So far, with a (very generous) average of 86 photos for sale over the last month, I’m netting about $0.58 per photo per month. It doesn’t sound like a lot, except when you realize that these are photos not intended for this market, more or less casually shot over seven years, and then you do the math:

$0.58 * average of 86 photos = $49.88 per month (so far)
$0.58 * (a hypothetical) average of 1000 photos = $580.00 per month
$0.58 * (a hypothetical) average of 5000 photos = $2900.00 per month?!!??

Does it scale? Hard to say, but it’s interesting and it makes me want to keep shooting, because if I could make a living by shooting photos that I like while in every other way being an utterly worthless simpleton, I’d do it immediately, no questions asked.

that stings

Sometimes you gotta stop trying to explain yourself to everyone, tell all the people that don’t get you to leave you the hell alone, and do your own thing. The last few months have taught me that my life is full of a lot of people that I don’t know very well and that don’t know me very well.

It’s not quite time yet to do the 2005-2006 after-ABC-CLIO, after-the-girlfriend-came-back, after-the-girlfriend-left-again, until end-of-application-season post-mortem, but it soon will be. It has been a season that I would very much like to forget.

Early obvious things that can be mentioned now:

– Have lost some friends and nearly lost others
– Lost a whole shit-ton of money
– Took a step toward doing what I really want

Cryptic. Cryptic. One of the more bizarre downsides of blogs or web diaries is that they’re as public as you always wanted them to be, so you have to be as careful as you don’t want to be to moderate and manage what you publish until it’s no longer so timely as to be able to derail what you’re working on at any given moment.

Think of it as a kind of tape delay on the performance that is your life, used to mask the obscenities that you really want to hurl until the audience can no longer hear (or at least make any decisions based on) them.

—

There are a lot of people I miss right now. Some of them aren’t talking to me anymore. I hope they read this and decide to talk to me again. Everything since October really has been a nightmare and a mess, and it would have been moreso if I had waited any longer to make the decisions that I made. But the point is: it wasn’t that I strayed out of contact because I didn’t care about people.

I strayed out of contact because I was in the throes of existential struggle and running to keep ahead of various genres of personal disaster. More on that when the post-mortem occurs, probably in a couple of weeks, give or take, along with (no doubt) a whole pile of posts on what happens next in life.

Stay tuned.

—

If nothing else, it is time for me to expand my writing career and to begin to investigate other genres. The fact that the publishing house I’ve done a great deal of my work with for years is once again undergoing some reorganization (and thus, once again I’m not sure whether or not they’ll continue to work with me) gives me the excuse I need to start using my writing for things other than mere tutorial material.

In particular, I have one manuscript laid out, edited, and ready to custom publish, so you may see a publishing company spring up around me in coming years. I will also be shopping some other ideas that are probably far too big for my own marketing britches at the moment. They’re big. As in “I don’t know whether I want to be such a big author” big… Nonfiction trade paperbacks has been a kind of comfort zone in which one can labor in relative anonymity while still accumulating publishing credits and a modest amount of cash. When you move into “A-list titles” you’re trying to play in an entirely different league. Changing subject matter at the same time makes the whole enterprise into a fairly big gamble or, if nothing else, a fairly big lifestyle jolt.

And let’s face it, I’m what could be (generously) called a “nontraditional” individual in the way that I work through and conceptualize my life. The “A-list” of the mass marketplace may not be the ideal place for me in the same way that the field, or the cave, is.

But in any case, the point is that all of this when combined with the sudden increase in the emphasis on photography and design indicates that my life is headed for big changes and what could loosely be called my “second personal revolution.” I’m just barely catching my breath enough after everything that’s happened over the last six months to (perhaps) be able to facilitate it successfully.

—

This is it. This is the only one I get. It’s nearly halfway done. How am I doing?

everything old is new again all over again just like always

Was present for and participated in the founding of a new company today, almost on a whim. We’ll see where this takes us. I like it.

it’s a white out
and i can’t see a thing

Is it bad when alcohol gives you more pleasure than anything else on Earth? More than any drug you’ve ever taken or any success you’ve ever had?

Alcohol and Neil Young are, so far as I can tell, the only meaning of life.

—

The extent to which some things are fragile only becomes clear when you break them by mistake.

Heh… some of these entries are rotting and need to be thrown out. The last one begins to ripen already.

—

From time to time I am startled to look at someone I know very well, to measure their mannerisms and find with a kind of shock that they are really very… American, for lack of a better word. No intended disparagment here, just a nagging sense that I am not. I suppose it’s the multicultural family thing. My father is definitely not a hot-dog-and-bleachers man, and my mother is, though she’d protest the accusation, really more a European than an American in most deep ways.

Really, I don’t get these Americans. More specifically, I have a lot of trouble partying with them. When I decide to party, it generally means I’d like to relax, enjoy some nice, challenging conversation, maybe a drink and a nice view, and at some point laugh along with everyone else in the room at something or other. When Americans decide to party, it invariably seems that something — either the food they ate for dinner, the clothes they put on just before they went out, or an arsenal of medium-range weapons — must go flying everywhere. This is the American idea of fun, and without it they seem unable to feel themselves to be adequately social beings.

I think it’s just beyond the radio range of my enculturation to suss this out. I think UK’ers party in much the same way, only my impression is that they’re less big on the bombs when it comes time to tie one on. I suppose this makes me like them better, but only a little. The French, on the other hand, are too sensual, the Germans a bit too heavy on the clothes-chucking as well. Who do I identify with, party-wise?

Strange as it feels to say it (though I don’t know why it should be), I think I party like a Chinese. Dear god, there’s a thought. “Party like a Chinese?!”

What the hell can that even mean? It makes my head swim.

—

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau03022006.html

All kinds of musing about to happen. It’s a good thing this entire project is filed under “Personal Blog” and not “Political Blog” or “News Blog” or even just “New wave of online communication called Blogging Blog.”

—

First, blogging. This word has been fucking co-opted. When I started doing this in ’99, this was a blog. Now I look around and see Slashdot and Daily Kos and CounterPunch and the Drudge Report, and those are the blogs. What does that make this? It is the live electronic bastard child of the good, old-fashioned diary, and it seems doomed to require such a long referent for some time to come.

No pressing reason I bring this up, it just becomes an issue from time to time because people get ahold of the wrong end of things when I say that I “blog.” They think I’m Matt Drudge and begin to issue press releases directly into my hoodie pockets.

—

Next, education and career. I didn’t plan this whole thing out properly. Some people did — you know, the “goal” people. More often than not they’re very good at knowing precisely what they want and precisely how to get there, and ten years on they phone you up and say, “I’m where my treasure map led, are you where yours led?” and you respond, “Jesus, I don’t have a map, I’ve been feeding that damned Canada goose in the park all this time. What did I miss?”

So as a result I’ve worked about ten different industries in my life in all kinds of roles, most recently what I suppose would have to be called management. Didn’t like it much, I hate “managing” things, whether projects or people, it makes me uncomfortable mainly because I hate it when projects or people “manage” me.

This was meant to go somewhere nice and insightful, but it has gone off the rails at this point, so suffice it to say that I’m sitting here on top of three degrees and a fairly impressive career of eklektica that I think a culture of rationalized labor like this one can’t quite structuralizecan’t quite name. I’m rather a lot of things to anyone who looks at me with an eye toward evaluating general coolness, but people tend to have a lot of trouble figuring out what to actually do with me, both personally and professionally.

I don’t know if the return to grad school for Ph.D. work will make this better or worse. By all rights it should make things better, only while I’m working on my dissertation I also plan to be actively writing in technology and politics and shooting (cameras not guns, you lot) professionally, too — so I suspect I might wake up to rather the same outsiders’ not-quite-polymat-but-wishes-he-was-one milieu at fifty. Beh. This may be a “you’d better prepare, folks” pep talk aimed at myself.

—

What was the last thing? Oh yes… The illness. I’ve come to realize over the last few months what the larger problem with much of my life is: I like nearly everything I produce or create rather a lot, and so does everyone else. In fact, I often get rave reviews. But I absolutely hate selling myself, or the things that I create, because to equate cool things with cash… well, you know where I’m going. Is that an immature way to look at the world?

Naturally immature is just a euphemism for “needs to pull his socks up.”

I’m thinking, as always, in a million little estuaries of digression. It has been a long life already, I think. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be seventy. I wonder if I’ll ever know? You can’t think about such things too long without having to drink.

—

Chris was a monk. Before that, I always thought that only Monks were monks. Silly and naive of me, yes, yet also understandable, really. But now…

Well anyway, nevermind.

—

The book — the book — is still sitting here all laid out and ready to go to press. I just haven’t managed to do it yet. Who knows when I will? Others will get done first, as they always have. Maybe I’m actually a poet.

What am I saying? Everyfuckingbody’s a poet.

Speaking of, I’ve got to get that proposal completed.

—

Sometimes I want to bring my old posts from Defarge online and incorporate them here, but I just can’t break it up like that, it takes the whole God damn thing out of context. I miss you, my friends.

“A penny saved is a penny earned.”

“You’ve got to spend money to make money.”

“Times change.”

Below the fold… I haven’t posted much lately. No particular reason. Maybe because at some deep level I know that fewer people are reading me now than have ever read me since I began keeping an online diary. I just have fewer friends and interested parties than I used to.

In general, it’s hard these days to figure out precisely how I ended up where I am right now, or indeed where I am right now, period. It’s just not clear. There has been some sort of sea change. It pivoted around and through my time at the University of Chicago, but I don’t know what shape it took or how it looks yet — I can’t yet see the forest for the trees.

I need distance and perspective.

Right now there are simply far too many trees and I have been far too upset and indignant to figure anything out. Last night in an argument with my father it was again suggested that I ought simply to join a Buddhist monastery and keep a garden, far, far away from anywhere (especially here).

It was meant to be an accusation — that I am petulant and immature and make false “moral” complications for myself in order to obscure my latent laziness and fear of life. Maybe some of that is true, I don’t know… but I also know that the premise is flawed… Because I don’t see the monks in the monasteries anywhere as petulant, immature, afraid, or lazy. I admire them immensely and feel that as a group they are a thousand times more justified in their existence than is our American politburo and its “luminaries,” much less its greedy and sheep-like “citizens.”

—

I suppose spring is here. At the end of last summer I was so immensely broken that I wanted nothing more than to return to wintertime and gestate in it, baby in womb. Somehow, though, it’s all passed me by — somehow there has been a winter, and I hardly noticed it at all.

And the brokenness remains… only now it is tempered, changed, evolved into something else. Don’t know what yet. I’m more comfortable with it. Maybe it was the last remnants of youth leaving. Maybe it was the last remnants of sanity and social responsibility, I don’t know.

My situation now is infinitely more precarious than it was at the end of last summer, only now I don’t care. And gone is the certainty — held all too briefly, perhaps from 2002-2005 — of my place in the order of things. I feel as though I’ve realized that I’d been on the wrong road, and have now left it, and am left for the moment to wander through meadows and chaparral in search of another one, wherever I find it.

—

I can say this for certain: I am tired of small-mindedness, greed, rationalization, westernism, self-absorption and “individuality” (which for me has become something of a four-letter word). As my father raised his arms and voice to stir the flock of Mao’s sins into a frenzy around us, I couldn’t help but think of the feats, such as they are, that have been accomplished historically by the leaders of China and the Soviet Union.

A harsh morality and an ordered world are painful, perhaps. But no more painful than the morality-of-self or the world of the inescapable open market. Pick your poison.

Or on second thought, I may just pick it for you, if I’m able, lest you do the same for me.

—

Let me feel the wind and know, deep, that it is all I — or you — need.

all such misguided people that run away from youth
shall they be caught by themselves and wonder in double turns
whether they have got hold of the wrong suspect after all

—

death is never far away for anyone

—

caught on the stroke back
don’t take it, just go
just go

like you can race,
like you can run at all west,
sun guardian take notice
and smile
smile at you

as for me,
i am getting old
am getting old,

and i miss
the frost on the wind
i miss
the sun on my hands
in the morning

and i miss
you