So.  The photos.

I take pictures of the inanimate.  Sometimes I am oblivious to far more interesting subjects close at hand.  It wouldn't surprise me to have come away from the Rodney King beating with pictures of the moon.  Maybe not as oblivious as all that, but I often miss the point.  No press photographer am I. 

The camera is a burden--the lens, really.  And not for the weight of its glass.  It points like a child, sometimes unmistakably, at the thing it wants.  It reveals me in a crowd.  All I'm doing really is trying to preserve a shard of the passing reality, a sparkling pendulous chandelier crystal, dangled out in the open, flirting with the light, daring me to focus.  Sometimes that crystal is you. 

I avoid taking pictures of the animate.  That smile, that pose, that embrace.  That other.  Maybe I do not like to acknowledge that it is not me in the picture.  More often than not I photograph images of my unmet desires, places I wish I was, intimacies I wish involved me. 

And taking photos is merely another way to let go, to say "this was," before the shutter has even reset itself.  Its another way to say good-bye, and that's funny, because saying good-bye is just the opposite of what I want to do.