I think digital cameras are a grotesque scam. While my new Panasonic Lumix FZ18 is a simple thing to use, and the 28-500mm zoom range is amazing, it just doesn't offer the compositional ease and fine control that my Bronica ETR gives me. Not to mention the excellent color of film, versus the crap color of digital; that is the final straw -- there is no comparison between optical and digital color when printing... It is like comparing a pricey cold whore to a hot free lass who wants you for who you are and not for your cash... Oh well, the Japs just have to make us consume something new, I guess. Just be happy you are buying cameras and not guns like the dumb amerikens... ha...

Anyway, I have two tons of medium format negatives to get scanned, but it costs more to scan them than get them developed... It costs six times less to develop negs and prints in Taipei than Vancouver, medium format that is... Ha, aha. A good reason not to go home, I guess. I have these great big huge posters of my girlfriend Janelle in a g-string crawling on the beach and standing in the sun. Huge blow-ups of wonderful wild-flowers and beach vistas... None scanned, alas. I will have to find a way to get it done... Maybe next week... Nobody will look at them even if I upload them anyway...

Well, like, life is good if you believe it to be... But I'd rather write a novel in the sweet sea-breeze, and see it read than sell photos to poser countesses in some smelly city any day...

bye...

Friends... Do you have enough friends? Can you get rid of yourself, forget your neuroses and make progress? Yes, of course. But when you get friends solely through business or hustling, what-have-you, then you start to wonder who your friends really are. Not because you don't deserve friends, but because you simply want them. You want your friends to like you for who you are, not what you can do, or the aspirations you might help your brothers and darlings fulfill...

Now, I am trying to keep my head and go on with life. I never stop my mouth up, I talk and talk to get it all out. I tell stories, ask endless questions. You can't hide yourself from me. I will find out why you are attracted to me, what makes you loathe the very sight of that old coat... You might even whisper, like others before -- "You smell so good..." And I never often use any artificial sweetners on the flesh, so to say... So many times my girlfriends have told me, "You smell so good..." And it is a blessing, it sort of compensates for my small fear of responsibility and doing the right thing. If nothing else, you will recall, most fondly, waking among my quilts, after I have left the cabin to fish for some fresh squid to fry up with red peppers and basil, whatever, that, 'doesn't he smell good... mmmm...' just ask Janelle... She won't give the sheets that I lent to her back without pretending to forget that she borrowed them, yeah, it's true...

Now to remember that things happen over which we have no control... Like, being "free" to say to the president of your most hated dictatorship: "well, so far as I can see, your people have the right to kill each other, what's so great about being a bunch of f--king idiots?"

What does matter, really? Defeating the reality of a mudslide on the side of Mayon volcano that buries innocent fools and strong men and lonely single mothers just the same as brutal bastard killers get away with murder for no reason..? We search for the softer ratios, the load we carry is never light enough in face of the "light of reason," which we would shed over our dismay and doubts... The world is real, but it is incongruous, too. So, the god is born again, and rises amid a world that does not willingly admit absolutes. So the core of belief resides just there, in the heart of everything that must remain unknown, untouched by us in our heartfelt endeavour to live.

If you have any genuine compassion, if you can speak with pure sincerity, then do exercise yourself before the ones you love... Perhaps they will love you as you want to be loved...

To be free now... I am not even coming close to the things I want to tell you all about, sweetheart... Like do you know why you should get married, or not... What is it that makes us DO things socially, when at the intimate level of you and me, in each other's eyes, testing our tongues in lingo and taste, a moment for whispering and tenderly nibbling, and pointy, wetly directed kisses that dance their across the nape of your neck, and reach the funny bony spots lying beneath the flesh hiding your pelvic bone... There's another place, too, between your palm and elbow, and a sensitive one there, on top of your shoulder blades...

Let me see you, so I can pretend she doesn't want me so much!

Few people realize just how much our civilization depends upon things that happened so long ago! I am sleepy now, so must write these few words to stay awake under the watchful eyes of Master Mayhem and Sistrin Sledge... Let me defend my thesis like so:

Times have not changed so much since 450 B.C. when Cicero first set down a version of the same legal system that still underpins so much privilege in the Western world...

Now think about this: if someone can take away something that belongs to you on paper, just because it is not physically in your possession, then that would seem strange; but actually, that explains at least half of the selfishness and meanness of wealth... If 9/10ths of the law is possession, then who gets to define that possession is probably also the same one who gets to possess the most... Well, the way I see it, the Roman senator/lord asked his peasants to move over from their plots to cultivate some of his fallow land. After they did so, twelve months later, when the peasants decided to go back to their farms, the senator/lord/patrician said that they couldn't; because they had left the land for twelve months, it was no longer their land, but his... so you see why things are in the hands of the wealthy today, and not ALL of us together...

so sick is western civlization, that to be a gentleman or a gentlewoman, you must submit to your possession of one another... It is as if we are scared of sharing. But I know that jealousy is made of insecurity, not a just right to possess your lover. You have no right to possess your lover, only make love to her. And I should be able to make love with her, too!

May these next 2,461 years see a lot less of the same old shit: that's mine, this is yours...

Right now I am shit out of a camera... Lost lost lost my 15 year old Nikon, and now I have to decide what to buy... I think I'll get an new-old Bronica 645 with PE lenses and a couple of backs... Maybe I can get Janelle in the paddling pool with some olive oil and ropes... any volunteers..?

Fifteen years old is my legal limit. How about you lassy? If you wanna do it, should you be allowed to do it!?

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