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San Francisco Carnaval Parade.

June 14th, 2003

Calling It Vertigo
I've continued to have little epiphanies throughout the morning. I'm so wired into this two day weekend cycle the thought will pop, having taken Friday off - "Shit! I have to go back to work tomorrow." - immediately followed by the realization this is Saturday and there's another day to come. The whole body reacts to the - "Work tomorrow!" - thought, a jolt, like a car hitting a pothole. They probably talk about it on Oprah, anyone with a smattering of knowledge could cite the statistics: "live alone (but with a cat), interests and activities: Work and photographs. In need of heart and liver, lungs and spleen. And a year on the road with a camera and a laptop.

Nice day, though. Nice day these last two days after a week of cloudy skies. Still dizzy. Not the tired dizzy of yesterday, but a clear headed dizzy where, if I look up at the ceiling or get up too quickly, the vertigo hits for a moment and then subsides. And the ears are ringing, not so loud, but not so quiet. Time to talk to the ringing ear people. ENT: Ears, Nose and Throat. The ears are ringing, the inner ear is rotating and this has been going on now since last summer. Hi, ho. Since last summer. I am going to find out how to fix this thing or I'm going to learn to live with it. Not sure how much street photography you do with vertigo, easy to say, well, you know, let's not do that today, but I suspect something could be done with a little gumption and, you know, joi de livre. I've got some joi de livre left over from the summer of 1969, there's still some left in a jar on the back shelf.

Ramble, bumble. This ringing is making you dingy in obvious ways you have not yet observed.

Could be. I wonder if the needed focus for that last five percent is gone. I'm not sure I've ever had it together for that last five percent, but something's been taken off the top, that one last tug that pulls it together.

I did watch the Spike Jonze, Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep movie Adaptation yesterday. It was good. Uneven and unsatisfying in places, but one or two fascinating observations made by a character who's in the middle of a muddy morass of motivation and plot, a snake eating his own tail, a writer fighting to write about a writer who's fighting to write about, well, what? Orchids? It left you wondering - good? bad? high? low? Michaelangelo? The nature of obsession, the line between fiction and reality, thoughts you have when you spend too much time in front of a keyboard? Was there really a twin brother or was this another Fight Club? Or, once you've seen the Fight Club, once you think, even once, in Fight Club terms, is everything then another Fight Club? Interesting. Probably the latter, but is there a difference?

Cage wrestling with his screenplay - acted over the top, acted under the top - the screenwriter who wrote Inside John Malkovich's Brain, you have to expect something (you hope to find something) different. Malkovich was better was a first thought, tighter in many ways, but there are many ways to judge a movie and which "ways" are more important, what's meant by better? This one was, well, interesting. Made me want to write the Great American Novel. I'm thinking of calling it Vertigo.

 
The photograph was taken at the San Francisco Carnaval parade.

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