I had thought maybe about going out to Really Rad this weekend. It isn't that far, but I wasn't keen on paying the price to race on a dry dusty course, shifty bike or no shifty bike. And it would have been a long drive to go out to ride Otis and then take photos. I'm not as inspired by the dusty shots as I am of the muddy rain like last year. 

And I was tired.

Physically not so much but mentally, hoo boy was I a wreck.

Did a few things, got some small stuff sorted, like laundry, that was a week overdue. 

But driving the hour plus out there, to not race. I did finish George's book, it is good and worth a read or a listen. And no, i'm not editing this shit. 

Not yet at least, going to just get it out. 

I took a few snapshots with the cellphone while out at Dirt Church, but no film, no fancy camera shots. 

well shit

I had a little bit of motivation and steam and poof, two side quests later and I'm sitting here... hungry... feeling funky... and yeah now what?

Was going to maybe do NBX under the lights on Wed, but maybe I should just do dirty smackdown tomorrow. Would give me more time to recover before Saturday and maybe I'll be recovered enough from my ride on sunday. And yeah, not eating before doing Dirt Chuch is still a bad idea. No matter what.

I mean I know better but also kind of am trying to drop a few KGs so why not give that a try, again. Gotta remind myself it isn't a good idea, even if I run out of time.

So maybe dirty smackdown in the dust tomorrow. Wheels are on it for that. I don't think Tree house is going to be all that muddy this year, unless that water there is spring fed. Guess I'll find out.

Started looking for flights to seattle for the concert, there's not much and kind of surprising, no red eyes, or not many. Either they are all sold out or aren't happening. And that kind of changes the plans, Red Eye was nice, i was going to be exhausted after the trip anyway, why waste daylight on travel? Sigh, need to figure that out soon. Maybe I'll hit it with some vigor tomorrow, aka energy levels higher than tired sloth.

Oh, I still haven't put any air in the tires on the CX bike since setting the bike up before the Cider Donut Hundo. And they still have plenty of air. Kind of insane for a tubeless set up. That or the Finishline stuff really is working well, or pairs well with this set up. 

That said to fill them up I have to pull the cores out. Kind of annoying but it is nice having the TUBI pump because it does just that. 

Alright, this was down at the bottom of the barrel of web log posts but...  yeah oh well.

Amor Fati Motherfuckers

heddwch
G

 Hitting hard

In all the ways.

Visually,

lyrically, how it is sung and the words

compositionally and the arrangement

--

How to phrase it without saying it all. Maybe I don't need to, maybe I shouldn't and leave it here as this. Pivot to an odd connection and realization.

The idea of what I take photos of when not 'assigned' or 'working.' The walking around. Photos of birds, photos of the water, sunsets, fog, structures, buildings, spaces and shapes. If people factor in, they are almost always solitary. Faced with crowds and crowds I find no compulsion to take a photo, no inspiration.

Also started listening to the new George Saunders book after Ken F's mention of it. AND THAT has brought me back to high school again, with a teach who was all about Russian Lit. He gave me a few books, and I devoured them. Found I just couldn't read enough Russian stories, and here is george going through some short stories in a way that's new. But also as a college grad level professor I'm hearing it all differently than most I think, esp differently than student age readers.

Makes me want to go back and re-approach all that that I read then.

Dark dramatic black and white photographs, maybe with one person, like the solo fisherman from the first roll of P30...  kind of falls into that bucket. Contrast, description, not bright happy flowerly colorful bullshit. Go figure. Shocking.

Started off with all the intention of being more expansive on the notion and reflection from the video, but brining up ancient heartbreak, and all that seems kind of pointless now hours later after I started, walked away and came back to it.

A bit overwhelmed at the moment but also too tired to care. Weird state.

"I can handle

Way more than I can handle 

So I keep reaching for the handle ..."

and here I am, buried by handling way more than I can handle while still reaching for more (scanning negatives to edit while I still have so many more photos from the weekend to edit)

I'd do it at home but lets see, I get home, sit for 20 minutes maybe more if I'm really cracked, then start cooking dinner, after washing the dishes, wind up finishing eating and sorting it all out at 8 or so, then maybe I have an hour plus a little if I want to work and start again. 

Time is precious, never enough of it. The clock is running out too. Each second is an experience we'll never have again. We are standing in a river of time constantly changed by it and can never go back to where we were once before. So we much hold on, persevere, find little bits of joy, and ultimately carve time out from somewhere to stay sane.

So maybe I'll be doing that now. Soon at least. I'll get on the bike, maybe the sky will be colorful on the way home, maybe not.

And dinner to make, what? I don't quite know. We'll see when I get there.

Amor Fati Motherfuckers

Heddwch
G

 I believe I'm suffering from the ride on Saturday. Not the physical side. No, the physical side was just pure and simple a beat down. 

What ride? I joined the College kids here, the fast ones, on a donut ride. Leland put the route together years ago and it flows horribly. Instead of routing it so it goes up from the bottom of a T with a stop sign it goes down them. Like screaming down a hill into a blind stop sign T intersection. A handful of times.

But it was on roads I haven't been on much in years. That was maybe not the best thing, nor was the fact that the route had 25 climbs on the RWGPS route and my Wahoo made sure I was aware of every single one. There were other issues with the ride, routing and getting out of town being one of them. The bigger issue was once we got away from the city and really started riding, it started going up and I'm 2x as heavy and 2x as old and that's not great when you're going up against. or honestly, just trying to hang out with a group.

I caught back up at the first cider donut stop. Had a part of a donut. Got dropped pretty quickly because the next donut stop (orchard) was literally a steady climb from the first orchard. I got there in time to taste one, have a sip of cider and leave. Easily hung out on the downhill section, that was fine. And then we hit another climb and there was 20 miles of riding before the next stop.

So I put my head down and pedaled, and tried, in vain, not to think too much. Of fucking course I thought. Too. Much.

I did roll into the third and final donut stop before they left, but immediately after that was the steepest climb section and it was long and they were gone and I was left alone with the climbing and my legs and my thoughts.

80 miles and many hours later I was back home.

Went for a mtb ride the next morning. took 2 hours before my heart rate decided it wanted to go over 127bpm. Like full on zone 5 breathing, panting, and HR is chilling in the 120s. WTF. 

But 2 hrs of pedaling and suddenly I was getting into the upper 130s and not breathing too hard.

Was some thinking time there. But also a good crash too (landed on soft stuff this time).

But the thinking and head time and maybe a handful of everything else has settled and my previously positive and good mood is elusive. Like a mist or fog or some intangible presence or dark cloud, not really intense but a off feeling just out of reach. Why? Dunno precisely. Hurricane, politics, life, health, getting old, feeling old. I dunno.

But I push on. 

Big cider donut hundo this weekend. Starts at Tyler Munroe's kid's bike shop and hits 5 orchards with donuts, 100 miles of mixed terrain. 

I put gears on the Crockett and ffs 105 10sp shit just works, so damn well. BAM positive shifting, perfect, no hesitation.

Taking photos, developed a roll last night and it is awesome. The roll. I like the process too. I do need to make up another batch of developer, but maybe that'll wait till tomorrow. It'll be a few days before I'm ready to develop anything.

Gonna throw a few links up from today's open tabs.

Mike F's column of course. I did pause to watch Joey's Kora video before continuing to read. It worked really well doing that:
https://nsmb.com/articles/the-lamentable-invisibility-of-nuance/

This kind of says everything I'm worried about with the new Pixel 9 phones, guess maybe I'll be looking at an 8 to replace the 4 when it comes time:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/08/water-thats-not-wet/#pixelated 

Dave's comment raises an interesting thought. If you're selling one of his bikes for that much and he's struggling with healthcare costs why not kick something his way before he's gone:
http://davesbikeblog.squarespace.com/

Stevil went and changed the webpage since I last looked at it. Sorry, we're stuck with this layout for a while. 

Kent went from one post only to now normal posts, and I think he's on his 30th new IG account. Getting to be a regular Hey look who followed me, again, must be a new account time. At least I have a new book on my hold list. I did finish one that was awesome and kind of maybe that's part of the funk, the just finished a great book funk and don't have something awesome to read lined up.

Anyway. People are still posting good content out there. And the believeinfilm crew on Bluesky has been awesome, for me, inspirational and helpful. Not super critical, but that's okay, I'm so hyper critical about my stuff I'm not sure there's anything anyone could say about it that wouldn't surprise me.

But yeah this place needs a facelift

As always: AMOR FATI MOTHERFUCKERS

heddwch
G

 On bluesky, then decided, f-that, just do it here. Don't want to thread, don't really feel like I need to share this in that space. But i wanted to get it out of my notepad and somewhere else.

So one cool thing the Arts Initiative group here has started was expand their monthly staff art gathering to include the whole university, inviting other colleagues that are also artists in any media/form/style together for a monthly gathering for an hour, to present and share. 

This month was IR and an amazing collage artist Karson. Karson's stuff was mind blowing, and lately doing some really cool animation using hand cut collage images and digitizing them (go check it here: https://www.instagram.com/karson_art/ ).

IR did a talk with his street style photographs of mostly current work. He's been a photographer for 5 years now. I'm trying not to laugh at that. 5 years. But for him, 5 years is a long time. For me? Yeah not so much. And that's okay. Like I said, I'm letting him own that confidence of the 5 years. And the reality is I'm jealous of that confidence and that ownership. Also like RP, IR is part of one of the big art clubs in town. There's two that keep coming up. This one. And the second. The second seems much more approachable, fees are even reasonable. The first one? I'll be reasonably polite in that it seems to reflect a section of society with opportunities for leisure and a desire to entertain and collaborate with others of similar levels of taste and standing. Someone who's worked two jobs most of their life, never really taken a vacation much less have a vacation house or what not. Yeah so maybe that's enough ground work. 

I suppose if you are in at that level and really get into that side of things, it could be really good to be there, to be in there. Obviously I'm not or I'd have a different more concrete evaluation of the places.

Exhibit? Could be cool. Sales and return on 'investment'? probably but not something I've even had much luck with and wouldn't count on. Disposable income? Yeah. No.

yes I'm jaded and cynical and that's probably a big barrier. But I'm also still occasionally struggling to call myself a photographer or an artist. Although lots of people call me just that. Both and seriously w/o mocking. Seems odd.

Shit just got into a Joe Gittleman sidetrack. TOTALLY FUCKING DERAILED.

Okay, forget the people who are a little less inclusive than AS220 but also different. 

Forget the part that to make any money on the art you need to spend a lot of time on it, marketing, internet, mailing, submitting, printing, framing, organizing, communicating...  If that's gonna happen I'll need an agent. Otherwise I'll just try and keep taking pictures and sharing them and accumulating negatives. One day I'll start printing them. Maybe soon.

Maybe not.

OKAY to circle way back around about the talk. Along with each one of IR's photos they shared some quotes. And I wanted to put them down here...

And I'd better do that before I get sidetracked again.

Elliot Erwin "“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place…. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”" 

Matt Stuart "Street photography is an attitude, a state of mind, a way of being, rather than something that has to be done exclusively on the streets of cities." 

Trent Parke " I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical" 

Ty Holland " A photograph is the pause button on life."

Robert Frank " When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem"

Henri Cartier-Bresson "To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression."

Susan Meiselas " The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise didn't being. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation"

Andre Kertesz "seeing is not enough you have to feel what you photograph" 

Garry Winogrand "the photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed"

Ken Rockwell "Photography is the power of observation, not the application of technology"

Okay go do your shit - i might not race CX two weekends in a row, seems crazy esp going into two weeks when I know I can't race. 

Who am I anymore? I dunno.

But we keep moving forward eh? What else to do...

Heddwch
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