Long Photos
This is a selection of some of my favorite “long photos” that I’ve done. I coined the term from Flickr when they introduced their video services encouraging their users to take long static shots of only slightly moving scenes. I combined that with a block of text.
When I was little I used to put lots of sugar in my cereal so that I could have a few spoon fulls of nothing but sugar and milk once i got to the bottom of the bowl. I won’t say that I don’t do that now, I just don’t eat cereal that much any more.
PermalinkSo I wrote this note that said “You’re the greatest thing since sliced bread” rolled it up into a cigarette sized tube and wedged it into part of the wire frame of a patio chair at the restaurant that I planed to take her to on our date that night. I’d also taken one of the napkins from the restaurant and written “feel inside your chair” on it. I figured I’d switch out her napkin for the one I’d written on once we got there.
When I went to pick her up she was talking on her cell phone with some guy she went to college with. She kept mouthing to me that she was almost done but eventually she handed me the tv remote and disappeared into her bedroom. I watched King Of the Hill, The Simpsons, and half of her Lost Boys dvd while listening to her laughing at his jokes thru the bedroom door.
I don’t know if you are even going to bother reading this, but, since you won’t answer the phone, I have to write. Even if you never want to talk to me again I thought you would want to know that it worked. Flawlessly. We were right. I tested it on myself. By myself.
Honey, when I said that stuff about the procedure allowing people to sneak into the girls locker rooms I didn’t mean that I wanted to. The whole point of all those experiments, all that research, was for us to run around like this together. It’s not any fun turning myself invisible without you here.
I thought having a summer job helping build a grocery store would be full of laying cement and stuff. We’d get to work with big equiptment, machines that could crush things, but I just helped assemble shelves, and had to get up butt ass early to unload boxes.
When the store was all put together they said I had to help customers on the floor. They gave me an apron and a name tag to write my name on. I wrote “Shmoger” because I thought “Kroger Shmoger” was funny.
It wasn’t till my third week into my new “Welcome to Kroger. How can I help you?” position that I decided to pretend to be a smoker so I could get away from the damn Popular Mechanics magazines in the break room.
I swear, I was so fed up with customers that couldn’t form complete sentences, my boss changing the bullshit schedule without notice, get the damn chickens prepped before the lunch rush or there will be hell to pay, Refunds! Damn it! Refunds! What do you mean I have to fill out paperwork to get my money back? Just give me my fucking money!
Cute Cashier Girl (later named Jill) appeared next to me on the smoking bench behind the store.
“Fuck it’s cold!” she said. I didn’t realize. “Feel this” and she pressed a freezing hand to my face that shocked me, so much so that I didn’t quit for six weeks. It shocked me so much that I made sure she quit with me. So much that when we both walked out of that store for the last time, shoulders touching, we walked right over our aprons on the way to the car, laughing, 35 in the parking lot, 70 all the way down Park Avenue, and when she kissed me with a suction cup pop on my cheek I took my hands off the wheel, stuck one arm out the drivers window and another out the sun roof and pushed the accelerator down as far as it would go.
When you are happy you need to say it out loud. You need to whisper to yourself , write it in a journal, or pee it in the snow. You need to make note of it. If you don’t it’s too easy to forget. When you pull the emergency escape handle that gets you out of your burning bus you need to whisper to yourself “I’ve always wanted to pull this damn handle and it’s fucking awesome that I now get the chance.”
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