I've started a newly un-postponed project. Hmm...made no sense. I've picked up what was once a fleeting idea, and have begun to work it into something more. I'm not sure what, where, when, why, or how - but i do know who. Devin Miller is responsible for defibrillating my creative streak. She is a great photographer and friend, and she inadvertently sparked my imagination.
I was sitting with my feet dangling off the roof of a mid-eighties Honda, feeling less like myself and more like someone...else. My head was lightly throbbing from whipping around against biting air to look straight forward at the lights of the city. Half-obscured by an oak tree, I craned my neck to see everything i could without appearing too eager. I wanted to see the water, reflecting the smog and clouds swirling together, illuminated by a waning spot of porcelain bending down to meet the bay bridge. Instead i got black, stagnant-looking scales with light linings of ecru. A vividly colored billowy mass hung with the presence of suprising consideration and vigilance, watchful almost. It fell implausibly unblemished. Jagged wisps looked purposeful and full of grace.
This was my aurora borealis. Lightly contorting sky fabric stretched watchful over the city, lit up with candles and neon and incandescent lamps. Breathing it in, realizing my knuckles were white and my mouth agape, my head tilted to the left. I shook myself back and moved to align my body with my cocked head, letting the roof slowly remove my body's indent. I pushed off and absorbed the shocks of my feet against the dirt road, letting it snake up to my neck. I put my hands in the pockets of ill-fitting pants and for the first time in thirty seven minutes i spoke.
"I wish Devin was here. She would've taken a mean picture of this for me to scrutinize later."
But my memory had to do. I ran into her on the street a week and a few days later, and bullshitted an idea for a project off the top of my head. She takes pictures, i write stories/monologues/dialogues/poems/descriptions/narrations. I write a little something-something, and she takes off on a treasure hunt of sorts to capture what it is that she took out of it. The idea was great in theory yet lay static as we both left for the week. It lingered in my head, near the back, where the jukebox oozed jazz and the bar was lit by neon.
One uneventful evening, i went to her house with some friends and she produced two binders of her work. I was a kid in a candy store, and while some shopped for art, i shopped for spare parts to weld. Ever ambitious, i took with me a stack of fourteen black and white photographs and three color photographs. I'm brainstorming on post-it notes, drinking by myself with Classics for Relaxation blaring from two speakers, orchestrating invisible cellos to hum and growl in time with the french horns, and sleeping without socks when i do doze off. I wish i had a scanner to show you her photos, but i may just have to scribble down my works and transcribe them here sans photographic company. Maybe ill add a bit of a description of the photograph, but maybe ill just let you use your imagination.
