week in church services. I can see now that it helps sustain my parents, but it became toxic for me pretty early on.
Once when I was about eight, a particularly graphic sermon about the apocalypse caused me to vomit in the pew. I would learn about Amazonian indian tribes from reading a book and then at church I would learn that they were all going to burn in hell. I couldn’t quite cope with any of this. I couldn’t reconcile their world with the one I was learning about from books and no one in the church ever offered to help. I got smacked around by a pastor when I was 14 for being disrespectful, but I was just trying to pretend I was somewhere else. My dad put me in the guy’s car the next day and let him drive me away for a serious conversation about my relationship with the church. It went downhill from there.
The night of my senior prom my parents told me they weren’t going to help me pay for college, even though this had been the plan up until then. I had always kept my head down, done my school work and tried not to start anything. My little brother had started doing whatever he wanted at a precocious age and my college money went to pay for private schools to straighten him out. I had scholarships, but none would even put a dent in the tuition at the schools I had been accepted to.
I was essentially estranged from my parents for about ten years. I was going to drive to my mom’s birthday party when I was 22 but I came down with appendicitis and had surgery instead. No one came to visit me. I still feel like they pushed me away too, but I am a parent now and I know what kind of grief I must have caused them and I regret it. They were doing their best.
The night I left, I started living in a one bedroom crashpad over a flower store with 3 other people and sometimes more. The place was affectionately named “The Taj Mahal” because it wasn’t one. Leigh was sleeping in a hallway that led to the kitchen.
Taj Mahal was mostly a fun place but regularly crossed the line into crazy. One roommate, inspired by Dead Poets Society, I think, tried to paint “Carpe Diem” on the wall with the remains of a can of house paint that had been found in the trash. The paint dripped and his mental state was not conducive to concentration. When he was finished the brick red house paint looked like dried blood and the message looked more like “Scare you to me.” It always made a big impression on guests. Setting kerosene fires on the carpet and trying to put them out before they spread was a fun late night party activity.
When a guy who was visiting took something, had a nervous breakdown, and moved into the niche formed by the enclosed fire escape, I started sleeping in a girl’s attic around the corner. I had met her at a house party and she had given me a haircut in the kitchen. I slept other places too. Lot’s of people who I can’t even remember helped me, but I was a wreck and didn’t see that. I was totally broke and breaking down and I didn’t really have the skills to pull my self out of it.
While I was bouncing around, Leigh found an apartment with heat and paid all of the deposits. She found me and flat out told me that I was her new roommate. I moved in and I think I slept for a week. We wound up living together for several years.
Even though I had never applied and had missed the deadlines by a mile, I went to the state school and they let me in right as classes were starting. I was a National Merit Scholar and they gave me some other scholarships that I don’t think I ever applied for. Out of the blue school was paid for, but if I dropped out for even one term, the money was gone. I didn’t drop out and graduated faster than anyone else that I knew. There was still craziness around, but I stayed on the edge of it instead of falling in fully. Some of my friends did fall in and took years to climb out, if they came out of it at all.
Leigh gave me a hand and led me to a solid piece of ground when I need it most. None of the other stuff would have happened without her. It took me years to appreciate that truth. I have tried to help other people over the years, but I don’t think I have ever made as big a difference as Leigh made for me.
reblogged from polaroidjesus
Natalie
She was a very sweet girl. She died less than two years after this picture was taken. She was on heroin and driving even though she had never been a driver and did not even have a license. She crossed a highway median and was crushed by a semi. She had been part of a crew that stole liquor and kegs from clubs to sell.
I pulled out the shoebox of polaroids to scan this morning. I haven’t looked at them in a while and there have been a lot of surprises, good and bad. It has been more than 15 years and it is impossible not to marvel at how young they look and to wonder how some of them look now. And then there are some like Natalie that make me wonder about other things.
reblogged from polaroidjesus
