What I’m Blogging

I‘m being unfaithful. I’m a dirty dog, two timing cheater, and I can’t stop. I’m having an affair behind my camera’s back.

…the new one is fast, loose and inviting…

My camera is a solid little number from the prehistoric days of digital photography. She cost me an obscene amount of money when I picked her up in 1999. Her 3.3 megapixels and her six times zoom lens lovingly crafted by Carl Zeiss were an immediate attraction. We went everywhere together, recording life and light in binary sequence; sticks of digital memory. She’s a little big compared to other cameras available now, but she still takes a good image.

Then came the phone, but she was more than a phone. She took pictures too. I told myself when this phone camera madness started spreading over the globe that I’d never take part in it. But I got suckered in by technology. It’s a phone, it’s a PDA and oh ya, it takes photos too. “OK”, I thought, but I just wouldn’t use the camera part. How wrong I was.

The old camera was big and bulky, the phone fits on my hip.The old camera takes time to set up, the phone is always ready, and worse, is always willing. I have to manually transfer files from the old camera, I press a button on the phone, and the picture is posted to my blog with a wink and a smile. The old camera takes much better shots, but the new one is fast, loose and inviting. So for now I’m having a little fling… Perhaps when this seven year photo itch is over, I’ll return to my senses and my old trusty companion.

Life is a funny old thing. It cycles, it changes, pattterns flow around us repeating with subtle variations. I have a new job, I’m happy. My mother-in-law is in the hospital. She is unlikely to come out of it this time, I’m sad.

…passage to the undiscovered country…

She is from that greatest and noblest of generations that sacrificed the better parts of their lives in the 1940’s for the freedom of the world. She lived through the Great Depression, she raised a family, and now she waits for passage to the undiscovered country, and all too soon we will be left with memories and eulogies;

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

– W.H. Auden

Life’s rich pageant marches on.