So that photo on the header. It’s been there a few days now. Cause I like it. It’s a completely candid shot taken by my daughter on Friday. We had gone down to the docks to see the spectacular sunset, and it really was spectacular, but my view was always obstructed by this thing this way, that thing the other way, I couldn’t get a panoramic view, so as we were leaving I said, “Honey, let me just go up on these rocks.” And it was better. I stayed there, oh, maybe thirty seconds or so. When I stepped down she told me she had taken the pictures, two, and showed me. I liked them.
Now that is the true story behind those photographs but silhouettes are dramatic, they just are. There is drama in the ambiguity—Who is that guy? What is he doing?— and for an old, fat guy ambiguity is maybe my only shot at flattery. I mean, you want to see me diving in my bathing suit off those rocks? (You do not.) The photos were taken from slightly below so I look taller than 6’1”—my head is literally in the clouds and more substantial (than 203 lbs :( ). I appear to be alone. Of course, I am anything but but that is the point. The ambiguity of the photographs makes them open to interpretation. As soon as my daughter showed me them I got it. And that I liked a lot. It tickled me. You can meme those photos with captions. One I immediately thought of was, “Hold up guys, I need to take a leak.” I tried to think of some Hallmark card captions, some Serenity lines, you tack on two sentences from Frost (All I could think of was “Two roads diverge in a wood...” but that wouldn’t work on a harbor sunset) or Homer or or or but it’s been a few years since I was on my Hallmark Wisdom popular series and I was rusty. Heroic, like Korda’s Heroic Che? Umm, if I was pointing or gesturing, yeah. "The enemy is there." But you can't be Heroic with your hands in your pockets. Contemplative. Philosophical. Yeah. The only similar artwork I could think of was that inane The Wanderer.
My hair is blown out the back as this guy’s is (which is not very flattering). Have I received a gunshot wound that is just exiting the back of my head and is snapped a microsecond before I collapsed? But I am not so absurdly dressed as that Mo-ron in short dress, riding boots and walking stick at the summit of Everest or something.
My “plume” tickled me as sorta like another absurd painting, The Genius of France Between Liberty and Death.
But you see I’m not full frontal naked and you would not want to see that and I left my angel’s wings at home and my back hair plume is poor as the Flame of Genius. Flames of genius emanating from the top of the head, not the back, are I believe de rigueur in all the elite French art teaching salons.
Another stretch of plausibility could be the Lone
Student of Tiananmen.
But that’s a real stretch. I confront no apparent, imminent threat to become roadkill.
I could be the Poet on the Mountaintop.
Maybe that’s the closest in competition but I’m not a poet and I do know it.
I appear to be Vigilant. "One if by land, two if by sea," but I'm only going number one at most and have nothing with which to be Vigilant. I carry no lantern, no spyglass scanning the harbor for the approach of enemy intruders and besides perhaps dousing them with a Golden Shower I carry no weapons to ward them off. Arms at sides, hands in pockets, no indicia of Vigilance. I could be a Philosopher of Nature, struck dumb by Nature, which is closer to Truth than any other take, but I was just trying to get an unobstructed view of a damn sunset and to soak it in, you know what I mean? That is all it was but it is fodder for creative geniuses, the meme creating folks, and the inspired Visionaries of Hallmark greeting cards. I await clever captions from whatever source, if they ever come.
Ciao.
