Saturday, February 1, 2014

Comanche Country

The Davis Mountains

Ansel Adams, Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas, 1947, gelatin silver print, 1975
Mr. Adams probably didn't use a 10 year old $100 Kodak for this shot in Big Bend
The Good thing about the west is that no photograph will  prepare you for the grandeur. Sure, a few Ansel Adams black and white postcards come close but in general you will see things for the first time.
A keen eye will see the violent history of this land
Getting on the trail in my hippie pants with not enough water, flirting with the brunette state park ranger, getting lost, learning about a new bird...these are things that I miss. Although I'm dedicated to the destruction of the earth's ecological balance, a part of me still pines for the wide open spaces of a rocky trail and a can of beans at night under the stars. I never needed money but the goddamn police hounded me all day long in Corpus that they basically forced me to seek shelter in a junk yard...and now I'm an industrial electrician with money to burn! Texas made a man out of the most irresponsible 40 year old child in America and I'm bitter about it. I'm resentful. The whole point was to become a professional jazz guitarist. You can go back to the early days of this blog to witness the sheer insanity of my default lifestyle...the willful disregard of gainful employment, writing protest songs, drinking medicinally evaluated soda pop, jamming with fellow gypsies on the sidewalk, throwing my life away on a dream. I actually sold everything I owned to move into a van parked on the street so I could play guitar on the Venice Beach boardwalk...where I didn't make a dime...but I didn't need a dime because I was recovering from ass surgery and couldn't eat. Those were the good old days and now I'm too broken to live like that again. The best I can do is drag ass through enough years in the oil field that I can get my escorted funeral when I die.

Just because it's black and white doesn't make it good.


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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.