surf city

Santa Cruz. Perfect, lovely, impossible Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz of small streets and golden water and thick air. Santa Cruz of cold fog and green cypress and big ocean. Santa Cruz that renders me wordless every time I try to specify with any measure of precision why or what it is that I love about this place so fiercely, so much.

Even moving to Brooklyn was faking it. I could still come back, to get my fix, to defrost, dehydrate, decompress. To be quiet, still. To stretch out, run. But now there is talk of moving, and seriously. We speak of life in New England, together and finally, with real intention. We talk about the quaint niceties of wood burning stoves and big red barns, pick ups and sheep, and I am excited and we will go and make a run of it. And we will chop wood (maybe) and haul hay bales (hopefully) and grow vegetables (certainly) and make stews. And will we be fine, better than before, but I fear that I will live like this with a half broken heart, always trying to find my way home.

dog days of winter

swirly goodness

Pinkberry is made out of crack cocaine.

imprinting

I think I need to start shooting in film. None of my pictures ever look like this. And it's not because I haven't dressed up my neighbors in nightgowns and garden tools and put them in front of burning heaps of refuse (like you haven't). My lighting doesn't look like this. My color doesn't look like this. Nothing comes out looking cool and grainy and perfectly modernly intentionally bright. No. What I get are shots that would almost look good if they weren't so washed out and flat and sharp (that's right, flat and sharp. At the same time. Not pretty) and then mashed into super saturated fake cracked out color clumsily applied in the crude format of iPhoto because I'm clearly not even cool enough to have Photoshop. I'm such a sad, sad loser and totally unworthy of my secret photographic aspirations.

Photos by: Cig Harvey

days lost

I hate the grey brown film of too-early winter mornings when the sun is far away and faint and pointless and I'm so tired I'd crawl home on all fours except that there's unidentified liquid objects covering the sidewalks and this is the West Village, New York. I hate sleeping during the day. It's not luxurious or relaxing or restorative. I hate drawn blinds and the oppressive thin white light that leaks beneath my eyelids. I hate days lost and dark hours and fluorescent lighting and the full-room sadness of watching strangers ail publicly on narrow plastic hospital beds in the crowded halls of an impersonal ER.

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It has taken about 98 hours of no sleep and dark-night and bad coffee and  shift work to loose my soft green sympathy and it winds me how easy it is to turn bitter, grey and grumpy. It is so fucking hard not to loose your whole heart in the hard light of the hospital, with a full board list long full of names but no faces and the off-on-off red lights in the ambulance bays that won't quiet and I am trying to remember to resist it with every cell in my body. I'm trying to remember, but forget more easily day by not-day by day passing. And the nurses are tired. And they are old already, and angry. And everyone around you-me-you is doing it; it's easier to be angry and tired just like cigarettes and coffee is cheap and available and it's really a lot of effort to remain cheerful after being bitten by the woman screaming in her bed, against her handcuffs, against her demons.

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Most of them are intoxicated. Many are cold and homeless. A good number of them are both. They are drunk and broken and smell of their own urine and vomit and blood and folly. If they can speak they do so loudly and are want to repeat the same things. Over. And over. And over. Again. They are the distracting injuries. They are poor historians. They are listed Unreliable. They are the stereotypes and the statistics and, reliability or not, they are predictable, expected, thick in numbers and coherence. Uninteresting and limitless.

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But others are not. Not drunk. Not wasted. Not high. They are not here because of blue-sirens or substances. It is hard to remember about them, the sick and the painful and the sad and the fearful. It is hard to remember about the quietly ailing in the midst of the robustly injured and overtly inebriated. And sometimes, just for a moment, I will stop, when I forget to care that others are looking, and focus in on one. On the old man, fragile, delicate, dying, in the corner by himself, grasping his tubes of oxygen, taking it all in, looking out from the middle of the end of his life and I realize: this is what he sees:

strangers, exhausted, angry, caught up in the mechanisms of our own lives, our small annoyances, our short tempers, our own imperfections. 
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It is usually and often more than I can hold on to, it usually and often takes my breath away, it usually and often renders me tiny, empty, pale and powerless. 

I hate days lost and drawn blinds and the thick film of sleep on my skin. I hate waking up in the evening, feeling bit by bit by bit, my soft green sadness flaking off, leaving behind a hard center: dull and grey and unrecognizably familiar.